Jessica Livingston+

Find Your People

Thank you to Bucknell University for inviting me to be this year's commencement speaker. And congratulations to the Class of 2025! Watch the speech on YouTube. Thirty-two years ago I was sitting where you are now. At least, I assume I was. I can't really remember anything about my own graduation. I was too hung over. The main thing I remember from that time in my life is that I had no plan. I had a degree in English, no job, and no idea what I even wanted to do. I would have liked to work hard on something I cared about. But I didn't have anything I cared about, and it took me a decade to find

Think Different. Think Users.

This post is from my talk at Y Combinator's Aspiring Founders Forum. There was a famous Apple ad campaign in the late 90s with the slogan "Think Different." This is something you’re going to have to do as a startup founder. It would be almost impossible to create a successful startup just by doing what everyone else has been doing. It's hard to think differently, which is why it's so rarely done. There's a lot of social pressure not to. People will dismiss your idea or even ridicule it. At some point you'll probably have to fight this headwind. At some point you'll have to do something that se

Startups: The Very Beginning

This was the talk I gave at Y Combinator's Future Founders Conference for women. I've given a lot of advice to startups over the past 15 years, but today I'm going to focus on just the advice that matters in the earliest stages. I'm going to start by talking about cofounders, because they are really the foundation of any startup. You need two things in the founding team that you’d need in any foundation of a building. The founders collectively need certain skills, just as the foundation of a building has to cover a certain space. But you also have to hold together the way the foundation of a b

Why I Started the Summer Hackers Program

Last month I got an email from a friend’s daughter asking me for advice about breaking into the startup world. My advice to her was to learn to program. I'm not sure that's what she wanted to hear, but that would be my advice to any young person interested in startups—unless they were planning to do biotech or something else that can be built without programming. Through my work at Y Combinator, I’ve observed a lot of patterns among early stage startups. With female founders, I’ve seen a lot of cases where the woman is an ass-kicking domain expert in some field and has a clever idea but she’s

Women: Learn to Program this Summer

As an investor, I've found that one of the reasons there are fewer female startup founders than male ones is that there are fewer female programmers. So this summer I'm trying an experiment to see if I can help change that. I'm going to give 40 women $9000 stipends to cover their living expenses while they take Lambda School's programming course. Lambda School has created a 15-week program designed to fit during the summer break and have generously agreed to cover these 40 students' $12,000 tuition. We’re calling it the “Summer Hackers Program.” Lambda School is an extremely intense online pro

Grow the Puzzle Around You

In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley regarded us as irrelevant. Y Combinator began the same way as most other startups: with a hypothesis about something we thought people wanted. It turned out they did want it, and we grew and grew. Now we've funded 1867 startups with a total value of over $100 billion. So having myself been through the type of startup journey that many of you are hoping to, I wanted to tell you my own story. If you only

Think about Equity

When I was younger I thought the way to get money was by working for a salary. If you wanted to get a lot of money, you did it by getting a high salary. That’s still the way most people make money, and probably even the way most people make a lot of money. But there’s another way to make money that I didn't know about when I was young, and that's becoming increasingly common. It's called equity. Equity is especially common as a way to make large amounts of money. A lot of people who get rich these days do it via equity, not salary. I usually write for an audience of potential or actual startup

What's Different about "Unicorns"

This is the talk I gave at the Female Founders Conference 2017. Last year I spoke about all the problems that can arise in a startup and how to avoid them. And to be honest, I think last year's talk is the best general startup advice I could give you. So if you haven't read it before, please do. And it would be worth re-reading even if you have, because a lot of these problems are the kind that get you even when you think you're already watching out for them. Last year, I ended by saying that I wanted there to be more women founders of the big winners, of the so-called unicorns. These are the

Y Combinator When No One Cared

Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way back in the early days in 2005. It also reminded me that no reporters ever responded to my email. From: Jessica Livingston ...We’ve recently kicked off the Summer Founders Program, a new program that lets people start startups as a summer job. [Background: http://ycombinator.com/sfp.html] We’re testing a theory that technology is enabling a new model to evolve where founders of startups can be a lot y

The Sound of Silence

I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years. But I can't tell you what it was. There's too much downside in sharing any opinion that could easily be misinterpreted online. Even facts are dangerous to share if they don’t align with what people want to believe. There's a lot of concern about "fake news" lately. That is a real problem, but there's also the opposite problem: true things that aren't being said. Some of the most useful things I've learned about startups over the years are also th

Don't be Too Busy to Vote

I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t vote in the last presidential election. I was so busy with 2 small children and a fast-growing company that I could barely keep up with everyday life. I rationalized my decision to blow off voting by telling myself California would surely choose Obama anyway (it did). Why did my vote really matter? Looking back, I realize how wrong I was. California would not have chosen Obama if all of his other supporters had been as lazy and disorganized as I was. Everyone's vote matters. And in this election, especially, your vote really matters, because the stakes ar

What Makes Founders Succeed

I recently dug up my introduction to Founders at Work, which I wrote in 2006, and I was amazed how accurate it still seems: –––––– Some kind of magic happens in startups, especially at the very beginning, but the only people there to see it are the founders. The best way to understand what happens is to ask them, so that’s what I did. In the book, you’ll hear the founders’ stories in their own words. Here I want to share some of the patterns I noticed. When you’re interviewing a series of famous startup founders, you can’t help trying to see if there is some special quality they all have in co

