connect the dot

Organization

Y Combinator

Startup investment firm founded in March 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell; it funds startups in batches.

9 links, 9 backed by primary records

Play the story Explore connections

Dates
Mar 2005 –
Also known as
YC
Over time
  1. Active Mar 2005 –
  2. people who worked here Sam Altman (part-time partner) 2011–2014
  3. headed by Sam Altman (president) 2014–2019

Connections 9

founded

  • YC Research Oct 2015 Primary record 1

    Announced by Sam Altman, then YC's president, as a non-profit research lab.

founded by

headed by

  • Sam Altman 2014–2019 president Primary record 56

    Paul Graham announced the choice on 21 February 2014; he wrote that he and Jessica Livingston thought Altman best suited to grow YC, and that he had started trying to recruit him in 2012.

people who worked here

  • Sam Altman 2011–2014 part-time partner Primary record 78

invested in

  • Loopt 2005 seed funding in its first batch (summer 2005) Primary record 910

    Loopt was in the first group of eight startups Y Combinator funded, in summer 2005, at $6,000 per founder.

  • Scale AI 2016 Summer 2016 batch Primary record 11121314

    Also took part in the 2018 Series B as an existing investor. Scale’s 2018 release describes the May 2017 Series A as led by Accel and Y Combinator.

Timeline 10 dates
  1. 2005 Y Combinator invested in Loopt
  2. Mar 2005 – Y Combinator
  3. Mar 2005 Jessica Livingston founded Y Combinator
  4. Mar 2005 Paul Graham founded Y Combinator
  5. Mar 2005 Robert Tappan Morris founded Y Combinator
  6. Mar 2005 Trevor Blackwell founded Y Combinator
  7. 2011–2014 Sam Altman worked at Y Combinator
  8. 2014–2019 Sam Altman head of Y Combinator
  9. Oct 2015 Y Combinator founded YC Research
  10. 2016 Y Combinator invested in Scale AI
Proof 14 sources
  1. YC Research, Y Combinator, 7 Oct 2015. Primary record
    So we’re starting a new research lab, which we’re calling YC Research, to work on some of these areas.
  2. How Y Combinator Started, Paul Graham, Mar 2012. Primary record
    I agreed to put $100k into the new fund and Jessica agreed to quit her job to work for it. Over the next couple days I recruited Robert and Trevor, who put in another $50k each. So YC started with $200k.
  3. People (Y Combinator), Y Combinator. Primary record
    Jessica Livingston Founder, Retired
    Robert Morris Founder, Retired
    Trevor Blackwell Founder, Retired
  4. Summer Founders Program, Paul Graham, Mar 2005. Primary record
    Some friends and I have started Y Combinator, a new venture firm that specializes in funding very early stage startups.
  5. Sam Altman for President, Y Combinator, 21 Feb 2014. Primary record
    I’m delighted to announce that Sam Altman has agreed to become president of Y Combinator starting next batch.
  6. Sam Altman, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 24 Dec 2024. Scholarship & press Archived copy
    Sam Altman (born April 22, 1985, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American entrepreneur who was president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019 and chief executive officer (CEO) of the artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI beginning in 2019.
  7. Sam Altman Taking Over As President Of Y Combinator, Replacing Paul Graham At The Helm, TechCrunch, 21 Feb 2014. Scholarship & press
    Taking over as Y Combinator’s president is Sam Altman, the entrepreneur who was part of the first YC startup class in 2005 and has worked as a part-time YC partner since 2011.
  8. Welcome Sam, Garry, Emmett, and Justin, Y Combinator, 13 Jun 2011. Primary record
    We’ve recruited four YC alumni to be part time partners: Loopt founder Sam Altman, Posterous founder Garry Tan, and Justin.tv founders Emmett Shear and Justin Kan.
  9. Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny, The New Yorker, 3 Oct 2016. Scholarship & press
    The first group of eight companies—which included a mobile app, Loopt, founded by Sam Altman and two friends—got six thousand dollars per founder
  10. Loopt (Y Combinator company page), Y Combinator. Primary record
    Batch: Summer 2005
  11. Scale AI: Data-centric infrastructure to accelerate the development of AI | Y Combinator, Y Combinator. Primary record
    Summer 2016
    Batch: Summer 2016
  12. How The 22-Year-Old Founder Of Scale AI Built A Billion-Dollar Business, Forbes, 22 Dec 2019. Scholarship & press
    drop out of MIT, and start Scale AI after accepting an initial investment from YCombinator
  13. Scale, whose army of humans annotate raw data to train self-driving and other AI systems, nabs $18M, TechCrunch, 7 Aug 2018. Scholarship & press
    This latest funding round was led by Index, with existing investors Accel and Y Combinator (where Scale was incubated), also participated in this Series B
  14. Scale Announces $18 Million in Series B Funding Led by Index Ventures, Index Ventures, 7 Aug 2018. Primary record
    including a $4.5 million Series A in May 2017 led by Accel and Y Combinator.
Page history 2 changes
  1. Add Alexandr Wang and Scale AIAlibek4938021
  2. connect-the-dot: sourced knowledge graph engine, site and contentAlibeka7fa236

Edit this page: content/entities/org/y-/y-combinator.md