The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups

Number of teams that applied to Y Combinator s summer 2011 batch: 2,089Teams interviewed: 170 Minutes per interview: 10 Teams accepted and funded: 64 Months to build a viable startup: 3 Possibilities: BOUNDLESS Investment firm Y Combinator is the most sought-after home for startups in Silicon Valley. Twice a year, it funds dozens of just-founded startups and provides three months of guidance from Paul Graham, YC s impresario, and his partners, also entrepreneurs and mostly YC alumni. The list of YC-funded success stories includes Dropbox (now valued at $5 billion) and Airbnb ($1.3 billion). Receiving an offer from YC creates the opportunity of a lifetime it s like "American Idol" for budding entrepreneurs. Acclaimed journalist Randall Stross was granted unprecedented access to Y Combinator s summer 2011 batch of young companies, offering a unique inside tour of the world of software startups. Most of the founders were male programmers in their mid-twenties or younger. Over the course of the summer, they scrambled to heed Graham s seemingly simple advice: make something people want. We watch the founders work round-the-clock, developing and retooling products as diverse as a Web site that can teach anyone programming, to a Wikipedia-like site for rap lyrics, to software written by a pair of attorneys who seek to make attorneys obsolete. Founders are guided by Graham s notoriously direct form of tough-love feedback. Here, we don t fire you, he says. The market fires you. If you re sucking, I m not going to run along behind you, saying, You re sucking, you re sucking, c mon, stop sucking. Some teams would even abandon their initial idea midsummer and scramble to begin anew. The program culminated in Demo Day, when founders pitched their startup to several hundred top angel investors and venture capitalists. A lucky few attracted capital that gave their startup a valuation of multiple millions of dollars. Others went back to the drawing board. This is the definitive story of a seismic shift that s occurred in the business world, in which coding skill trumps employment experience, pairs of undergraduates confidently take on Goliaths, tiny startups working out of an apartment scale fast, and investors fall in love."

About the Author :
Randall Stross writes the Digital Domain column for "The New York Times" and is a professor of business at San Jose State University. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including "eBoys," "Planet Google," and "The Wizard of Menlo Park." He has a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University."

Review :
Y Combinator is a national treasure, a Silicon Valley seed fund that is mass-producing new startups. Randall Stross s behind-the-scenes look at YC offers a rare glimpse into what it really takes to conceive an idea and get it to market as quickly as possible. The Launch Pad is a must-read for anyone interested in the realities of modern entrepreneurship. Eric Ries, author of the "New York Times" bestseller "The Lean Startup" The Launch Pad is an intimate look at the white-hot center of the new Silicon Valley star tup ecosystem. Stross s account of the best new entrepreneurs and the exciting companies they re building at startup schools is a great read for founders and would-be founders alike. Marc Andreessen, cofounder, Andreessen Horowitz" "Y Combinator is a national treasure, a Silicon Valley seed fund that is mass-producing new startups. Randall Stross's behind-the-scenes look at YC offers a rare glimpse into what it really takes to conceive an idea and get it to market as quickly as possible. The Launch Pad is a must-read for anyone interested in the realities of modern entrepreneurship." --Eric Ries, author of the "New York Times" bestseller "The Lean Startup" "The Launch Pad is an intimate look at the white-hot center of the new Silicon Valley star tup ecosystem. Stross's account of the best new entrepreneurs and the exciting companies they're building at startup schools is a great read for founders and would-be founders alike." --Marc Andreessen, cofounder, Andreessen Horowitz