We’ve noticed a common problem: founders don’t know what “good” looks like in a term sheet. This makes sense, because it is often, literally, the first time in their careers that they’ve seen one. This puts founders at a significant disadvantage because VCs see term sheets all the time and know what to expect. Because we’ve invested in so many founders over the years and have seen hundreds of Series A term sheets, we know what “good” looks like. We work with our founders to understand where term
YC Has Changed | Y Combinator
As YC grows, founders are wondering how it’s improved over time. This is a valid line of questioning – clearly much has changed about YC over 13 years. We have new leadership [http://www.ycombinator.com/people/], much larger batch sizes [https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/batch-stats/], we invest more money [http://www.ycombinator.com/deal/], we have a growth fund [http://www.ycombinator.com/continuity/], a series A program [https://blog.ycombinator.com/introducing-yc-series-a-batches/], a ma
YC Safe Financing Documents | Y Combinator
Information about startup documents, including the safe (simple agreement for future equity).
Startup Playbook
We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies.
Standard Contracts - Common Paper
Common Paper standard agreements have been downloaded more than 40,000 times and used to close millions of dollars in deals. They are created and maintained by a committee of expert attorneys and released for free under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.
Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I Work
Credit: Google DeepMind / Pexels In February I wrote about The Spreadsheet: one tab per week, a column for each area of my life, and a green/yellow/red rating for impact and vibe. Every Monday I fe…
Requests for Startups | Y Combinator
Y Combinator is looking for startups working on these ideas. If you're working on something we're interested in, we'd love to hear from you.
What's it like being a nonprofit in Y Combinator? | 80,000 Hours
Now the obligatory Tech Crunch article is out, I'm thrilled to announce we've been in Y Combinator (YC) since June. YC is widely regarded as the world's best startup accelerator, and has supported companies such as AirBnB, Reddit and Dropbox. It provides investment and intensive coaching over three months. I've had a lot of questions about YC over the last couple of days.
The Decentralized Future Series | Y Combinator
A good method for discovering startup ideas is to look into technological breakthroughs and think about what they unlock that wasn't possible before. In this introductory post, we are going to use this framework to examine Bitcoin.
Why the Best Companies and Developers Give Away Almost Everything They Do
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
Before You Grow | Y Combinator
Startups are defined by growth [http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html], but growth isn’t step one in building a great company. If you focus on trying to grow before you make a product people love, you are unlikely to succeed. We’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating–many founders hurt their companies by focusing on growth too soon. I’m not saying don’t grow at all–getting people to use your product, even in its earliest form, will help you better understand what your customers want. Bu
7 Startup Agreements That Save Companies (and Friendships) | Signus
Founder blowups and cap-table surprises are mostly preventable. A focused seven-document set—Founders Agreement, SAFE (Post-Money), Mutual NDA, Independent Contractor Agreement, Advisory Agreement, Consulting Agreement, and PIIA—closes the early gaps that orphan IP, muddle equity, and stall deals. Right-size what you send; use the subset that fits the moment. Clarity beats memory.
Your startup culture needs to act like a mosquito, not a termite colony
I'd like to talk to you about scaling. Specifically, startup scaling. At a high level, what you want is: A: more customers, more growth, more reach. You do this using: B: cost: hosting, staff, tokens, licenses, etc. Scaling is not minimising cost. Scaling is increasing external output faster than
