Sam Altman

We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight.

The worst part of our job at YC is rejecting companies.  It leaves me feeling down for many days after our application process.  I experienced plenty of rejection from investors while running my own startup, and I remember well how bad it is.  Starting a startup is such a hard thing that we wish we could help everyone doing so.

Some day, we hope to be able to fund almost all the good startups.  In the meantime, we still have capacity constraints as we figure out how to scale, and that means we’re stuck saying no to potentially good companies.

The best startups often look bad at this stage, and we make mistakes.  We could easily miss something great.  If you’re working on something that users love, you like working on it, and you have a plan for how to build a business around it, then please don’t let us deter you.  (It's sometimes useful to ask friends for an outside perspective on how you're doing.)

Although we had nearly 20% more applications than a year ago, it was really striking how much higher the average quality of applications was for this batch compared to any previous batch.  Most of the partners independently mentioned this to me.

Anyway, to everyone we’re unable to fund: Best of luck, and don’t give up.  We love to see founders and companies reapply—companies that look bad now can look great with 6 months of progress.

The YC application deadline is this Friday, and you can apply here.

People often tell us they think they want to start a company but just aren’t sure, so I thought I’d share some thoughts.  Although it’s true that most people aren’t well suited to start startups, a lot of people that could be great at it are afraid to make the leap.  They look at super successful founders who now seem impossibly impressive.

The first time I met the Airbnb founders they were clearly smart and fairly impressive, but nothing like what they are today.  We met at a coffeeshop in Mountain View, and they were stumbling over their words and talking about how things weren’t going that well.  Now they are taking over the world.  This improvement is not a special case—the same thing happened for the Collison brothers at Stripe, and the founders of Homejoy, Weebly, Coinbase, Teespring, Pebble, and on and on and on.

Here’s the secret: everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.  Even the most successful founders doubt themselves and their startups many times in the early days.  But founders improve very quickly.

So when you’re thinking about whether or not you can start a startup, remember that you shouldn’t compare yourself to these people now.  They became much more impressive in the course of running of their startup, and so can you.

Starting a startup is very hard and very painful.  Success usually requires a level of determination and commitment for which most people don’t have a mental model.

For example, when Adora Cheung was starting Homejoy, she would work all day as a cleaner to learn the business, drive an hour back to Mountain View, stay up as late as she could coding, then drive back to San Francisco at ~3am to beat traffic, sleep in her car, and do it again.  She also gave both her apartment and her car to early cleaners so that they could partner up with Homejoy.  We don’t want to delude anyone about what running a startup is like—it’s a rational decision to decide you don’t want to start a startup.  

But there are lots of great reasons to start a company, and a lot of people are willing to accept the pain. The unfortunate situation is when people who want to start startups don’t actually get started—they feel like the great startup founders are too impressive, or they don’t know what to do, or it’s too risky.

It’s really not that risky—in general, few things are as risky as they seem.  And Y Combinator makes it even less risky—we don’t invest much money, but it’s enough to live on (even with a family in most cases).  If the startup doesn’t work out, one of the advantages of the alumni network is that most YC founders find something interesting to do next.

The only thing you have to know how to do is build something people want.  If you can do this, and you are sufficiently relentless, you can probably create more value and have more impact than you could in a regular job.  YC can teach you nearly everything else—in fact, most of what we do is give startups one-on-one advice.

Founders are usually amazed by how much they get done over the three months of YC, and how much they change.  The structure of YC helps startups focus on the few things that matter, and a group of people that mostly start out feeling like they don’t belong transform to some of the best founders out there.

If you’re still on the fence about applying for the Summer 2014 YC batch, we hope you’ll make the leap!  And don’t worry if you’re not as far along as you’d like of if your application isn’t polished enough.  We’ve gotten very good at looking past this, and also it doesn’t hurt you if you don’t get in the first time you apply (we rejected Drew Houston from Dropbox the first time he applied).  We fund companies at all stages, from just the faintest idea to post-Series B. 

Here is some advice other people have written about how to apply:

How to Apply to Y Combinator by Paul Graham

Last Minute Advice for YC Applicants by Garry Tan

Harj Taggar on Quora answering "What is the best advice for a startup applying to Y Combinator?"

