27:21Jessica Livingston Shares 9 Things She Learned From Founding YC
From Y Combinator · Published Jul 22, 2018 · Watch on YouTube
TL;DR
Jessica Livingston, cofounder of Y Combinator, recounts her personal journey from a mediocre student with no conventional predictors of success to building YC, emphasizing that her unlikely qualities—social radar, event planning, empathy, straight-shooting, and lack of drive for money or fame—were critical to YC’s success.
Key insights
- Y Combinator was founded in 2005 as an experiment to learn how to angel invest by funding a batch of startups all at once; the batch model proved powerful for both founders (colleagues during a lonely
- Livingston’s role as the only nontechnical cofounder included handling all legal setup, event planning, banking, weekly dinners, and delivering air conditioners—tasks the technical cofounders were not
- She used her “social radar” to judge applicants on qualities her cofounders couldn’t see: earnestness, determination, flexibility, and particularly the cofounder relationship.
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