Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator

**Jessica Livingston** (0:00)
Carolynn, I'm really excited. It has taken a couple years, but we have Paul Graham back on the show for part two.

**Carolynn Levy** (0:09)
Part two, yay, hey Paul.

**Paul Graham** (0:11)
Here I am.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:12)
You'd think it would have been easier for me since I'm your wife, but here we are.

**Paul Graham** (0:17)
The Shoemaker's Children.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:19)
The Shoemaker's Children, exactly.

**Carolynn Levy** (0:20)
Oh, I say that all the time. I say that all the time about YC, how shoeless, we're always shoeless.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:29)
So we had a great conversation the last time, and we kind of had left off, we had talked a lot about the history of Y Combinator, and we talked a little bit about what you had been up to after Y Combinator, but we didn't get into the growth of Y Combinator and what happened once we had, you know, successfully, once it had gotten airborne, what happened? We had eight startups in that very first batch. And we always say we grew it organically, but let's talk about how we grew it.

**Paul Graham** (1:00)
Well, we would just have an application deadline, and people would apply, and more and more people applied. We never did anything all that consciously to get more people to apply, right? I mean, we denounced there was going to be an application deadline. We would do startup school every year, and I think that probably caused some people to apply. But other than that, we didn't have any sort of conscious effort at marketing. Oh, and I would write essays, and people would read the essays, and I would have this link, interested in starting a startup, apply to Y Combinator, right? So that probably got more people to apply, but there was never any deliberate plan to grow it.
We would just get more applications each time.

**Carolynn Levy** (1:42)
How much overlap with Hacker News was there? Because I have to imagine, well, I know for a fact actually that Hacker News was a huge source of applicants.

**Paul Graham** (1:50)
Hacker News, I think I started it in like 2007 So for the first couple of years, it wasn't a factor.

**Carolynn Levy** (1:58)
Oh, okay, yeah.

**Jessica Livingston** (1:59)
And in fact, I think when we were first getting going, there was very little press, but then we were in the New York Times and that kind of got us out there.

**Paul Graham** (2:10)
And you know, honestly, the only kind of it, for something like YC, what is it something people don't realize? For something like YC, the only kind of out there that you care about is whether potential applicants know about you. Do 22-year-old programmers know about you? And so if you get an article about you in the New York Times, and 22-year-old programmers aren't reading the New York Times, it might seem to you, you've gotten a lot of publicity, but actually it didn't really help much. I think founders talk to, I think applicants would talk to one another. I think that was why we grew.

**Carolynn Levy** (2:46)
Did that New York Times article have a theme or a thesis other than just like check out this new thing? Like I don't, I probably read the article at some point, but I don't remember it.

**Jessica Livingston** (2:55)
A hatchery for startups.

**Paul Graham** (2:58)
Yeah, it was good actually. It described YC as this new phenomenon in the investment world, which at that point it was.
So that was actually a pretty useful sort of good historical article.

**Jessica Livingston** (3:12)
And kudos to Jenny Eight-Lee for getting it. No one else did.

**Paul Graham** (3:16)
She had claimed to understand early on what was going on.

**Carolynn Levy** (3:19)
You were talking about how that's not the right demographic, right? Because you want 22 year old programmers to know about YC, but we may talk about this a little bit later, but we also had the Tiger Mom problem, remember, when Adora actually was the first person to explain this, I think, to me in an articulate way. Like you also need the parents to know about it. So maybe the Times article helped.

**Paul Graham** (3:42)
Parents could read the New York Times.

**Carolynn Levy** (3:44)
Exactly. That was my point. Yeah.

**Paul Graham** (3:46)
You know, and in fact, part early on, this is probably not true so much now because now startups are a more accepted thing to do. But back then in 2005, parents would freak out at the idea that their kids would leave school and like not get a job. It would seem like, it wouldn't seem like they were founders. It would merely seem like they were unemployed. And so once YC started to have a big brand, then the founders could say, look, Mom, I'm not just working on my loser startup. I got into YC. There's this well-known thing that I got into. I think it helped a lot back in the day.