Work at a Startup Expo 2018

Okay, hello everyone, and welcome to Work at a Startup. This is the first time we've done this conference since 2012, so it's a pretty special day for us. I'm really excited to see that we had such an amazing turnout. In a moment, I'm gonna introduce our first keynote speaker, Justin Kahn.

Justin is the founder of three YC companies. He is now running a company called Atrium, which we are going to hear about later this afternoon. But before that, he was the founder of Justin.tv, and he actually presented up here on this stage eight years ago, back when he was running Justin.tv. He's going to tell you some really awesome stories from what happened back then and talk about why you should or should not work for a startup.

So please welcome Justin Kahn. [Applause]

Thank you, Jared, for giving away my talk! It's me, Justin Kahn. I am YC's remedial student. I had lost track, actually, of the number of times I've been through YC, until Jared reminded me it's been three times; actually four, at least. Some of those companies worked, and some of them didn't. My newest company, which went through YC in the last batch in Winter 2018, is called Atrium, and one of my team members will be up to tell you about that later.

But what I want to talk about today, and it was supposed to be a surprise twist but no longer is, is why you should but also why you shouldn't join a startup. I'm gonna start with why you shouldn't join. Okay, there are a couple reasons, and my goal here is just to give you the most unfiltered, raw feelings that I have to help you make an informed decision.

But there are lots of good reasons why you shouldn't join a startup. Number one: The management at startups generally really sucks. I wish I was joking, but no, it's true. I used to joke that there were YC companies — there are two kinds of YC companies. There are the rocket ships with bad management, and then there were the other companies with bad management.

A corollary to that is that it is likely that if you join a startup, especially an early-stage one, you won't necessarily get enough mentorship or direction on what you're doing unless you really actively force people to give it to you.

The second reason: You are likely to not actually get rich joining a startup. It's statistically improbable. If you think you're gonna join a startup and then be set for life, that is unlikely to happen. So that would not be a good reason to join; I'm sorry if I ever told you differently.

And then the third reason, which I think is a new reason in Silicon Valley, actually, is that Silicon Valley has matured in the last ten years since Jared and I have kind of gotten here. One of the things that I think has changed is that people, you know, originally, when I got here, I think people just wanted to work on interesting projects, and it was a much smaller number of people.

Now, I think there's a lot of people who come to Silicon Valley because it's a great career, and there’s a great trajectory, and there’s stability. If you want those things, you should not join a startup. I’ve noticed more and more people — even people I've recruited more recently — coming in and saying, you know, “What's the career path here? Where’s the five-year plan?” And I’m like, we don’t have five years of money! So if you want stability, I think you should go join Facebook. Maybe not today, but next week.

Alright, alright, so now on to what you really came for, which is why you should join a startup. When I was writing this in the parking lot five minutes ago, I identified three reasons.

Alright, number one: You will get access to jobs that you're completely unqualified for and you might not be able to do. My example actually comes from that very first startup eight years ago. You know, I was on stage talking about Justin.tv, and we actually recruited someone from that, and his name was Jim. He was a programmer from France, and actually, he came to work for our startup and got two offers from two different companies — one was Justin.tv and one was actually Scribd, Jared’s company.

I sat down with Jim; I remember in a coffee shop after working for the first startup, and he said, “Oh, I have this offer from Scribd.” I said, “What was it?” He told me, and I was like, “I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars more right now to sign this instance!” And so he accepted — sorry Jared — he accepted and he joined Justin.tv. Within a year, he was running our entire Rails backend for a site that was like a top hundred site and I think a top ten to twenty Rails site at the time. That was like in 2010, so the bar was a lot lower, and that was a job he was completely unqualified for. He would never have gotten the opportunity to do if he didn't join us at a startup where we didn't really have anyone else to do it.

He went on, actually — this is a pretty cool story — we spun out a company called Socialcam a couple years later. He went on to be a co-founder of that company. As we spun it out of Justin.tv, it went through YC and got an even greater scale challenge when they scaled to like from 0 to 128 million users in like two months. So, you know, just the rate of learning for him was like pretty incredible, and he's gone on — now he's a co-founder at a company called Triplebyte that does recruiting for YC companies and others.

Okay, so that's number one. You are going to get access to jobs you are not qualified for.

Number two: Joining a startup is a really good gateway to starting your own startup if that's a goal of yours. In the second summer of working for a startup — we in 2012 — I came back with another company called Exec, and I recruited someone else; actually, someone really talented. His name was Finbar, and he was an engineer at Groupon at the time. I think he really wanted to break into startups with the idea of eventually starting his own.

I think one of the things that's really important is to just put yourself in positions where you're around people who want to do the things that you want to do or people who are like the person that you want to become. One of my co-founders of Twitch, his name is Emmett, always told me, “You know, you are the average of your five closest friends.” And he wasn’t talking just about me; he was talking about everybody in general, and I really think that's the case.

So it was Finbar who went on — he was, like, you know, working at Exec, that company; but he didn't work out super well. But he ended up meeting a co-founder there and starting a startup, which was a horrible idea. It’s a terrible idea — I told him not to do it at the time, but he ended up getting his start, right? He became a founder! That didn’t work out; he ended up joining YC for I think just over a year and then started a new startup that just went through YC and is after the races and doing super well. I won't give away that it's called Shogun; you should check it out and probably work there.

Okay, so starting your own startup — that's the second reason.

The third thing is to maximize your — I should slow down, I still have a lot of time! Sorry. The third thing is to maximize your own speed of learning. I think this is actually the most important reason why you should join a startup, and I have kind of two examples of people who did that working with me, and they are both the two co-founders of Cruise. I think they're cool examples because one is kind of maximizing learning on the way up and the other on the way down, and I'll explain what that means.

So the first co-founder of Cruise, his name's Kyle Vogt. We recruited him at Justin.tv in the early days. He was an MIT student, and we had found him. He was like kind of this person that we thought we needed because it was this hardware hacker. We thought we were gonna build a hardware company, so we convinced him to come out from MIT for his month-long break during January, and we bought him a one-way ticket. We were like, “Just work for a month,” and then we never bought him a ticket back!

Kyle basically became our VP of Engineering, and he even became a co-founder! Actually, Kyle's an amazing hacker; he always has been a very amazing tinkerer. One of those people with a can-do attitude — if you're like, “Hey, let's build this thing,” he's gonna go figure out how to build it! But he didn't know jack about scaling systems or building, you know, scalable system architectures, and so that was like the job that was available, though, as soon as we stopped.

We figured out that we should not build hardware, and so that was the job we kind of assigned him, and he had to figure it out really on the fly. He ended up, you know, packing this live video system; there was nothing kind of — there was nothing. There was like no precedent. Right? We basically built this scalable dynamic live video system that he engineered and architected, mostly badly at first, actually, and it would go down all the time!

There was this one kind of funny story where, you know, we had no idea about — like, we did no idea how to build reliable systems, and so every time it would go down, we would call him, which was like every like 36 to 48 hours. He could like never go on vacation, which was like not really acceptable to him, so it was just like one time he was just like, “I’m going goodbye!” basically, and we're like, “No, what's gonna happen if you're like not around?”

