Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A website with 12 questions
Opening the Valley
Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, along with the other original founders, including Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris, saw that lots of really smart people never get access to Silicon Valley. In the past you had to go to the right schools and know the right people, or come to the Valley and try to get invited to the right parties. There was a social network you had to crack.
YC has a word for that whole scene: scenesters. Its replacement was an application, and today YC has 16 equal partners, all of whom went through YC and had successful outcomes.
Startup School
Startup School brought 7,000 people to San Francisco, the majority of them for the very first time, a birthright for tech. Where you are from and who you are does not matter. What matters is your ideas and whether you can execute.
The Value of Community
The community has its own value. At a TechCrunch event everyone says they are killing it, while a founder on the day the best customer leaves or the best engineer quits has no one to call.
How did the first YC batch run?
Y Combinator held its first batch in the summer of 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eight startups took part, and Reddit was among them. Each startup received a small investment plus weekly dinners and advice from the founders. A second batch ran in Silicon Valley that winter, and the program was based in the Valley after that.
How did Paul Graham become an investor?
Graham co-founded Viaweb in 1995, an early program that let merchants build online stores. Yahoo bought it in 1998 for about $49 million in stock, and it became Yahoo Store. In March 2005, he gave a talk at Harvard that became the essay How to Start a Startup. Y Combinator launched later that year.
More from The a16z Show