7 Important Lessons from Airbnb's 7 Rejections

I am so happy Brian Chesky shared these rejection emails from Airbnb's early days. I am constantly reminded how most every successful startup began small and faced various types of rejection early on. Most YC startups tell us that fundraising is harder than they anticipated, even though we do a lot to prepare them for it. New startups: please remember how many times you can get turned down by investors before you finally wind up getting funded. I came up with 7 points that these rejections remind me of: 1) Fundraising is hard. You don't realize how hard until you try it. 2) Even the most succe

Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing

I published this article about a year ago on the Wall Street Journal's Accelerators forum. I think the content is still very relevant to early stage startups, so I thought I'd post it on my personal blog. The most important thing an early-stage startup should know about marketing is rather counterintuitive: that you probably shouldn’t be doing anything you’d use the term “marketing” to describe. Sales and marketing are two ends of a continuum. At the sales end your outreach is narrow and deep. At the marketing end it is broad and shallow. And for an early stage startup, narrow and deep is what

Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls

(This post is derived from a talk I gave at SV Angel's CEO Summit.) A lot has been written about the dangers that early-stage startups face. But startups face a different and equally lethal set of dangers in what we could call the mid-stage–the stage after the company has figured out what it's doing and has raised some money to go off and do it. Because of where YC sits on the funding timeline and the volume of startups we fund, there is probably no one who has watched more companies negotiate the mid-stage than us. Twice a year we accept a batch of startups (the last one had 114 companies in

My Interviews with Airbnb, Dropbox, Posterous, Reddit, Weebly and Wufoo circa 2010

Mixergy's feature today inspired me to dig up these old video interviews I did years ago with some YC founders. We talked about things like how they got started, what went wrong, and what surprised them most. I'd like to find the time to do more (and work on improving my on-camera interview style). Enjoy! Airbnb Dropbox Posterous Reddit Weebly Wufoo

The Social Radar: What I Did at Y Combinator

Culture matters for startups. For a startup to succeed, it must have a culture that reflects what it wants to achieve. This is one of my areas of expertise. I've spent the past decade focusing on Y Combinator's culture. Here I'm going to tell you what I did and what I learned. People and culture have played an important role at Y Combinator from the very beginning. And I was the one responsible for these things from the very beginning. Most people don't know this–both because I prefer to operate in the background and because culture is not as visible to the outside world as what a company does

6 Female YC Founders in Forbes' 30 Under 30 List

Congratulations to YC’s female founders recognized by Forbes Magazine in its new 30 Under 30 list: Katy Ashe - Noora Health Alexandra Cavoulacos - The Muse Katelyn Gleason - Eligible API Nancy Hua - Apptimize Joanna Huey - Casetext Olga Vidisheva - Shoptiques Cindy Wu - Experiment.com If you are interested in learning more about their startup experiences, read their stories here: http://www.femalefounderstories.com/ Inspired to start a startup or go work for one? Apply to Y Combinator’s Female Founders Conference on February 21 in San Francisco. Hurry, the deadline to apply is Monday, January

Why I Love Startup School

I realized on the way to Startup School that this was the tenth one I've emceed. We've done one every year since 2005 (plus two this year in NYC and London). It struck me throughout the day how happy I was to be participating in this magical event that, despite so many changes in Silicon Valley and the world of startups in the past decade, remains practically unchanged. The authenticity that Startup School has feels so rare to me these days. I want to bottle it up and save it. Y Combinator held the first Startup School just after the very first Summer Founders Program (as it was called then) i

What Twitter Followers Tell Us

Twitter recently allowed all its users to see data about their followers. I almost tumbled out of my chair when I discovered that mine were 19% female and 81% male. I expected 70% would be female. Y Combinator's Twitter followers are 85% male and 15% female. We asked many other prominent individuals and companies in the startup world and all their ratios were similar. I feel like this new feature is letting us measure something we could only guess at before: the gender ratio among people interested in startups. And what the numbers suggest is that it won't be enough just to encourage women who

A New Speaker Series For NYC’s Founders At Work - WSJ

blogs.wsj.com Warren said Founders at Work inspired him to host these events.

‘Surrogates’ Mini-Documentary Explores How Close The Film’s Tech Is To Real Life

via splashpage.mtv.com Featuring Trevor Blackwell's Anybots!

FaW "July Business Bestseller" at Stanford Bookstore

Guy Kawasaki was nice enough to send me this photo today. I had no idea that Founders at Work was being featured as this month's Business Bestseller. This made my day. Thanks Guy!

April Buchheit and Trevor's robot, Monte. She's brave!

Father's Day contest: Win a 1 year subscription to Picwing

I LOVE Picwing's new photo printing service: you just email photos to Picwing (from your phone or computer), and you're done; they automatically get printed and sent to your friends and family on your distribution list. I use it to keep my family back east updated on my 4 month old son-- every 2 weeks they get a new package of photos in the mail! This week Eddie & Enrique are running a Father's Day contest-- just email any photo of your dad (like mine circa 1982) to dads@picwing.com and you could win a free yearlong subscription. Details are here: http://www.picwing.com/dads_rule

The Lobby Conference party at August Capital

Thanks for a fun time David!

Sama and his brother Max at the Loopt party.

Sent from my iPhone

Remnants of the traditional "last dinner" pinata

Since winter 2006, the Wufoos have managed to sneak in a pinata to every last dinner of each funding cycle. They know it maddens me :) I'd forgotten I'd taken this silly picture of Trevor with the remains of Darth Vader.

The New Internet Start-Up Boom: Get Rich Slow

YC and Airbnb are featured in last week's Time. Paul is on the cover (top left photo)!

Interview: Y Combinator Founder Jessica Livingston : The Next Women

via thenextwomen.com