He ends up — he went to Tahoe or something like that. We ended up, of course, like clockwork, after, you know, 36 hours, the site went down. We had no — we were calling him on the phone like ten times. It’s a live video site, so if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t have any value, right? Like just right then. So we started calling him and he didn’t pick up. Luckily, I had left an address; we ended up having to order a pizza to go to his house to read a message to him — like a pizza delivery driver read the message: “Like, answer your phone! The website is down!”

So like that was like our concept of like a pager system at the time, right? So really figuring everything out one step at a time, kind of inventing everything from scratch. The end of the story is he eventually architected this live video system that, by the time Twitch sold to Amazon in 2014, was the fourth largest bandwidth consumer in North America, had 15 points of presence around the world, and did 90 petabytes of data transfer a month. And so, you know, his rate of learning was incredible as a software architect. He obviously kind of went on and took a lot of that to Cruise, which is also an incredible story.

The other co-founder of Cruise was my brother, Daniel, who met Kyle, actually as an intern at Justin.tv when he was a college student. We recruited him — not really recruited, it was more like nepotism. I'm sorry; I hope he's not watching right now I just fumbled this up to say.

So now he was — he also had a crash course in startups over the next couple of years. Didn’t work for me for very long, but when he didn’t work for me, he recruited these guys to the site. I remember Justin.tv when we were doing like the kind of live streaming site — he recruited this unknown band; it was called the Jonas Brothers, and they ended up like crashing our site. They were part of the reason that Kyle hated his life and crashed the site over and over again.

But the cool thing was he joined as this intern who got to, you know, interact and kind of make a deal with like what was basically like — became the number one kind of teen band at the time in 2007. And then later on, you know, he joined me as a co-founder when I started this other company, Exec, in 2012.

And the cool thing, you know, I mentioned that, you know, Kyle’s kind of the example of like how you might learn how startups are growing and on the way up. I think Daniel is a perfect example of how you will also learn and maximize your learning if the startup is completely and horribly failing.

We, in 2013, by the time we had worked out Exec for a couple of years, we realized that the home cleaning business is not a great business. I'd recommend you don't join a home cleaning startup! And we ended up trying to sell it.

This is a great story; it's my last story. This is a great story. So we were trying to sell it; we ended up negotiating a deal with a company called Handy that’s on the East Coast and, against all odds, has survived in this industry. We negotiated the deal, and I'm like — it was taking forever. There were like tons of lawyers; it was dragging and dragging and dragging, and I was so burned out. I was just like, “I’m going on vacation! Daniel, you have to deal with it!”

It’s not a very responsible thing to do, but he ended up having to be the one who closed this deal over the next month while I was in Thailand. I mean, I was like kind of doing stuff on the phone, but he was mostly like running this deal for not a lot of money — you know, just a bit of stock from Handy.

And he ended up — it was like a horrible experience; he learned all about like negotiating. You know when you want to have leverage in a deal. You know, what you should — like all the things, and all the different minutiae of negotiating a deal, and he learned it on this very small, horrible deal which we were mostly trusting to offload because we were so burned out!

We wanted to get out of the business. And two years later, fast forward two years, he had become a co-founder of Cruise. Cruise had built an amazing technology team that was executing super well, and you guys know the end of the story. They end up selling to GM for a billion dollars.

And the cool thing, I think, is that Daniel applied all those horrible lessons he learned from like trying to negotiate this shitty, piddling deal for our company to his next company and ended up, you know, they sold it for over a billion dollars.

So you're gonna learn something whether the company succeeds or fails. You'll probably walk away with something valuable. The last thing I'll say is that the way I think about it is — the way I think about growing, maximizing your speed of learning, is from a quote that our YC partner, Paul Buchheit, generally said — I think he says it to every batch — which is that, you know, “It’s not your y-intercept, but it’s your slope that’s important.”

And so I think you want to, you know — the way I’ve always thought about it is how do I figure out ways that I could put myself in the position to maximize my own personal rate of growth and rate of learning? And I suggest that you do the same, regardless of whether that's at a startup or not.

Alright, best of luck! Next up, I’m supposed to introduce you — I’m sorry I forgot; next we have YC President Sam Altman. [Applause]

Alright, Justin covered a lot of what I was gonna talk about, so I'm gonna have time for questions. That was awesome, though. So I want to talk about how to pick which startup to work at. The most important considerations — you all already know: picking a company you're excited about, people you're excited about, and a role you’re excited about. That's more important than the rest of the stuff I have to say, but that's also intuitive.

And so I'm gonna talk about the things that are not intuitive, or at least haven't been for me. And I want to just echo one thing that Justin said because I think it's so important: Every job I've ever had, and probably every job Justin’s ever had as well — at least for myself, I’ve been wildly unqualified for. And doing that I think is like the number one secret to having a really great career.

Like, that's the way you have a super fast rate of personal growth. And I think the way careers go is you should put in the most of the effort at the beginning because it’s this compound interest-like thing, where the work you do now, the learning you do now, the improvement you make early in your career gets to pay off for all the rest.

So you may as well work hard and take a chance on a role that you feel unqualified for early. And if you flame out, you flame out, and you go try something different. But my experience is when someone does a role they’re unqualified for, it either goes way worse or way better than expectations, and a lot of the times, it goes way better.

And if you hold yourself back from doing this because you’re afraid of it not working out, which is totally understandable — sometimes it doesn't — I think you miss this opportunity to have the sort of most impactful career you can. And that is what's so cool about startups: you can get jobs you are qualified for.

So I want to talk about how to pick a startup, and I want to talk about this from the perspective of being an investor. Because I think what you’re doing when you go to work at a startup is making one big investment. If you're really good, you are going to take way less cash compensation than you could get at Google or Facebook, and you are going to be compensated for that by investing your time in the startup in return for equity.

So people have different risk rewards, trade-offs. You might want a later-stage startup with its lower risk or return; you might want a high-risk, high-return very early-stage startup. But I think the right framework for this is to think about it like you're investing in a startup.

For me, at least, learning to invest in startups was deeply counterintuitive, and I'm gonna talk about eight things that I learned about how to evaluate startups for investment. This mostly applies to sort of the stage startups you'll see here today.

Number one — this is a Paul Buchheit, another probably Buchheit ism — it’s more important that a startup have a small number of users that really love the product rather than a lot of users that really like the product. Most startups either have no one who cares at all or a lot of people who are kind of like, “Yeah, that’s okay.”

It’s very rare to find a startup where people love the product so much they spontaneously tell their friends. But if you think about the really big companies today — Google, Facebook — you probably heard about it ‘cause someone was like, “This is awesome, you gotta sign up!”

And you know, people talk about product market fit and all this other stuff. I think it's sort of hard to evaluate, but one thing you can do is either like talk to some users of the company or ideally you are one yourself or know some. And like, is this product so good that people are telling other people they’ve got to use it? And that I think matters much more than the vanity metrics — number of users, current growth rate, whatever that most startups throw around.

So if you only do one piece of diligence, this is the one I would do.

