What is Y Combinator?
YCombinator (YC) is a 12-week startup accelerator program. YC runs in “batches” with the Summer 2024 (S24) running from July 8th to October 5th. The overall goal of YC is to accelerate the growth and progress of your startup. Group partners (former founders) mentor and guide approximately 250 companies each batch. I’ll dig deeper into why we decided to apply to YC in a future post, but for now, I want to highlight the key components of the first 6 weeks of YC.
What happens during YC?
Batch Retreat
Our 3 days in Sonoma felt like college orientation meets summer camp. From grape stomping competitions to late-night fire pit chats to the incredibly powerful and vulnerable founder stories from our group partners Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia), Andrew Miklas (PagerDuty), Tom Blomfield (Monzo), Nate Smith (Lever), Brad Flora (Perfect Audience), and Harj Taggar (Triplebyte), the batch retreat takes you from strangers to a bonded group (go Group 4!)
Founder Stories
YC is filled with events where we listened to behind-the-scenes stories and asked off-the-record questions with founders like Patrick Collison (Stripe), Sam Altman, Greg Brockman (Open AI), Andy Jassy (AWS), Brian Chesky (AirBNB), Aaron Levie (Box), Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), Howie Liu (Airtable), and of course Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston (Y Combinator). It's wild to go from an engineering job to being in the same room as some of the greatest founders.
Founder-Led Sales
For most of us technical founders, we know how to build products, but have never had to sell them. WOW I have so much more admiration for enterprise AEs now! Sales & marketing are HARD. YC led a founder-led sales bootcamp where sales geniuses like Tracy Young (PlanGrid / TigerEye) and Ryan Neu (Vendr) shared key insights. This part of YC felt like a compressed business school for founders. I still have a ton to learn, but have gained a lot of wisdom from them and fellow YC founders.
Product Day
Last week we had the chance to demo what we've built to other YC founders, and there's nothing like a big demo to push you to build bold features & functionality. Joe & I worked 16+ hour days for the past week to pull off a great demo, and we can't wait to show the world all of the new Clearly AI features.
YC isn’t over yet!
With 6 weeks to go, there's so much left to accomplish at YC. But, I'm super proud of how far we've all come. Stay tuned for more company updates here and on my LinkedIn.
