#81 - Announcing Work at a Startup

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Jared Friedman and Matt Long. Jared's a partner here at YC, and before that, he co-founded Scribd. And Matt's a software engineer here at YC, and before that, he co-founded Crocodoc. So today, we're talking about a project that Jared, Matt, and several other YC people have been working on. It's called Work at a Startup, and it's like a common application for engineers to apply to many YC companies at once. We're also announcing that we're hosting a Work at a Startup Expo on July 28th in Mountain View, where you'll be able to meet 35 of those YC companies. You can learn more and apply to attend at workatastartup.com/expo.
All right, here we go.
All right, guys, so we are here today to talk about Work at a Startup. Let's really quickly do some introductions. So Jared, why don't you start?

**Jared Friedman** (0:52)
Hey, I'm Jared. I'm a partner here at YC.
The way I got into YC was I did a YC company in one of the earliest batches. It was a company called Scribd. And then I joined YC three years ago. I was a partner.

**Craig Cannon** (1:04)
Matt?

**Matt Long** (1:05)
Hey, I'm Matt Long.
I was a co-founder of a company that went through Y Combinator back in winter 2010 called Crocodoc. And now I'm a software engineer here at YC. I've been here for a little under a year now.

**Craig Cannon** (1:19)
Cool. And you guys, in addition to a few other people at YC, have been working on a product called Work at a Startup.
So Matt, could you describe what it is?

**Matt Long** (1:27)
Yeah, so Work at a Startup is a common application for engineers that are interested in working at a startup and in particular a YC company. They'll go through a lot of kind of typical biographical questions about themselves and their experience and background. And then they're able to kind of choose their preferences for what sort of company and role they're looking for. We make all this information available to the founders of all of our YC companies who can then kind of browse and search through them to find what they're looking for, kind of indicate their interest and start conversations with them.
That'll hopefully lead to some hires.

**Craig Cannon** (2:05)
And yeah, so why make this? Why make this instead of just relying on the existing infrastructure out there?

**Matt Long** (2:12)
Yeah, so I guess hiring is notoriously hard amongst startups and in Silicon Valley, it's so much intense competition, the more established players in the tech industry. And sure enough, just like internal surveys we've done with founders of YC companies kind of confirm that we're overwhelmingly hiring, and in particular hiring engineers is kind of the number one problem they face following going through the YC program.
So YC decided we should take the same approach we've done with everything and try to apply software to this to help scale, find a nice scalable solution. And just another way that YC can kind of help out our portfolio companies and kind of made our own kind of hiring portal that's a little bit kind of particular to the way and the types of companies that go through YC.

**Craig Cannon** (3:05)
And so Jared, you have experience with this directly, having hired quite a bit at Scribd before, and you were also part of the Work at a Startup before it was known as Work at a Startup Conference in 2010, right?

**Jared Friedman** (3:18)
Yeah, so it's actually not a new idea per se for YC to try to help its companies hire.
Hacker News, from the very beginning, when we first created it back in, I think, 2009, part of the goal was to help companies hire. And so it's had a job section from day one. And when I was at my startup, I used the Hacker News job section a lot, and it was incredibly helpful for hiring, I think. Probably half the engineering team that we hired came through Hacker News, and that's not atypical for YC companies. So we have sort of a long history of this.
We have also long had an internal forum for YC founders where they share candidates that aren't right for them but could be great for somebody else. And that's also worked extremely well. And so it was, the origins of this project were kind of like we saw that this was working and that there was tremendous demand for it and everybody wanted us to do more. And so the Work at a Startup product is trying to build just a better, more efficient, more sophisticated version of the Hacker News jobs board and the internal forum that we've had for a long time.