What Y Combinator looks for in a founder

I'm Jessica Livingston and I'm one of the founders of Y Combinator Y Combinator funds startups in batches twice a year in Silicon Valley we fund give them very small amounts of money at the average is $17,000 we have them move here from around the world and we work with them very closely over the course of three months at the end of which is demo day when the startups present to investors and hopefully go on to get more funding first and foremost the co-founder relationship is extremely important one of the biggest reasons our startups fail is because the founders don't get along and they just you know dot the company does almost before it even got started so the co-founders relationship is important second is have the founders built something before I'm not saying they need to do a start-up but have they created some cool thing that they use you know that can they program well do they just build things for the sake of building them to see if if they can do it because that's one of the signs of a of a successful founder it's like they pursue these ideas not because they want to start a startup because they want to solve perhaps one of their own needs or they just want to see if something can work another quality that I think is important is kind of being flexible minded or open-minded I'm not saying you shouldn't have a you know vision for for your idea or your product but you need to be open to changes and when we talk to founders in an interview you can kind of get a sense for are these guys totally stubborn and unwilling to think about other possibilities related to this idea or you know if you if you bring up an idea they'll say well we've already explored that and here's what we found like so having sort of an open mind is an important quality you know I always say that the most important quality in any founder is being determined and that is probably the toughest quality to judge in a 10 minute long interview you know how determined is someone is you can't tell until you see it but you can you can sometimes get a sense for different things I mean when I meet people who have you know flown from you know Prague to interview I think you know that in itself is sort of determined to get all the way over here and deal with all the visa stuff so we definitely are looking for a level of determination but I'd say that's the hardest one to see in the interviews those people that we fund are programmers and we used to be pretty strict about that because we mean you kind of have to ever have someone building the product to implement the vision if we just don't believe that it works to have you know business person say here's here's what I'm thinking now go build it so there's always been at least one programmer on a founding team and now we like to do experiments with founders we're always interested in what happens if if you do this or what happens if you do that and so we've definitely funded teams that only have one programmer and they're two business people and in some cases that's totally fun this may be the idea involves you know enterprise sales which that would totally make sense so we're always kind of experimenting with things along along the lines of the founding teams a lot of people have the wrong idea of Y Combinator and I kind of think this is fostered by the trust that they say we only invest in young programmers you know right out of college and that's just not true at all we have a lot of people in their 30s who have kids and mortgages and a lot of people who are doing their second startup a lot of people who have maybe already even taken funding for their startup and still coming new Y Combinator we think we can help all different types of people and so so that's an important thing like this summer up to 63 startups there are all kinds of people

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Length: 4min 33sec (273 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2011