Number two: Trust in exponential growth. And as a byproduct of that, trust in momentum. Momentum is sort of this really important concept to startups. If things are feeling good, if it’s growing, if people are loving the product, if good people are joining, that tends to keep going. And if that falters, it’s very hard to get it back.

So does the startup have a good sense of momentum, and is there some sort of exponential growth model? By the way, I’ve been investing in startups for like, I don’t know, eight or ten years now — I still have not managed to get good at intuiting exponential growth in my head, so I have to do it in the spreadsheet every time.

But I've learned to trust it, and if a startup is growing exponentially and it's not fake — it’s not like, you know, they’re buying all the users or something — it tends to keep going. Making that leap of faith and trusting that is super valuable.

The related concept — this is the third one — is the size of the market today matters almost not at all. It is the growth rate of the market and how big the market will be in ten years.

So I think the number one mistake investors make when they miss out on a really great opportunity is they look at the size of the market today. Now they only care about how fast the startup is growing. They don’t care about the size of the revenue today. And why they can't make the same leap of faith for the market — I've never understood.

But if you make a really great decision on what startup to join, it will probably be a smallish market today that’s growing really quickly. You know, I saw this morning on the way down here, this is like the 10-year anniversary of the iPhone App Store. So ten years ago, not very long, the size of the market for iPhone applications was zero dollars.

And a lot of investors, you know, somewhat rationally but obviously wrongly said, “Alright, well we’re not investing in these iPhone apps because this is a small market.” I also saw it this morning that Uber, when they first raised money, they said, you know, their TAM is like two billion dollars or something. And if you think about the world from a certain set of constraints, that was true; but it turns out that the market for people that want to move around cities easily grows quickly when you have a better product.

So thinking about the growth rate of the market, not just the growth rate of the startup, is super important if you're going to identify something really big.

In a related concept to that is the biggest companies that we have been able to be a part of, and I think the biggest companies in the technology industry as a whole, happen when there's a technological platform shift. So for example, the iPhone — stick with the iPhone example — the iPhone App Store launches in 2008, and in a period of say 2009 to 2012, there were a lot of companies that you could never have started before that all of a sudden you could.

You know, Uber's a good example, but there are other ones like Snapchat which really just didn’t quite make sense before mobile phones and apps. So trying to identify these platform shifts, that's another place where I think you can find almost all of the big startups. Most people are wrong about this, so you have to learn to trust your own intuitions here.

It’s very hard to differentiate between real trends and fake trends. The technology journalists in particular seem easy to trick about this, but honestly, so is everybody. And so if you read the news, you’re not gonna find the answer here. If you talk to most people, you’re not going to find the answer here.

But if you think hard and you really pay attention, sometimes you can. The metric that I use to differentiate between a real trend and a fake trend is similar to loving a product; it's when there’s a new platform that people are using many hours every day.

So the iPhone comes out; not that many people buy it, but they use it all day. VR headsets come out; a lot of people buy it, but they never come off the shelf. So VR, by that metric, is not yet a real trend. And at the point where people start, you know, having their headset on hours a day, that might be a good time to start a VR company.

The fifth consideration is, “Is the company exciting?” And here’s why that’s important. The hardest thing, especially right now in Silicon Valley, is critical mass of talented people at one company. It’s easy to get the first few employees; you can give them a ton of equity, give them big job titles, but that stops to work.

And then you get to employee 30, employee 300 — why are they still gonna join rather than start their own startup, join a small startup, go to Google? And this ability to have an exciting enough mission to be able to concentrate talent — this is why I think it’s easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup, because people care.

And if you don’t have this, it’s really hard. I’ve basically in my life tried to recruit a lot for two different startups. One was a company I started a long time ago; it did social networking on iPhones, and another was OpenAI. In the first one, we could tell people, like, “Hey, you know, you should come do this; it’s really cool,” and it was kind of cool.

And at OpenAI, we can say, like, “You know, if we don’t do a good job, or if someone does not do a good job building AGI, like the world will very likely get destroyed. And we need you specifically to do this piece of it, and if you don’t do that, it’s really bad for the world.” And that is a really hard pitch to say no to, and so a startup that has a reason why people need to join it is super powerful.

The sixth one is hot. Think about how impressed you are by the founders and the early employees at the startup.

So as a general observation, it is extremely powerful whenever you can identify something in the world that is true and important and that most people don’t believe. And, in fact, I think this is one of the two major market inefficiencies that startups get to exploit: there exists a small number of founders in the world that are so good that they end up bending the world to their will, and they can do this without a lot of business experience.

And they are like hundreds of times more effective than people that aren’t like this. And, you know, there are programmers that — I know people hate the 10x engineer meme because it’s so often used to justify being a jerk, but there are plenty of people who are ten times as good as average programmers and also nice people.

In companies where you find a lot of these people concentrated in the early hires, this is a huge deal. And these startups consistently outperform, and the quality of the early people at a company, the quality of the founders is so determinant of success and it has such a bigger impact than people like to believe or want to believe about the world that when you find this, it is one of these secrets about the world that is critically important and that people try not to believe.

So I think that’s a really great thing to look for.

Another big market inefficiency to look for is ideas that sound bad but are good. So most ideas that sound bad are unfortunately bad and you should try not to join those companies. But there exists a class, and this is where YC has made most of its money, of ideas that sound bad but are good.

If an idea is good and sounds good, then the big companies will try to do it, and usually, they’ll compete with you. But there’s a really important difference between startups and big companies: if you have the same idea at a big company and you want to do it, you have to get your boss to say yes, your boss’s boss to say yes, your boss’s boss’s boss to say yes, and then Sundar to say yes, and then Larry Page to say yes, and in that chain of 21 “no’s,” kills the entire idea.

And if the idea sounds bad, someone will rationally say no. If you're a startup, you may also have 20 conversations; you may go up and down Sand Hill Road trying to convince someone to fund it, but you only need one yes. And the one yes you get to go do it, even if it’s 19 no’s. It’s very different than what has to happen at a big company.

So one idea I often ask startups is, “Can you tell me why this idea sounds bad to the big companies but actually is good?”

And then a final thing that I look at — and this has been a long-standing YC metric — is: What are the smartest recent college graduates excited about? In our experience now over more than, you know, 13 years, that YC has been in business, that group of people consistently is 3-4 years ahead of what investors focus on.

And that has been a model for us of identifying real trends before they happen. That group is not always right; there have been some big failures. But directionally speaking, young people, I think, have more time, they’re more on the forefront of technology, they’re less set in their ways — whatever it’s for, that, you know, what those people are going into is an area that we have always looked at.

So another question that's related to all of this is how to get good advice about what startup to join. And you have to choose the peers whose opinion you care about in your life very, very carefully. Most people will have bring whatever biases they have about what a career should look like, or what a safe choice is, or what a good thing to work on is. They'll bring all that to the table, and most people have led bad processes and behind their firewall, and they will give you bad advice.

So trying to find a group of people that you can go to in your life, whenever you have a big career decision, that are kind of open-minded and intellectually rigorous thinkers and who care about similar kinds of things that you care about, whatever that is, is a really valuable thing to do.

