YC General Partner David Lieb’s story is all about perseverance. In 2008 he co-founded Bump, one of the hottest startups of the early iPhone era. But even with 150 million users, he couldn’t find a way to create a sustainable business. For many founders, that would be the end of the road. But he didn’t quit there. Instead, David and his team pivote…

YC's Nicolas Dessaigne was the co-founder and CEO of @algolia, a Search API used by millions of developers to build great search experiences into their apps and websites. Today it powers over 1.75 trillion searches annually for 17,000+ customers worldwide. In this episode of Startup School, @dessaigne shares his advice for founders building a dev t…

Since Twitter rebranded to X, the platform has added new features and implemented a few major updates to both its UX and algo.So what can founders interested in product design learn from all this?In the first episode of our new series, The Breakdown, YC’s Tom Blomfield (co-founder of Monzo) and David Lieb (creator of Google Photos) take a closer lo…

It’s fair to say that few people in tech are positioned to have a bigger impact on the future than Sam Altman. At OpenAI, Sam and his team have overseen monumental leaps forward in machine learning, generative AI, and most recently, LLMs that can reason at PhD levels. And this is just the beginning. In his latest essay Sam predicted that ASI (Artif…

The biggest companies in the world all had to start somewhere. In this episode of Office Hours, the Group Partners explore the humble origins of several top YC companies to try and identify common traits of the most successful founders. They’ll explore what it takes to keep your company alive in the early days, where to focus your energy and how to…

Stripe, Airbnb and Lyft are a few of the most successful companies of the past decade. And there are at least two things they all have in common - great design, and Katie Dill. Katie was Head of Experience Design at Airbnb, led the design team at Lyft and is now Head of Design at Stripe. We spoke with Katie about her design philosophy, what sets co…

Building a startup and trying to break into an established market is very difficult, especially if you’re trying to do it alone! That’s why it’s critical to find the right co-founder for the journey. In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Harj Taggar explains why you need a co-founder, when to bring them on, where you can find one and …

Whether it's for sales, recruiting or making new connections, cold outreach is a necessary tool for helping build your startup. But as you probably know, most cold emails either are ignored or end up in the trash. So what can you do to make sure your emails break through the noise? In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein s…

At YC our motto is make something people want. But how do you actually know if you’ve accomplished that in the early days? One of the best ways to measure successful growth is a concept called cohort retention, which tracks the fraction of new users that come back time and time again to use your product. In this episode of Startup School, YC Group …