Program
The program consists of weekly dinners where guests come to speak to the founders. The dinners last for the duration of the three month program, but all founders have the lifelong ability to book office hours with the Y Combinator venture partners.
Compared to other startup funds, Y Combinator itself provides very little money ($14,000 for startups with 1 founder, $17,000 for startups with 2 founders, and $20,000 for those with 3 or more). Prior to the Winter 2013 class, Yuri Milner and SV Angel offered every Y Combinator company a $150,000 convertible note investment through the Start Fund. Starting with the Winter 2013 the Start Fund has been replaced by "YC VC", a similarly structured $80k from Andreesen Horowitz, Yuri Milner and others. This reflects co-founder Paul Graham's theory that between free software, dynamic languages, the web, and Moore's Law, the cost of founding an information technology startup has greatly decreased. Wired has called Y Combinator a "boot camp for startups" and "the most prestigious program for budding digital entrepreneurs".
The firm is named after a construct in the theory of functional programming called the "Y Combinator".
Paul Graham has said that a good growth rate (growth in revenue or number of active users) during Y Combinator is 5-7% a week, although in exceptional cases this number can be as high as 10%.
The average valuation of Y Combinator-backed companies, according to co-founder Paul Graham, is $45.2 million.
Read more about this topic: Y Combinator (company)
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