I was lucky to find a handful of those people very early in my life. I still ping them on every big decision, and the advice that they give me I think is generally quite good and very different than what I'd get from most of my friends.

So finding people who can give you good advice about what startup to join is really important. I was gonna talk about how to think about equity at a startup, but I only have one minute left, so I will say this: You probably aren't getting enough. I think most startups are not nearly generous enough with employee equity.

The difference, the amount of value that you create as an early employee versus a founder is not the hundred X difference that you usually see reflected on a cap table. We try to get YC startups to be more generous with equity, and I think over time it’s trending in that direction, but remember: startups need really talented people!

Startups need people they could otherwise go work at Google and make a gigantic salary, and I think you should demand to be treated fairly for that. That was supposed to be five minutes, but there's the 25-second version.

Alright, thank you very much! We are going to start with company presentations now, and thanks for coming today. [Applause]

Hi, I’m Jose! We’re gonna go alphabetically. The first company up is Armory. [Applause]

Hello, YC! Armory's here, and we believe that software is the highest leverage way to improve humanity. But how do you feel when you hear “deploy to production”? How has that gone for you? Maybe some rollback or fire drill time, but don't worry. Armory is building a next-generation deployment platform to help software teams ship better software, faster.

And we're looking for skilled individuals that want to grow together and learn from one another. And grow we have done tremendously! Last year, we were at $60,000 annual revenue. Today, we're at 1.3 million. There's a lot more to talk about; find our booth. Thank you! [Applause]

Hi everyone, I’m John, and at Astronomy, we are building small, low-cost telecommunication satellites. Why are we doing this? Because four billion people in the world are not online right now. This is a huge problem. There are so many people out in the world who do not have access to knowledge and education and all the things that they need to improve their lives.

The other side of this is that this is an enormous business opportunity for the right company to tackle this problem. There are actually very few things in the world that grow exponentially — 30 plus percent year-on-year — and the world’s hunger for bandwidth is one of those things.

There really are just a few things out there you could imagine. Sam talked about growing markets, and there are very few places where the market grows this fast and this consistently. So why is this still a problem? After all of these years and all of the many billions of dollars spent in space?

And the answer, I think, is captured pretty well in this picture. So this is a picture of what telecommunication satellites look like today. They are massive, double-decker bus-sized satellites that cost several hundred million dollars or half a billion dollars each.

With small satellites, we can do the same job at a fraction of the cost. At Astronomy, we put our first test satellite in space, and it's orbiting right now, working great! We launched it a few months ago. We have raised a very large funding round, Series A, from a firm called Andreessen Horowitz, so we are very well-funded and gonna be around for a little while to see this thing.

And we have a spectacular team of engineers. We're just over 30 people now from Google, SpaceX, Skybox, some of the larger aerospace companies — a huge array of specialties across software, mechanical, controls, you name it, every possible type of engineering you can imagine. And really, I mean I just can't say enough about how fortunate we are to have this team.

You may have heard that SpaceX is doing a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to try and solve this problem, and the lead antenna engineer for that constellation just left SpaceX to join us! Oh, sorry, one other really important point: you do not actually have to have space experience or even embedded experience to join the team. We have a whole group of veteran engineers; they’ve put the operating into operating systems place. This is more application-level code, so please do not let that dissuade you.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the company culture. So we’re very hands-on; we build lots of hardware, we build it fast, we iterate quickly. You have an opportunity to learn from all these different disciplines and engineers of all stripes. Like I mentioned, if you want, we have something we're very proud of, which we call a blameless culture. These things are hard, and we know things are going to go wrong.

And the other thing is, we take work-life balance seriously at Armory, and we have baby goats! It’s the random thing ever, but we'd love to do trips out to the farms outside of the Bay Area to do these retreats and do fun things with the team. And that’s Armory! So thank you very much. [Applause]

Hi everyone, my name is Chris Szymanski, and I'm the head of engineering at Atrium — a tech-enabled law firm for startups. At Atrium, we're making legal services fast and transparent, and we’re building a platform that turns documents into data. So, legal is broken, and we hear this from our clients all the time. It’s like this — Atrium works to fix legal and we do that with a fully digitized legal services platform that’s powered by both real lawyers and AI.

So our team of lawyers makes better decisions thanks to our AI technology. This is a massive market — over four hundred billion dollars per year — and it's highly fragmented with the top 25 law firms only holding a 13 percent market share.

There's also very few — in fact, only one law firm startup that's tackling this market, and that’s Atrium. We employ cutting-edge ML technologies, and every day we work hand in hand with both lawyers and engineers; you'll see here engineers and lawyers working together.

We're working to transform an extremely outdated industry and lowering barriers for entrepreneurs to get access to legal services. We'd love to have you join our team; we’re hiring software engineers and you’ll get to work with Justin Kahn, our CEO, myself, Head of Engineering, Max Cantor, our Head of Data, and our twenty other engineers. We'd love to have you apply at atrium.co/engineering. Thank you so much! [Applause]

Okay, hi! Hello! Hi! My name is Tammy Sun. I am the co-founder and CEO of Carrot Fertility. We make customized fertility benefits for modern companies. What does that mean? That means that we make it easier and more affordable for employees to access everything from personalized fertility education through text, video, voice chat with fertility experts, data-driven learning modules, and making egg freezing, IVF, and everything in between — all the way to surrogacy — easier and more affordable.

And so our mission is fertility care for all. The first goal of our mission is to make fertility benefits and Carrot in particular, as standard in the modern workplace as medical, dental, and vision coverage. This is a mission that has met its moment today — even more than 50 percent of Millennials believe that fertility should be equal with dental and vision as coverage at work.

And so these trends have helped Carrot become the leading provider of fertility benefits in the US for mid-market companies, and moving very quickly into the enterprise. We have thousands of members, whom we call employees, across the country, and we’re operational in nearly 30 countries around the world.

So why join us? Well, there are three reasons: First, it's the product. What sets our engineers apart is that each of them is a key player in every aspect of developing the product. You’re not just simply releasing release after release; you’re gonna help decide what to build next, and you're gonna be responsible for making sure how we measure success after the release, after the release.

The second is product-market fit, so we know that companies want Carrot, and we’re really lucky and proud that companies who are working with us love it. So we’re really proud to be working with some of the most important public and private technology companies in the world. We’re also breaking into finance, media, real estate, and even retail, so the market opportunity is enormous, and this is a really exciting time to be at the company where you’re going to be pushed and challenged to be doing way more than probably what you’re qualified for.

And the last is that this is a mission that matters.
Um, and if it matters to you, then this is my promise to you: you’re gonna have the opportunity to do some of the best work of your life on a solution whose time has come, and in exchange, Carrot and me personally promise you a 50x opportunity for growth in ways that you won’t be able to achieve anywhere else.

So I’m here today with my product engineering team, Pat, Dan, in a room where you guys are! If you could raise your hands and please come find us afterwards to talk about fertility, what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re doing it, what’s egg freezing, and why you might be our next teammate! Thank you! [Applause]

Hey guys! I’m Dave from Cheerio, and our mission we call it to join people on data. Basically what that means for us is — Excel's been around for about thirty years. Anyone can work with data; it's really easy to use, but as soon as the data gets bigger than a spreadsheet, as soon as you're working with databases of data, all of a sudden you have to know SQL, you have to be a data scientist, you have to be an engineer to work with it. We think that’s really stupid, and we're out to solve that.

