When is the Right Time to Apply to Y Combinator? - Jared Friedman

Hi, I'm Jared. I'm a partner at YC.

Before I joined YC, I was a founder of a company called Scribd, which was in the Summer 2006 batch of Y Combinator.

The right time to apply to YC is when you have two key ingredients. The first ingredient is you need your founding team. That means you need the right set of people to work on your idea. The second ingredient is you need an idea that that team is excited to work on.

Those are actually the only two ingredients you need to have a successful YC application. A lot of people think that you need a bunch of traction or a certain amount of revenue or something like that, but it's just not true. Anywhere from a quarter to a half of the companies that YC funds every batch are companies with just those two things: just an idea and a founding team.

Now, if you don't get in on your first application, that doesn't mean we're not going to fund that founding team and that idea. It just means you should make some more progress and then reapply again. The more progress you make, the more likely we are to fund you.

But you've really got nothing to lose from applying as soon as you've got that founding team and that idea. That's the stage that my company was at when we applied to Y Combinator, and I'm really glad we did.

So the two key ingredients you need to apply to Y Combinator, once again, are the founding team and the idea that you're excited to work on.