Inside The Most Powerful Startup Community In The World

In 2005, four people came together to make something new. They thought if we bring together smart technologists and give them a little bit of money and a really good community, it would give founders a huge advantage. Out of that first Y Combinator batch came startups that continue to touch hundreds of millions of people. Starting a company would never be the same again; not so lonely and also not so fraught. You do it together with all the other most eminent people of your generation starting companies too.

Today, Y Combinator funds hundreds of companies at a time, and it's the only place in the world that produces generational companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, and a whole lot more, again and again and again. That's not normal, but nothing about YC really is. YC is the most powerful startup community in the world.

So what's the secret? What's it like to be at YC, and is it right for you? I know it was right for me. Let's get started. YC is the only place in the world I've seen where a startup founder can learn to move at the speed they need to. Here's what Brian Chesky of Airbnb said about speeding up: "We basically decided for three months, we would move from Boston to San Francisco. We'd wake up at eight o'clock, we’d go to bed at midnight, seven days a week. We worked from 8 to midnight every single day."

In that dedication, for three to four months, created this real serious rhythm where we weren't doing other things; we were totally focused. The goal of YC, the entire reason why we exist, is to help startups really take off. For three months, it's all startups, all the time. Everyone around you—group partners and the other founders in your batch, the alumni, the speakers—we all want to help you succeed at your startup.

That kind of speed-up Airbnb got out of YC is something you can't buy. You can't get it from an investment round or go into a tech startup conference. Moving fast is just one part of the game. YC is the best place in the world to learn how to get product-market fit, which is that magical moment where your startup goes from idea to a reality that can set the world on fire.

Being able to make your way through the idea maze, pivoting when it makes sense, listening to what the market and your customers are telling you, and finding product-market fit are all things that I think YC is unusually good at. In fact, finding a billion-dollar market of this sort has already happened at YC over 90 times.

So how do you actually do it? How do you start a startup, get product-market fit, and then have it touch a billion people? It turns out when you're surrounded by people who have built things, magic happens. At YC, you get a bunch of things that add up to a big deal. First, you get dedicated group partners who have worked with hundreds of companies and started companies of their own. When you see that much, you can do a lot to prevent unforced errors.

The partners can spot patterns of success and failure and provide personalized advice in office hours, on Slack, and through a written startup manual that only YC founders get access to. Then you get brilliant batchmates—other startup founders who are learning right beside you, and you'll learn so much from them. Smart people who have already tackled similar challenges, and they're there to help you get ahead.

And it's not just your batch; you get access to the YC alumni, of which there are over 9,000 now in the world. Almost every geography, every sector, and every kind of go-to-market has a YC alumnus who has been there, done that, and could help you. You'll meet both batchmates and alumni through our private social network online called Bookface. One in three YCLMs use it every single day, and it's home to the most pressing technical and business questions out there—things that you won't be able to Google to find out.

The founder directory makes it easy to ask any alum for advice and intros, and the company directory makes it easy to find customers. YC is always evolving, and we've added tons of programs to help your startup. YC is more than just a three-month program; programs like Work at a Startup have sent over 150,000 candidates to startups that went through YC and placed more than a thousand employees so far.

Finally, of course, YC gives you money. It's $125,000 for seven percent and a $375,000 uncapped SAFE with MFN on top—so a total of $500,000, which is plenty to help you get to product-market fit and to that next level. On top of that, you get over half a million dollars worth of deals only for YC startups—discounts and offers on everything from hosting, cloud services, and almost everything you need to run your business.

YC is great for early teams, right when you're ready to get started. You don't need a demo or first version of the product, but it often helps. I want you to apply to Y Combinator. We help founders make something people love, and the results show. A crazy double-digit percentage of the companies that matter applied to YC, and 66% of those companies had YC as their very first investor.

So there's no such thing as too early for us. You can apply at ycombinator.com/apply. If you ask me, that's the one URL that has created more wealth and prosperity than any other that I can think of in the world. It changed my life, and I hope we get a chance to change yours too.