#85 - YC Partner AMA at the Female Founders Conference

**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 an AMA with YC Partners. It was recorded live at our Female Founders Conference in New York.
The YC Partners on the panel were Kat Manalac, Kirsty Nathoo, Adora Cheung, Holly Liu, Jessica Livingston, and Carolynn Levy. And this panel was hosted by Sharon Pope, head of marketing programs at YC. We're also posting the other talks from the Female Founders Conference today, and you can see those at blog.ycombinator.com. And if you'd like to learn more about the Female Founders Conference, head on over to femalefoundersconference.org.
All right, here we go.

**Sharon Pope** (0:37)
Hello, everyone. My name is Sharon Pope. I'm the head of marketing programs at Y Combinator, and it's my pleasure to welcome back to the stage YCE's partners coming up, Kat Manalac, Kirsty, Nathoo, Adora, Holly, Jessica and Carolynn. I'm going to stand over here. This microphone. Oh, this one works now. I'm going to stand.
All right, so just as a quick reminder as I unlock my phone, please submit your questions at slido.com, slido.com and the event code is FFC. So you can also upvote questions. So if you want to kind of try to prioritize what questions get asked, these are your questions. This is your time to ask. Okay, so first question. Will YCE ever open a New York City office?
Carolyn, I'll send that one to you.

**Carolynn Levy** (1:40)
Thank you. You know what I think? I think that we never say never at Y Combinator. And as somebody mentioned earlier, I can't remember, maybe it was Kat, we experiment a lot.
So it could be that in our future we have an experimental NYC outpost or maybe in a different city. But I think that we like to try things and see what works. And if it doesn't work, we don't do it again. But it's always worth a try.

**Jessica Livingston** (2:06)
Please, though, don't start any rumors or get your hopes up.
The point is we never say never. There are no plans.

**Carolynn Levy** (2:13)
That's true. There are no immediate plans to do that. So yeah, that's... But yeah.
Sorry. There are no plans.

**Kat Manalac** (2:23)
One thing I'll add to that is that I meet a lot of founders all over the world. And at this point in time, I still think it's helpful for any founder from anywhere to spend three months in the Bay Area and get to build that network. There's so many investors there, so many other founders, and then you can stay there for that amount of time. And then theoretically, if New York is where your customers are, move back to New York. But at this point, it is still so much easier to raise and build that network there. So even spending a short amount of time, I think, still helps.

**Sharon Pope** (2:56)
All right. And speaking of building your network, one popular question is... I think a few people have talked about finding people who are 10x people, right? So those people who you hire and the people you surround yourselves with that are just over the top, really great mentors and peers. So how do you go about building that network? How do you find that? And how did you find the ones in your lives?
I will throw that one to Jessica.

**Jessica Livingston** (3:24)
How do you surround yourself? How do you...

**Sharon Pope** (3:26)
How do you find those kind of excellent people that will help push you forward?

**Jessica Livingston** (3:31)
I mean, I think...
I can think back to what we did 13 years ago, because by the way, we didn't know anyone in Silicon Valley, and we had to meet people and grow our network. And I think if you're working on something interesting, then people who are really good will themselves be interested in it. And if you sort of genuinely want to talk to people and get advice, I mean, most people in Silicon Valley are pretty open to it. But I think just working on something interesting and being insightful about what you're working on makes for fascinating sort of conversation, and people like that.

**Sharon Pope** (4:11)
Yeah. What about Holly? Maybe you could answer also when it comes to building a company as a founder.

**Holly Liu** (4:16)
Well, I'll throw out a fun story about a different YC founder, Eric Mikakowsky, he was the founder of Pebble. And he came from Canada, and most people don't obviously have a network in Silicon Valley, and that's why they join YC, and that's why you should join YC. But he came down and he was working on basically trying to fit an entire computer processor in this little tiny little form factor.