Michelle Crosby on her YC experience

Drew Houston's Dropbox Application

Harry Zhang's (Lob YC S13) Advice for YC Applicants 

 Y Combinator Applicant Advice by Zain Shah

On the whole, I got a great response to my request for feedback about how YC could encourage female founders.  It's clear there are two separate problems: 

1) Some women already starting startups aren't interested in doing Y Combinator.

2) Some women who could be great founders don't start startups. 

I realize it's always a bit ridiculous for a guy to talk about what it's like for female founders, but I'm interested in doing whatever I can to help, because the venture business has definitely been unfair to women.  The women on our team also care deeply about this issue, and  can do more than I can to address it.

For point #1, one of the most consistent messages was that we need to make it clear that we care about the issue and want to fund more female founders.  So I'll say that now: we want to fund more women.  And we'll keep saying this in the outreach we do.

We want to fund more women because it's the right thing to do, but we're not doing this for diversity's sake alone.  We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women.

Many are also going to be founded by people of different races, different religions, from different countries, straight, gay, in their 20s, or in their 50s.  All of those apply to people in the current YC batch.  In fact, they all apply to the YC partnership as well.  Again, we don't do this for the sake of diversity. We do it because we want to get the best people, whatever they're like.

In the current YC batch, 24% of the companies we funded have one or more female founders, and there will be a lot of companies out of those with the potential to serve as role models.  We hope that as the number of female YC alumni continues to rise, more women will feel YC is a place that supports and respects them.

Another message was that we should do more to make women feel welcome.  Many emails pointed out that our website shows nearly all men; we'll fix that.  We'll also continue to work with our most successful female founders to talk about their experiences and mentor women that could be future founders.  We'll continue to ask women to come speak at dinners. In this batch, two of my four favorite speakers were women (Adora Cheung and Julia Hartz).  And we're working on something to improve the quality of Hacker News comments.

A very common request was for us to have women in the interviews we do before funding companies.  In the last batch, we had a woman in 2 of the 3 interview tracks.  We now have more female YC partners, so for this upcoming batch, we'll have a woman in every track.

Nearly all women who emailed me suggested that we keep the exact same bar for women as for men (anything else wouldn't be fair to the incredible women we fund every batch), but many pointed out that women are often good in different ways and at different things than men--for example, that men and women express confidence differently--and that we should make sure our criteria catch that.

A specific issue that came up is a belief that we look for founders that look like Mark Zuckerberg.  Actually that meme began as a self-deprecating joke. We funded a guy once who looked like Mark but ended up doing badly, and when PG was asked by a reporter how to fool him, he said that apparently this was one way. His real point was that looking like Zuckerberg means nothing--that you can look remarkably like him and still fail miserably.  I think it's more accurate to say we look for founders that have some of the qualities that have made Zuckerberg so successful.

Finally, I heard a lot of support for events like the Female Founders Conference and a belief that they could help change the industry.  And if YC continues to fund more women, many people believe VCs will follow.

For point #2, I think we can do a lot to reach young women earlier and help teach them about startups and coding.  Many women pointed out that you don't have to be a coder to be a founder.  That's definitely true, and it was a good reminder for me personally.  But I think it's good to at least present learning to code as an option worth considering.

As we do more events, we'll continue to reach out to women.  Kat, our director of outreach, Jessica, our founding partner, and I will all specifically work on this.  For example, we're thinking about holding a hackathon later this year.  It'd be great to have a lot of women attend.

We're also going to ask some of our successful female founders to do more outreach.  I believe we have already funded at least one female founder/CEO who will produce a multibillion dollar company. She and others are outstanding role models.

There's lots of work still to do, but we're on it.  I hope other investors will join us.

We’d like for Y Combinator to fund more breakthrough technology companies—companies that solve an important problem, have a very long time horizon, and are based on an underlying technological or scientific breakthrough.  Not many people try to start these companies, so starting a company that will require a huge amount of time and money is an automatic competitive advantage.  SpaceX and Tesla are great examples of what is possible.

