Jessica Livingston at Female Founders Conference 2014

I'm Jessica Livingston. I'm one of the founders of Y Combinator, and I'm so happy you're all here today. I've been reading; like some of you have come from so far away. It's just thrilling. I've been in the startup world for nine years now, and this is the first conference I've ever been to that's all women! Crazy! Except for Lauren, our honorary male guest, who's here with Julia Hart's today.

Here, I'm back. The reason I decided to make this an exclusively female event is that we now have enough female partners at Y Combinator and enough successful female alumni that we can do this with all women. Actually, the conference started out as something we planned to do for like one hundred and fifty people in our office with just alumni speaking. And then we were flooded with applications, so we switched it to the Computer History Museum. But even so, with extra space, we still had to reject a lot of great applications. I'm really bummed about that. This is the most oversubscribed event we've ever hosted, and there are a lot of female YC alumni in the audience.

Um, female YC alumni, would you please stand up? I just want to see how many of you are here! I'll stand up. Yeah, and all the alumni have orange name tags that say "YC Alumni." So please, I encourage you, if you're interested, go up to any of them and ask them about their experience with YC.

Ok, so I thought I'd start out by sharing my own story. Y Combinator is basically a startup investment firm, and the way things worked was much more like a startup than an investment firm. Here's a photo of when we first started. These are the four founders, and it was during our first interview weekend. We launched in March two thousand five. I hadn't quit my job at the investment bank where I worked. I didn't actually quit my job until after this weekend. We had agreed to fund eight startups, so I sort of had to quit then. I had a book deal at the time for "Founders at Work," but I remember that when I resigned, I told people it was to work on my book.

YC is a big deal now, but in those days, it seemed so crazy and so inconsequential that I was embarrassed to tell people that that was really what I was going to do. In fact, the hardest part for me for starting YC was telling my dad that I had quit my job, that I no longer had medical coverage, and that I was starting this like new kind of investment firm with my boyfriend. Um, but luckily, my dad was supportive, so that was good.

Um, okay, so here we are at dinner during the first summer. That was the summer of two thousand five, and that one table is the entire batch. In fact, the two older guys, sort of toward the front, were the guest speakers. In those days, we had absolutely no idea how big we'd become, and I had no experience with startups at all. Yes, I was writing "Founders at Work," but other than that, I had zero credentials.

So if you're worried that you might not be qualified to work on the idea you want to work on, I can tell you that you cannot be less qualified than I was. But I did have what I have since observed many times is the most important qualification in a founder, which is a real interest in the problem you're solving. I did have that. We didn't start YC to make money. Back then, we would have been happy to know that YC would even break even. I started it for the same reason that I was doing "Founders at Work," which is because I was really interested in startups and I wanted to help founders, as I still do today.

By the way, this is often how startups get started: you don't know what you're doing, but you test a hypothesis to see how it works. The hypothesis we were testing was that it had become so much cheaper to start a startup that a lot more people would do it if we made it easier for them. Everyone takes us for granted now, but this was news back then. In 2005, it was a lot cheaper to start a startup than it had been a few years earlier. Servers and bandwidth were cheaper, there was more open source software, and the internet had become a really good vehicle for getting attention. So you were no longer dependent on press and expensive PR firms, but these changes were happening...