One of the ways we’ve solved it is we’ve created what we call visual SQL. We’ve made SQL visuals, so it’s just drag-and-drop! We can do it; it’s a way better way to explore data just like Windows made DOS visual. So way more people could use computers; we’ve done that with SQL, and it's one visual drag-and-drop language that works with all the databases — Redshift, MySQL, Hadoop, I'd like all the databases.

Also Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, all the different sources of data you can be coming from: one language for all. And then we make it really easy for you to make charts and dashboards and share that with your whole team. So we’re in the BI space; we compete with like Tableau. We consistently get rated just really, really well; there are four main categories that we’re rated on in our space. We have a lot of competitors, and we’re number one in three of those categories and number two in the fourth, so we do really awesome because of that.

We have 800 customers and some really great brands. These guys are using, primarily, Cheerio’s the main data tool and we’re profitable. We’ve done all this with 10 or less engineers; our competitors have hundreds of engineers. We’ve done this because 1) our engineers are really awesome, and 2) we just keep really good coding practices; we keep minimal technical debt, we have really strong coding review processes, we keep it really pragmatic about our codebase. And it’s never been a better time to build more features onto Cheerio; we keep it that way because this will be a product that will always have continually more and more interesting awesome projects to build on top of it.

It's like a data language; there are all kinds of things to continually build on it. So we know that, so we’re looking for more senior and mid-level engineers to join our awesome team, and we’re also looking for some junior engineers who are really smart and interested in learning from a really top-notch team. So thanks a lot!

Hi everyone, my name is Trenton, and I’m co-founder and CTO at Checker. At Checker, we do background checks! We started four years ago and built an API, and then discovered a lot more issues around the industry. There's a lot of unfairness, a lot of inaccuracies, and a lack of transparency, and we are working to change that.

Every month, we work with great customers such as Uber and Lyft, and run 1 million background checks every month. Our team is more than 200 people, and we are profitable and making money on the insurance side.

I want you to highlight a few challenges we have — identity matching is really on accuracy of the background checks. We use ML to improve automation and efficiency, and it’s in production. Platform reliability is also really key as we process millions of transactions every month, and it’s really at because we work with 10,000 plus data sources that are really unreliable and unstable.

Then every feature that you would work on — we touch millions of users. Come chat with us; none more. Thank you! [Applause]

Hey everyone! I’m John Gann, co-founder of CoinTracker, a portfolio and tax manager for cryptocurrency. Raise your hand if you own cryptocurrency! Alright, pretty tech-savvy crowd here. Basically what CoinTracker does is it integrates all the top crypto exchanges and wallets into one unified dashboard, and with the click of a button, you can file your crypto taxes.

Underneath the hood, in order to file your taxes, we are building some foundational tech that relies upon billions of rows of pricing data across over 2,500 coins and over a hundred exchanges, and it complies with local regulations in different places, all under a simple, easy-to-use interface. Since we started building this in September, we’ve grown to over $350 million of crypto assets tracked, over 55,000 exchange accounts, generating over $300,000 of revenue.

And this puts us in a unique position to now build even bigger products such as a unified front end for cryptocurrency non-custodial wallets and enterprise crypto accounting software. We’re backed by some of the best in the industry, including the co-founder of Reddit, the founder of Protocol Labs, the first seed investors at Coinbase, and a bunch of others.

Previously, I was a product manager at Alphabet; my co-founder John was a Google software engineer and a successful founder, and now you have the opportunity to be a founding engineer in a hyper-growth startup! Come find us afterwards in the blue shirts to learn more. Thank you! [Applause]

Hi, we're Crowd AI, and we’re building an API for change detection for aerial satellite and SAR data. Why are we doing this? We’re trying to replace large-scale operations that are primarily manual. Why is this interesting for you guys to join? Well, we’re solving a two-prong technical problem: the first is the lack of training data for segmentation, and we currently have one of the largest segmentation training datasets in the world in over 126 countries.

And secondly, we've built our own convolutional neural net architecture for segmentation of geospatial data. In fact, we recently placed that CVPR. So what are our customers using our data for? We currently can find roads better than what's on Google Maps and on OpenStreetMap, and we work with ride-sharing companies and mapping companies.

The same product that we have built is also used by the US government for various purposes — finding different types of objects. The same type of tool that we use for ride-sharing companies and mapping companies we also use for insurance and utilities companies. In this case, we find destruction post-wildfires in Santa Rosa, as well as flooding in regions after hurricanes.

We currently have rolled out a new product for E&P companies; we're one of the only companies, if not the only company that can find fracking on a weekly basis, if not daily basis. Why are we so good at what we do? We've got a fantastic team of 10 from Google, OpenAI, IBM Watson, and University of Oxford. Please come join us as a machine learning engineer, and please talk to me and my colleague Joe Garr over there in the back. Thank you! [Applause]

Hi, my name is Yen.

Hi, I’m Barsa.

And I'm Max, and we're from DoorDash. Now, I was mingling a little bit earlier, and people asked, “DoorDash? Are you guys still a startup?” And we are a startup! We’re still a startup. It’s been, you know, four or five years. I think one of the advantages of being an older startup is that the founders can now send people to events like this!

So, I'm not a founder, but I represent DoorDash, and so what is DoorDash? I think most of you know what we are — we’re a technology company that specializes in food delivery and last-mile logistics. I know we're known for food delivery, but we are actually expanding into other verticals like groceries.

You may have heard this spring we actually started a grocery pilot with Walmart, so we're growing very, very quickly! Now, some fun facts: This spring, we raised through $535 million from top investors like Sequoia and Softbank. We deliver food from over a hundred thousand merchants across the nation every day, and we're expanding into new cities every week. We expect to be in sixteen hundred cities by the end of the year.

Now, there is something with a more mundane service or ordinary service like food delivery, but I think one thing you should think about is why do we take it for granted? And we take it for granted because that's where society is trending.

So, in a world where same-day delivery becomes ubiquitous, and it's actually the norm, you know, that's kind of what we're thinking about, and that's where we are sort of taking our platform. So, come join us! Our booth is pretty obvious. So, you know, we’re good; we are very good people to work with.

And get, you know, 80% of a startup experience without all the risk! Thank you! [Applause]

Hi, I am Peter, the CEO of Ambers. We issue corporate cards that enforce expense policies. So, as an employee when you spend on behalf of your business, the expense is pre-approved, a report is generated, and a budget is tracked in real time. We started the year with just two full-time founders, and we’re now at nine employees with three engineers. We have 210 clients who collectively spend more than seven million dollars a month using our product.

We’ve been able to scale our business to its current size with just three engineers by being disciplined about code maintainability and by preserving simplicity of infrastructure. I was one of the technical cofounders of a company called Crocodoc that was acquired by Box, and I’ve had years of experience working with the other two engineers on the team. Together, we’ve launched credit cards using both MasterCard and most recently on the Visa payments network as one of the first expense solutions to launch a product using Stripe's new issuance API.

