Y Combinator Partners Q&A

I'm Cat Manik. I'm a partner at Y Combinator, and honestly, one of my favorite parts, one of the best parts of working at Y Combinator, is getting to work with the other partners. So, I'm really pleased right now to invite them all on stage. We're going to have them answer a bunch of the questions that you sent in to the Startup School at Y Combinator email.

So, let's bring them on. They're telling me not to move the stools. Alright, so I am going to start. I'm going to let everyone... So basically what we did was we got about 75 plus questions, and we had to cut them down really fast so we have time for about 10 of them. And the first question actually is, could you tell us about your role as a Y Combinator partner?

So I'll have each of you guys answer that and introduce yourselves. You know, you've actually probably seen everyone on stage at this point, so I'll start.

I started at YC as the Director of Outreach, and part of, you know, one of my favorite parts of the job is, and a huge part of it is I get to travel around and I meet people every day who are working and building incredible things and are really passionate about what they do. So that's, I think, like honestly one of the best parts of my job. The other part is I help a lot with a lot of the press launches at YC, so I really love the storytelling piece—helping craft a story around what everyone is doing, what the significance of what everyone does is.

So, my name is Caster. You guys can hear me okay? My name is Caster. We did office hours, I think you see what we kind of do. I help startups through office hours, both group and individual, basically build their company. My background is I'm an engineer, MBA—really straightforward.

My name is Kirsty. I'm the financial and operational partner, I guess. So I work with the startups to help with their financial questions and with their questions like, "How do I hire my first employee? How do I pay myself?" So I help more with that than with strategy or product. I think the favorite part of my job is that every day is different. The questions we get are different, the problems that startups have are different, the great things that happen to startups are different. We wake up every day not knowing what's going to happen that day, which makes life really exciting.

My name is Justin. Before joining YC, I had started a couple of startups, all funded by YC three times actually, so I'm kind of the remedial student. I have the same job as Caster, basically working at advising and helping the startup. I think for me it's very exciting because it's always something new. I really like things that are new, and working with a lot of different companies is really fun for me. I guess that's it—pretty fun.

So I'm Paul, and I mainly just listen to people's ideas and then laugh at them. I can verify that if... Yeah, only if that wasn't true, I would be laughing. I'm just there for my own amusement. I really... it sounds, I don't know how to put it, but I like to be in the place where history is happening. I think PG is a very clever guy; he has a real insight into history. I think he's never said it, but I think he intentionally created this magnet for interesting people in interesting places, so I just like to go hang around there.

I've actually been officially a partner since I left Facebook in 2010, but I had started hanging around YC, I think, 2006, as soon as they came out to Mountain View. Just because there are crazy people like this that I could talk to, and they would tell me their ideas, and I would laugh, and they wouldn't get offended—which actually turns out to be a good thing. The people with a thin skin are... I don't know.

So yeah, I basically just talked to founders. So, we'll kick it off with the next question.

The next question, and something we've been seeing a lot on Twitter, is that if you're starting a company where the main market is in a spe...