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Jessica Livingston Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015


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·Nov 3, 2024

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Hello everyone! Hi! I'm so happy to be here today and have you all here. Um, wow, there are a lot of you! Oh, that's better! And I know a lot of you have traveled from really far away too, so this is just wonderful. Um, I have a quick question: how many of you can you raise your hand if you were here last year at the conference? Okay, so it's like a little reunion. This is going to be good.

And one other question, just 'cause I'm curious: how many of you have already started working on a startup? Oh wow, okay, wow, a lot of you! That's great! That's awesome! Okay, so we're gonna get started. Um, oh, oh, oh God, yes! Okay, sorry, got to get the nerves out a little bit.

Okay, so I'm going to start off today, uh, quickly with an update on some numbers. Last year I shared this graph with you and we now have a year's worth of new data. Um, the winter batch that's going on right now was the first time we ever asked for gender on the application. Um, we knew that fewer women applied than men, but we wanted to know the exact numbers once we'd chosen the batch. We crunched the numbers and here's what we found out.

Okay, all right, 23% of the startups who applied to YC for this batch had a female founder, and 23% of the startups we accepted in this batch have a female founder. So let me emphasize again that we didn't know the numbers before we did the interviews. There wasn't some magic bar we were trying to reach or any kind of quota. We did what we've always done, which was try to fund promising startups, and we ended up funding exactly the same percentage of companies with female founders as we had applicants.

So these numbers confirmed what I've always felt, which was that the founders we fund are a direct reflection of our applicant pool. Which means if we want to fund more women in YC, we need more of you to apply. Please! Applications are open now, and there's like a whole another month to go before the deadline, so you have plenty of time.

Um, if any of you in the audience are thinking something like, "I'm not the sort of founder YC would accept," let me tell you the sort of founder YC accepts: anyone who is determined and has a potentially big idea. Um, I'm going to ask all of the YC alumni who are here today to, if they can, can you stand up if you're here? YC alumni? Okay, stand up, yeah, wave your hands around!

Okay, so all of the YC alumni have orange strips on their badges. Um, you know these are the type of people we fund. So they'll be happy to talk to you today and share any experiences, um, that they have with you. And many of these women have also shared their experiences on the Female Founders Story site too, so I encourage you to read these if you want to just see how varied their paths were to starting a startup.

Okay, now I'm going to switch gears and get into my talk, and I need to apologize in advance. I have a really bad cold, so if I cough a little bit and clear my throat, I'm so sorry. Um, this right here is my general advice for founders, and it doesn't usually change that much.

Um, this is the advice that I talk about over and over until I'm blue in the face, but there's another important component to building a successful company, which is a challenge that every one of you in this room, um, are going to face if you start one: building a great team and culture. And that's actually one of my areas of expertise.

People and culture have always played an important role at YC Combinator from the very beginning, and I was the one responsible for these things from the very beginning. Most people don't know this, both because I prefer to operate in the background and because people only know the version of YC that they read about in the press. They know the structure of YC, but not the people it consists of and how they interact. Softer stuff like values and culture and community is often ignored by the press, and more dangerously, it's sometimes ignored by founders.

Maybe that's because it doesn't seem exciting, or it's touchy-feely, or it's really hard to measure. Or maybe when you're trying to solve a technical problem that's never been solved before, company culture seems a secondary consideration.

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