As we build our business, we're looking for an engineer to take ownership of a sizable piece of our infrastructure by augmenting our fraud detection algorithms using machine learning or by designing new bot interactions for our Slack integration. Again, my name is Peter, and I’m joined by Cameron and Winston, the other two engineers on the team. We have the only purple table in the other room, and I hope to talk to you afterwards! [Applause]

Hi, I'm Jared C. Hoffer. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Enzyme. I'd like you all to remember three numbers: 4, 7, and 10. Average time to market for a new software medical device is four years; for a hardware device like a pacemaker, it's seven years; and for a new drug, ten years. Why is that? Well, it’s kind of a complex question, but this is one reason — that’s an FDA submission.

And yeah, that picture is from the 60s. We've evolved a little since then; you can send PDFs now, but you're still stuck to paper copies. Bottom line is that if you’re in life science tech, you’re dealing with enormous quantities of data. The problem is that regulated companies have terrible information systems, and this leads to things like rote work, doing paper pushing, delays, and arbitrary decision making.

The good news is, as software engineers, we have an idea on how to fix the terrible information system part. How do we do it? Well, we combine a Rails web app with an NLP ML back-end that extracts data that users upload and programmatically writes FDA submissions. Even though we’re working in a regulated environment, we still follow software development best practices with hourly CI and weekly deploys to production. Most importantly though, by automating the FDA approval process, we’re helping life science innovators get their products to market one to three years faster than they otherwise would.

And our customers are making some really, really cool stuff. If this excites you, we’d love to talk — we're hiring for both full stack and NLP and all roles! Thank you! [Applause]

Hey everyone, I'm Michael from Focal Systems. For the past several decades, there's been little to no innovation inside the four walls of brick-and-mortar retail. Whether it be inventory management, like out-of-stocks, or the checkout process in general being extremely inefficient, there’s a lot of friction there, and all the friction inside of brick-and-mortar retail right now is driving a lot of us to shop online.

What we're doing at Focal Systems is we deploy hardware and software inside retail environments, and we use images to provide solutions like out-of-stock detection, automated checkout, or indoor location to let you know where you are while you're traveling throughout the store. Currently, we’re working with six of the world’s biggest retailers to solve these challenges.

And we’re looking for deep learning engineers, mechanical engineers, web engineers, and data scientists to scale our business. Come talk to me at the Focal Systems booth, and I'm looking forward to automating brick-and-mortar retail with you!

Hello, I’m Roc and I head engineering for HER. HER is the world’s largest LGBTQ female space and queer consumer app. We run our mobile app that is used by over 3 million users in specific five countries. We reach 48 million people per year, and we organize over a hundred events that attract our gay people.

Our goal is to make home for the world’s identities, and we want to make every lesbian, queer, and bisexual person feel at home. For us, our core values that we feel reflect the entire team is that we’re great together, that we foster ownership and responsibility, that we try to learn and contribute back to the team, and we will always struggle to do more with less.

Some of the things that engineers have done on our team recently is a deep and wide deep-learning recommender for meeting new people; this camera detection tool using NLP. And we’ve recently internationalized both of our apps — first language, French, for many more to come. Currently, we’re mostly looking for mobile engineers. We’re kind of looking for product-oriented engineers who care enough about UX and who are going to help us create some space that has been traditionally super underserved into something that community will feel and take for its own.

We all work tirelessly on this goal by believing that this is something bigger than us and that we are creating a better new future for a lot of the demographics that have been traditionally overlooked. Thank you very much! [Applause]

Hi everyone! I’m Betsy Larkin. I'm the founder of Honeylove. We are a direct-to-consumer fashion brand that makes clothing with built-in targeted compression that accentuates body shape. We are part of the current YC batch, and we’re hiring a founding CTO. Some of you might not be familiar with this space, but we’ve been able to prove that there's a strong demand for our products.

We raised over $300,000 on Kickstarter in the spring, and this past week we started shipping and also launched sales from our website. In just the first week, we brought in over $30,000 in revenue and are also profitable right out of the gate.

In terms of the founding CTO position, we’re looking for people who are passionate about creating amazing e-commerce experiences — so on the front end, custom checkout flows; on the back end, you know, fulfillment, warehouse, inventory management software. And then, as the third team member, you guys would also be instrumental in helping us to build out the team. So if that sounds interesting to you, please find me. Thanks! [Applause]

Hello, hello! My name is Alex Harmsen; I'm one of the co-founders of Iris Automation. We build collision avoidance systems for industrial drones — drones that are being used for railway inspection, farming surveys, mining exploration, even things like package delivery and air taxis.

About a year ago, pretty much every single aviation authority around the world mandated this type of collision avoidance system to be onboard millions of drones. Essentially, these drones can’t be used for any sort of beyond line of sight operations, anything autonomous, anything scaled — any one of the industries that I just mentioned — without this critical technology.

And the way we build it is we use computer vision and AI software to be able to allow these drones to see the world the way a pilot does. And this is not easy; I mean, essentially, we’re taking these current drones, and we’re adding these systems to them to be able to actually allow them to see objects at thousands of feet away in real-time with size, weight, and power constraints. This needs to be aviation quality — a problem similar to self-driving cars, but way harder.

We do this by modeling human perception and really understanding how pilots see the world. Ultimately, it's software; we’re able to do remote software updates, continuously improve the product using the latest embedded GPUs and cameras, and we do this by layering traditional geometric computer vision algorithms with more semantic understanding through artificial intelligence.

So far, we've collected more than 50 terabytes of data of real collisions; we have a chief pilot on staff, we have drone operators — we're going out into different landscapes, environments, different conditions and collecting all of this data as well as all of our customers internationally. Not just that, we’re able to do hundreds of thousands of collisions in simulation and hardware in the loop environments. We built up an entire architecture behind the scenes to make sure that every new algorithm is tested and is worthy for the world.

Currently, we have a twenty-five person team; we've raised over ten million dollars. These systems are actively going out! For us, it’s a combination of people from the self-driving car world, avionics. Me, my co-founder, we came from Boeing and NASA originally with lots of experience in the drone space. So if you're interested in any of what you just heard, specifically for computer vision experts and anyone who’s worked on C++, come and find us! We have a booth in the other room and a huge sign that you won't miss! [Applause]

Hi everybody! My name's Andrew Quarry; I'm the CEO of Level 5. So autonomous cars — they’re like a really hot thing in 2018, and there’s so much hype, but autonomous cars still suck, and that’s really sad. So we make maps. Maps, you say? Haven't maps already been created? No, we make HD maps, and HD maps are really different than regular maps because they are these 3D representations of the environment. It includes everything from lane lines, traffic lights, signs, pedestrian crosswalks — pretty much everything you name it.

And so we're mapping this using cameras and computer vision. And how do we do this? Well, we have a program called Paver, and if you have an iPhone, you can download Paver and make money just by driving. So we have a lot of Uber drivers on the platform doing this for us, and Paver's a really special application because it has on-edge machine learning, and we really get your phone cooking! Like, we use Metal; we use CoreML. We use everything; we're running powerful computer vision algorithms to do segmentation, to detect cars, pedestrians, lane lines, buildings — we literally get your phone cooking!

And it uses 5% of battery every two minutes or something. So basically what I'm saying is we need people that help optimize this. We have over 10,000 drivers, and yeah, so we're getting a ton of data! And we have like 500 terabytes — or 500, we have almost a petabyte of data! And so we take all this data, the reconstruction happens on the phone, but then we send all these point clouds up to the server, and we aggregate all this stuff together server-side to create these really, really high-detailed centimeter-level maps of the world.

And this is really important for self-driving cars. It's like a git diff for maps, and self-driving car companies would really need this, but we really need you! Especially if you're an iOS engineer or just someone interested in mapping or autonomous cars or vision or anything like that, come talk to me! So, yeah, come map the world with us! Thank you!

So every company you’re hearing from today has the potential to shape the world, but they all have one big problem in common — they can’t hire enough talent. We're fixing that — make schools a new model of college focused on training students for high-growth tech companies like all the companies you’re hearing from today.

We’re starting with computer science; eventually, we might look to robotics, biotech, and more. We have placed our alumni at Google X; we’ve placed alums at OpenAI; one of our alums leads mobile at Limebike, and about 40% of our students get offers from YC companies — that gives you a sense of the talent that's coming out of here.

But we also care a lot about diversity. Forty percent of our students are underrepresented students of color, and fifty percent are low-income students. We are the first bachelor’s granting institution where students can graduate in only two years, and they can pay tuition as a percentage of earnings once they graduate instead of building software. We want you to build developers, but this is not just like any teaching job — this is like being a senior engineer mentoring and coaching junior developers.

Our school feels much more like a workplace than a classroom. Building developers will accelerate the future and maximize your impact; it’s really high leverage because instead of working for one company, you're training an army of students to go work at all of them. You should work with us if you’re passionate about teaching and coaching and mentoring, if you want to build a scalable system for upward mobility for all the people who don’t have the opportunities that we do, and you want to help accelerate economic growth everywhere in the world. Thank you! [Applause]

Got some giggles? Okay! Hi, my name is Hua; I’m the CEO and co-founder of Meadow. We build cannabis SaaS. So our products include retail point-of-sale systems, inventory management, automatic compliance reports, and delivery. We process over 10 million dollars of weed per month, and it’s growing. Our mission is to build the best software in the cannabis industry, and it's growing from 9.7 billion dollars last year to 47 billion dollars in the next ten years.

This is our team; we're a team of ten people working together in San Francisco. Our engineering team is four, three of which are my co-founders. So one of you lucky or two will be our next second or third engineering hire, which we’re really excited about! Our front end consists of three React apps that power the point-of-sale, power the dispensary management system, and then we have one iPad point-of-sale app that's deployed across all these dispensaries in California.

We utilize Node.js, and we really run the latest version — utilize the latest JavaScript technology, such as async/await. Come say hi; my co-founders Scott and Rick are here wearing our Meadow shirts! We’re looking forward to hanging out with you guys! Thank you! [Applause]

Welcome! My name is Keith with Mystery.org. We create video explanations for kids’ questions like, “Why is the sky blue?” Most questions that children ask — grown-ups don’t know how to answer. Eventually, kids stop asking, and their curiosity fades away. So we’re creating explanations for every question kids have. Think of us like a visual Wikipedia for kids.

We’re already used by teachers in 50% of elementary schools in the U.S., and we'll do nearly 8 million in sales this year. Now we’re scaling our platform to answer every question and reach kids everywhere! We need a couple engineers to help us. There are 30 people on our team — eight of them are engineers.

These are teams’ former Facebook, Palantir, Google, and we move fast! We deploy code a dozen times a day to production, but that’s just table stakes. We’re looking for engineers that are passionate about creating great product experiences. You’ll work closely with our designers, our customers, you’ll make product decisions, and you’ll be surrounded by a group of people that you’ll learn from every day — people who've contributed to Rails, people from the Bundler core team, and people who find Ruby a little slow and will drop in to C and write a custom gem.

But what is it that you’re building? This is a new kind of wiki software. Wikis are great for a group of people to collaborate on creating a text document; we're building a platform so a group of people can collaborate on creating video explanations for kids.

So come join us if you want to help the next generation of children grow up and stay curious! We'll be across the way. Thanks! [Applause]

Who here rents? Cool! 93% of landlords use credit as the primary indicator of who they’re going to rent to. 67% of people under the age of 35 have subprime credit scores in America, and less than 5% of people will ever be evicted in their life. When it comes to renting, credit is broken, but we figured out how to fix it.

So Neighborly is a credit bureau that has built an AI-based credit score for the rental industry that helps landlords know who they’re renting to while helping tenants access fair credit and build their credit by just paying their rent. We give our product away completely for free, and we, which includes a credit report, criminal background check, everything; we make money selling renters insurance, and that’s allowed us to grow from a thousand to 350,000 rentals in 18 months, which is like 1/2 of a percent of America now using us.

That means that every day, 20 people at Neighborly decide where thousands of people live, which is a responsibility we take super seriously, and that’s what we need your help with. So if you want to solve hard problems with real-world applications of AI, building inclusive user experiences that like really need to matter for an incredibly diverse group of people, and you want to have an impact on something that really matters, like housing and credit in America, then you should come talk to us! Thank you! [Applause]

Hello! I’m Scott Patterson; I head up the engineering team at Notable Labs, where we’re doing personalized drug discovery for blood cancer. So the basic idea is that we take a patient’s actual cells, we test different combinations of approved drugs, and we see what kills the cancer and keeps the healthy cells alive. We focus on combinations because many of the driver mutations are very difficult to drug with a single drug. In blood cancer particularly, if you start with a single drug, you lead to a resistant clone and relapse of the cancer.

Broadly, our goal is identifying personalized combinations of approved drugs that a patient can use today. We're using the same platform to do drug discovery both internally and in partnership with a number of pharma companies. The platform we’re building consists of our proprietary biology, where we’re miniaturizing the microenvironment around the cells so that we can scale up and do the number of combinations that we need to test. We have our custom-built software — machine learning to handle automating the analysis and handling these complex scientific workflows, and we’ve automated the whole thing with robotics and lab automation so that we can scale up and have a reproducible assay.

We’re actively hiring software engineers, data scientists, and cancer scientists. If you want to work on an awesome mission where you can have an impact on patients' lives today with a super talented and diverse engineers and scientists on a modern tech stack, come talk to us! Thank you! [Applause]

Hi everyone! I’m Lucas from Innova Credit. I’m the CTO and co-founder. Innova is the world's first international credit history platform, and we have successfully raised a series A recently, and we’re backed by General Catalyst and in expenses, and of course, we are actively hiring. I’m going to tell you a little bit about a problem first and then a solution.

So what is it that we’re solving? The problem is that immigrants today, they just cannot get credit in foreign markets. All of your credit histories, your borrowing behavior, and your payments details — they’re stuck in their market. And this is a really big problem because if you get into a new market, you want to get started; you want to get like renting apartments, you want to get a credit card, you want to lease a car.

