Bookface

Bookface is the platform founders use to connect to one another—imagine a combination of Facebook, Quora, and LinkedIn. Each founder has a profile and can tag themselves as an expert in any topic. If you have a question, need an introduction, or want to poll for knowledge, you can post the request to the forum on Bookface. The knowledge base of the YC community is both broad and deep—the community includes founders who are the world's foremost experts in everything from security to community building to nuclear energy.

Batch Kickoff

In the first few weeks of the batch we host a 3-day, in-person kickoff. The kickoff gives founders the opportunity to get to know each other, their group partners, and the YC team.

Alumni Talks

Every week, we invite an eminent person from the startup world to speak. Most speakers are successful startup founders — the founders of Airbnb, Stripe, Doordash and Ginkgo Bioworks often come back to tell the inside story of what happened in the early days of their startups. Talks are strictly off the record to encourage candor, because the inside story of most startups is more colorful than the one presented later to the public.

Public Launches

Once a startup has something built that's ready to launch, we help founders figure out how to present it to users and the press. We prepare founders for launches on community sites like Product Hunt and Hacker News, and for their first press pitches and interviews.

First Customers

B2B and consumer companies often get their first 40-50 paying customers from the YC community. With that, you not only get first customers, you get the smartest early product feedback possible.

Weekly Meetups

Throughout the batch, we host weekly meetups in San Francisco. These events often feature special guests like the founders of YC and successful YC founders.

Demo Day

On Demo Day, the latest batch of Y Combinator-funded founders present their companies to an audience of specially selected investors and press. We doubt there's another occasion when such a large percentage of the top startup investors have their attention focused on the same thing.

In the weeks following Demo Day we keep in close touch with the startups as they negotiate the fundraising maze, and help them decipher the real messages in investors' sometimes deliberately ambiguous responses. Often we talk to the investors ourselves, to find out what they're really thinking about a particular startup. Because YC-funded startups are a known quantity to investors and get introduced to enough of them to create serious price competition, companies tend to get higher valuations than they might otherwise.