#18 - Q&A with YC Partners at the Female Founders Conference

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is a Q&A with YC Partners, and it was recorded at our fourth annual Female Founders Conference, which took place here in San Francisco this June.
Okay, here we go.

**Kat Manalac** (0:12)
So I'm really excited to introduce you to all the, not all, but many of the incredible women that I get to work with every day. These are the partners of Y Combinator. And so, yeah.
So I would love for, we're going to be answering some of the questions that you sent us. And so I'd love for each of you to introduce yourselves and then we'll just jump in.

**Kirsty Nathoo** (0:37)
Okay, shall I start? Okay. Hi again, everyone.
I'm Kirsty Nathoo. I'm the CFO here at Y Combinator and I've been involved with YC now since 2010 So I've seen it go through a lot of changes.

**Carolynn Levy** (0:52)
I'm Carolynn Levy. I'm partner and general counsel at Y Combinator and I've been here for about five years.

**Anu Hariharan** (0:59)
Hi everyone. I'm Anu Hariharan. I'm a partner at Y Combinator's Continuity Fund. I joined YC last year.
The Continuity Fund is fairly new. We invest primarily in growth stage companies and help with company building at scale.

**Adora Cheung** (1:15)
Hi, my name is Adora Cheung. I have, I'm a partner at YC, one of the group partners, meaning I work directly with the startups.
I've been here for about a year now, a little over a year. And I went through YC myself in 2010, I guess when Kirsty started. Yeah.

**Jessica Livingston** (1:32)
I'm Jessica Livingston. I'm a co-founder of YC.

**Kat Manalac** (1:36)
And I'm Kat, and I've been at YC for about four years now. And started out as the first director of outreach, so meant working with a lot of potential applicants like you guys.
All right, let's just dive into the questions. So, how much industry experience do you typically recommend founders have?

**Jessica Livingston** (1:54)
Zero.

**Carolynn Levy** (1:55)
Yeah.
Well, no, actually, I think for biotech, it's pretty important that the founder have industry experience. But not true for other.

**Jessica Livingston** (2:05)
Well, also, it's how do you interpret that question? Because in my talk earlier, I said that ideas grow organically out of founders' lives. And usually, they're working in some given industry, and they're an expert in it. And they say, gosh, this aspect is totally broken.
I know how to fix it. And so we love funding people with domain expertise, I guess.

**Adora Cheung** (2:28)
Yeah. Usually, these people have been in the industry for just a little bit, not too long, so that they are so entrenched in it that they don't know how to fix it or know how to build to fix it. But yeah.

**Kat Manalac** (2:42)
Which is long enough to kind of experience the problem and say, like, this is insane, I have to fix it.

**Adora Cheung** (2:46)
Right.

**Kat Manalac** (2:47)
Yeah. And so yeah, I think at YC, I've seen folks that have had zero industry experience in something that they're launching and then some folks that have had years, many years. So I guess it really just depends.
But there's no, I guess there's no simple answer to that question.

**Jessica Livingston** (3:01)
There's no simple answer. I don't think Drew Houston had a whole lot of experience in storage when he got frustrated because he'd left his talk back and he was on the bus to New York.

**Kat Manalac** (3:15)
So here's a stats question. What percentage of applications have a female co-founder or how many, what percentage of, I guess the overall population are women. So I'll take this one.
I obsess over the stats. So right now we're seeing about 13% of the founders that apply to YC are women. And so I just want to let that sink in because I want that to be closer to 50% of the population of people applying.
And then so about 22, 23% of the companies have a female founder. And there are very, very few companies that apply that are female only teams. And so I would love to see more of that as well. What is a myth about starting startups or about YC that you wish you could dispel?

**Jessica Livingston** (4:10)
I cannot answer that question. I'm going to have to write an essay on that one.

**Anu Hariharan** (4:17)
I'll probably start with that and you all can fill in. I think especially because I joined YC only a year ago and I remember after going through all the interview process, I'm super excited about having gotten the offer when I was talking to other people and what are some of the myths that I think now that I've spent a year, I can say. So one is I think it's a myth that we don't invest in non-technical founders. We do.