So how do we solve this problem? We solve this problem by having one API for global data. So this is creating one standardized format across the world for credit history data. We aggregate from databases all over the world and expose that with one unique API data points.

So why do you want to join Innova? We have technical challenges that are really interesting. We have massive ETL pipelines, we have infrastructure systems that need to be cross-region and need to talk to each other at all times. And we face a lot of graph machine-learning problems because of all these databases across the world.

So come talk to us! Sorry, come talk to us at our booth! We have a talented thirty people at our San Francisco office — beautiful fur, and yeah, just come talk to us! We are looking for infrastructure system engineers, backend engineers, full stack engineering, basically across the board! Thank you! [Applause]

Hi everyone! I'm Kevin, the co-founder and CEO of PathRise. We are YC4 Careers instead of companies. So what does that mean? That means we help and mentor students and young professionals to get the best possible job and find fulfilling work — everything from outreach tactics, resume review, to interview preparation and to negotiation advice.

One of the things to keep in mind is that we’re not a coding bootcamp; we’re not an interview prep course; we’re not a replacement for college. Instead, what we do is guide you through your job search afterwards and help you figure out the stuff in your early career that nobody else is gonna teach you.

The catch is it’s completely free until you get hired and start work. The whole point is that our fellows pay zero dollars out of pocket, and instead, we recoup our investment back from an income share of their salary only after they've already started their employment. It’s affordable to anyone, accessible to anyone online, and we actually have aligned incentives with our fellows.

You might want to join our team if you want to do more than just code and would love to spend a significant amount of your time working with students that are aspiring to be engineers. You might want to join our team if you want to fix a broken model of career services that it’s ridiculous how far and how bad it’s gotten.

And you might want to join our team if you’re not looking for a company that’s building the next big social media app or gadget. You're not looking for a company that's going to maybe provide marginal utilities for hundreds of millions of individuals. Instead, you’re looking for a company that invests in every single fellow that we go through, and one where I can say that even if we collapse today, there are a hundred students where we've literally changed their lives.

And for those of you that are less experienced and aspiring engineers, for those of you that are still students or recent graduates — come talk to us! We’d love to give you free advice and any help you might need — no strings attached! Thanks! [Applause]

Hi, my name is Tracy Young; I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of PlanGrid.

Hello! My name is Ralph Judy; I'm the CTO and co-founder of PlanGrid. PlanGrid builds beautiful, simple, powerful software for the $14 trillion per year construction industry. We are part of Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch, and in the last six years, we've helped build over 1 million construction projects.

Today, we have paying customers in over 80 countries. You probably don’t know this, but one out of every ten people in the world eats, sleeps, and breathes construction every single day. And for us, it’s a privilege to be able to write software for some of the hardest-working people in the world.

As an engineer, what excites me about PlanGrid is not only do you get to work on deep technically challenging problems, you also get to work with customers that you get to know, that love you, that love your software, and rely on it to get their job done.

So we’re hiring across the board! We’re hiring mobile developers — that's iOS, Android, even Windows! We've got web, back-end, Python, data science, machine learning — we’re hiring everything! We have a modern stack, just like everybody else here. We're a diverse team of 350 people and growing. We deeply care about fairness in the world; in 2016, PlanGrid took the United States Equal Pay pledge, and I am proud to share that we pay our men and women equally!

We also have great benefits for individuals and families, and we pay well! And we would love to meet you! PlanGrid.com/Ralph — move your head slash careers! We’re also by this big ass fan over in the other building, so come talk to us! Thank you! [Applause]

Hi, everyone! My name is Omni, and I am the founder and CEO of Poppy. Our mission is to build the modern village for every family. Right now, we're doing that by building the platform that connects parents with amazing vetted caregivers when they need childcare.

Why is that important? Well, there’s a shiny happy version of parenthood out there, and then there’s the super messy kind of reality — the reality that needs lots of help and support, but for lots of reasons, it doesn’t exist.

But we believe that you can do that with the amazing people that live in our communities and with a little bit of thoughtful technology. Our general thesis is that if you can connect parents with the people that they trust, are available when they need them to be, and are a really good fit for their families, you can really approximate that idea of village.

And the amazing news is that over the last two years, we’ve been doing that for thousands of families in Seattle. We've been creating that experience that Sam is talking about, that you're looking for — that really fanatical product that is really solving real problems for people, both on the parent and family side, but then also importantly creating really amazing jobs on the other side!

But we're only just getting started! If you think about how to scale this kind of marketplace, there are so many interesting and hard problems to work on. What is the right matching model when you're talking about people and families and kids? How do you think about supply and demand optimization? How do you think about automation when you're thinking about people? And, overall, just how do you create really simple and seamless technology that almost disappears and becomes invisible within people's lives?

So we’re looking for smart people that want to solve a really hard, really important problem and join our team in Seattle, who is made up of really fun, amazing, dedicated people that really want to solve this really important problem.

So if you want to solve a real-world problem, build features that get into the hands of our users the next day, if you're driven by talking to users and really iterating and understanding how a product can help them, and if you want to use your superpowers for good and live in a city that you can actually afford to live in, come talk to me! You can either catch me on Twitter or find me at the booth in the other room! Thank you! [Applause]

Hello everyone! I'm Chris; I'm the CEO of Precious. Precious uses AI to organize the photos of your kids. Here’s the problem: my daughter is three years old, and I have twenty thousand photos of her; in 2018, that’s normal!

Our technology will scan that mess, well, scan that mess, find the meaningful moments, and build the perfect album for your kids. We believe that this is important because we believe it's very important to make families happier and stronger.

We’re early C-stage company, and we're only three people, but we already have a lot of traction. Users love our early product so much that they’ve given us four and a half star reviews over thousands of reviews, and we have sixty-two thousand subscribers who pay five dollars per month to use our app.

These are subscribers across 100 countries around the world, and that translates to almost 3 million dollars in annual revenue with a three-person team! Joining Precious won't be for everyone, but here’s why it might be awesome for you: you’ll get the impact, responsibility, and equity of joining an early-stage company that also has revenue and profit on a small team!

We really do want you to take tons of responsibility and ownership, come up with ideas on your own, and ship them to users quickly. And finally, we're not a sweatshop; we truly value work/life balance. I have two toddlers, and I get home to have dinner with them every single day, except for tonight because I can’t get home to San Francisco in time!

So in summary, we’re Precious. What we offer to you is a chance to use AI to organize the photos of people's kids. We want you to take big responsibilities on our small team, and you'll get a chance to come to work to make families happier, stronger, every day. If that sounds interesting to you, please come find me and my co-founder wearing the icon of the smiling baby later; I would love to chat with you! Thanks!

Hi, my name is Phaedra, and I used to run revenue and operations at a ten-recent funded startup. I realized that technology actually had the potential to do incredible good, and so a friend and I co-founded Promise, and we’re helping people get out and stay out of jail. Right now, 75% of people in jail have not been convicted of the crime they were arrested for. They're there because they cannot afford bail. Two-thirds of those folks who are bail-eligible are nonviolent offenders who are stuck in jail.

What we know is the longer you stay in jail