It used to be the case that governments funded a lot of development of breakthrough technologies.  The bad news is that they have mostly stopped; the good news is that the leverage of technology is such that now small startups can do what used to take the resources of nations. [1]

We think the YC model works well for these companies.  We invest with infinite time horizon and are not afraid of risky-looking companies. [2] We understand software, which will be central to many of these companies.  We are good at getting companies to focus on solving real problems for real customers, and not just developing technology for its own sake.  And our model helps companies figure out a right-sized initial project achievable with a small amount of time and money—great companies get built with a series of small wins that compound over time, and early momentum is critical.  A common failure mode of many ambitious companies is to bite off an initial project that is far too big and expensive.  Finally, we know a lot about raising money, which will be a big part of the challenge for many of these companies as they mature.

Here is a list (we’ll add to it over time) of some areas we’re particularly interested in, but more generally, we’ll pay attention to any area where technology can make the world much better.

Energy.  There is a remarkable correlation between the cost of energy and quality of life.  Throughout history, when the cost of energy has come down a lot (for example, with the steam engine) the quality of life goes up a lot.

Cheap energy would do a huge amount to reduce poverty.  New energy sources could also help the environment, the economy, reduce war, ensure a stable future, make food and water more abundant, and much more.

We believe economics will dominate—new sources must be cheaper than old ones, without subsidies, and be able to scale to global demand.

Nuclear energy can hit the bid, and possibly so can renewables.  But pricing is the first order question.

In addition to generation, we’re also interested in energy storage and transmission.  10x better batteries would enable great new things, as would the ability to easily move energy around. 

AI. Relative to the potential impact, it doesn’t seem like enough smart people are working on this.

A lot of smart people talk about AI with a combination of awe and fear, both for good reasons.  But it feels like it could be one of the dividing lines in the history of technology, where before and after look totally different.

Robotics. Robots will be a major way we get things done in the physical world.  Our definition is pretty broad—for example, we count a self-driving car as a robot.  Robots are how we’ll likely explore space and maybe even the human body.

Biotech. It’s still early, but it seems like we’re finally making real progress hacking biology.  There are so many directions this can go—fighting disease, slowing aging, merging humans and computers, downloading memories, genetic programming, etc.   We are certain that this is going to be a surprising, powerful and controversial field over the next several decades—it feels a little bit like microcomputers in the 1970s. 

Healthcare. Healthcare in the United States is badly broken.  We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable.

We’re interested in ways to make healthcare better for less money, not in companies that are able to exploit the system by overcharging.  We’re especially interested in preventative healthcare, as this is probably the highest-leverage way to improve health.  Sensors and data are interesting in lots of different areas, but especially for healthcare.

Food and water. At some point, we are going to have problems with food and water availability.  Technology can almost certainly improve this.  Great innovations are possible—we will need another advancement on the scale of what Norman Borlaug did. 

Education. If we can fix education, we can eventually do everything else on this list.  The first attempts to use technology to fix education have focused on using the Internet to distribute traditional content to a wider audience.  This is good, but the Internet is a fundamentally different medium and capable of much more.

Solutions that combine the mass scale of technology with one-on-one in-person interaction are particularly interesting to us.

This may not require a “breakthrough technology” in the classical sense, but at a minimum it will require very new ways of doing things. 

Internet Infrastructure.  We can’t imagine life without the Internet.  We need to be sure it keeps working—this includes everything from security to free and open communication to infrastructure.  The Internet is a transformative power, and we’re particularly interested in applications that transform the big underpinnings of society (bitcoin is a great example!).  The Internet lets people around the world coordinate action—there are almost certainly important businesses to be built around this concept.

Of particular interest to us are ways to use the Internet to fix government—for example, crowdfunding social services.

An important trend is the API-ification of everything.  As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful. 

Levers.  We’re interested in technology that multiplies the efforts and productivity of individuals.  Robots are a great example, but this also includes areas like new programming languages, powered exoskeletons, augmented reality, etc.

Science.  Science seems broken.  The current funding models are broken and favor political skill over scientific genius.  We need new business models for basic research.  There are a lot of areas where scientific developments can have huge commercial applications—materials, neuroscience, climate engineering, and cheaper/better ways to get to space, just to name a few—and we’d love to figure out a way for it to happen.  Bell Labs worked a long time ago but would probably not work in today’s world.

Transportation and housing.  About half of all energy is used on transportation, and people spend a huge amount of time unhappily commuting.  Face-to-face interaction is still really important; people still need to move around.  And housing continues to get more expensive, partially due to difficulties in transportation.  We’re interested in better ways for people to live somewhere nice, work together, and have easier commutes.

As a side note, you shouldn’t start a company just because it’s on this list.  Our hope is that someone already working on a company in one of these areas that might not have otherwise applied to YC will now consider it.  The great majority of the startups we fund will continue to be the sort of Internet and mobile companies we’ve funded in the past, so if that’s what you wanted to do before this post, keep doing it.  Traditional-looking startups like Google and Facebook are obviously as important as any company one could imagine, and clearly are breakthrough technologies. 

[1] To be clear, we are not interested in funding patent trolls.  We only want to fund businesses that actually solve problems and create value. 

[2] Related to long time horizons, if a company needs to raise a billion dollars of funding over the course of its life, that doesn’t scare us—in fact, that’s a plus.

Nearly 5 years ago, Paul Graham first proposed the founder visa.  There has been a lot of discussion since, but nothing has happened. 

Maybe he was too ambitious in asking for 10,000 startup visas per year.  So here is a proposal for the US government: please let Y Combinator help allocate up to 100 visas to founders per year.  We’ll continue to take applications for funding from around the world, and work with whatever process you’d like—we just need to be able to get the founders visas quickly (None of the current paths works well enough for this, but a slight reworking of the O1 visa around criteria and timing could be sufficient.).  If the test works with us, you could expand it to other investment firms.  We’re happy to be the beta tester, and we’re confident we’ll prove that it’s a good idea.

100 visas a year is nothing.  But 50 new startups a year could be a huge deal. Many will fail, of course, but one could be the next Google, Facebook, Airbnb, or Dropbox. Though this is almost an immeasurably small number of visas, it could have a measurably large effect on the number of jobs created in the United States.

Startups are what the US is the best in the world at.  We figure out new businesses faster than anyone else.  It would be disastrous if that stopped being the case.

If founders from elsewhere want to pay taxes and create jobs in the US, we should let them.  Other countries are already encouraging this.  If you believe that intelligence and determination are evenly distributed, less than 5% of the best founders are born in the US.  But it’d be great if many of them started their companies here.

This is just a start. We are also in need of broad-based immigration reform, and I believe more immigrants will help our country.  But I also understand that the founder visa got tangled up with full-scale immigration reform, which may take a long time.  This is an easy way to have an immediate effect, and it’s good to move the ball down the field with small, incremental experiments.

Let us show you what we can do with 100 visas.  This will be measurable, and in 5 years, we can tell you exactly how many jobs get created.

There’s a lot written about what you should do when you raise money, but there hasn’t been as much written about the common mistakes founders make. Here is a list of mistakes I often see: 

Yesterday at lunch a friend asked me what tech trend he should pay attention to but was probably ignoring.

For most startups in the bay area, the engineer crunch is a bigger problem than the Series A crunch (this somewhat applies to designers as well, but most startups need far more developers than designers). The difference in difficulty between hiring developers and hiring everyone else is remarkable--I frequently hear startups say that for a non-engineering position they can find multiple great candidates without really looking but can't find a single great candidate for an engineering role no matter how hard they look. 

I, like everyone else in Silicon Valley, downloaded Secret last week.  It's incredibly well done, certainly the best yet of any of the gossip/anonymous apps.

Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they’ll be able to create more wealth than they can today.  Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people.  This disparity has probably been growing since the beginning of technology, in the broadest sense of the word.

Technology makes wealth inequality worse by giving people leverage and compounding differences in ability and amount of work.  It also often replaces human jobs with machines.  A long time ago, differences in ability and work ethic had a linear effect on wealth; now it’s exponential. [1] Technology leads to increasing wealth inequality for lots of other reasons, too—for example, it makes it much easier to reach large audiences all at once, and a great product can be sold immediately worldwide instead of in just one area.

Without intervention, technology will probably lead to an untenable disparity—so we probably need some amount of intervention.  Technology also increases the total wealth in a way that mostly benefits everyone, but at some point the disparity just feels so unfair it doesn’t matter.

And critically, without a reasonable baseline of access to wealth, there can be no such thing as equality of opportunity.

Wealth inequality today in the United States is extreme and growing, and we talk about it a lot when someone throws a brick through the window of a Google bus.  Lots of smart people have already written about this, but here are two images to quickly show what the skew looks like: