Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
316 comments
·March 11, 2025Dave_Rosenthal
knuckleheadsmif
In the mid 90s (1996?) So myself and 3 others worked for Intuit and we traveled, from Mountain View CA, to your tiny office near Harvard to look at acquiring the company. I believe Intuit made a lowball offer and eventually you sold yourselves to Yahoo for twice the price. At Intuit we did not offer you guys money for the product, it really was not that special at all, but for the people—I thought only 3 folks at the time? The product was a web store front builder (Viaweb?) I don’t think we actually talked to Paul that day but I remember Trever and the tiny ‘server’ room.
It possible we may have met you too. It was a long time ago.
Dave_Rosenthal
You were talking to a slightly earlier company--this was post Viaweb.
jimhi
Wow! I've read all the essays and thought I knew all the startups ideas he had tried by now. This is a new one.
racedude
Love this story. Thanks for sharing. I learned about YC/HN via my tools course at Purdue, and it continues to be a great resource.
alberth
"Founders at Work", written by Jessica is what got me into HN (and I was an initial lurker for quite sometime).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founders_at_Work
Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched the subsequent year (2007).
wheelinsupial
In case you’re not aware, there is a podcast by Jessica Livingston and Carolyn Levy called “The Social Radars” that interviews founders.
lobsterthief
Thanks for the recommendation; I’ll check it out!
I love that this podcast only comes every two weeks. Some (like Software Engineering Daily) are far too often so I either feel the paradox of choice or that I’m missing out.
azhenley
Downloading it now. I didn't know about it. Looks like there are a lot of big names!
hakaneskici
Such an inspiring book - I still have it by my desk :) I bought it because they covered Joel's FogBugz and 37Signal's Basecamp (I was building a competitor product back then).
sturadnidge
It’s the book that started it all for me. The Hotmail story is one of my favourites.
CSMastermind
I remember the initial PG announcement about the founder's summer program and wanting desperately to be a part of it. I wasn't at a place in my life where I ever could join YC but the tribe that's been built by everyone involved has added tremendous value to my life. I'll always be incredibly grateful that this place and YC exists.
jedberg
Happy birthday YC! YC has created a ton of value, and I can say is responsible for the major inflection point in my career. I'm forever grateful to Paul, Jessica, Robert, and Trevor for seeing the value in the reddit team before anyone else did.
Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count from incorporation :) )
Diederich
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 is always fun to look at, 18.5 years ago.
dnissley
Crazy that there was no original iphone announcement post. Would have happened between
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62
and
matsemann
1 indexed?
Edit: HN is apparently written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp.
redox99
Almost all DBs have a default starting ID of 1.
tomhoward
Indeed, though HN didn't use a database when it was first built.
eru
And Arc is (or was?) implemented in Racket, another language in the Lisp family and closely related to Scheme.
giancarlostoro
Fun there's enough posts in HN you could type your DOB (no leading zero) and find a submission for it:
btilly
There are actually enough that you can type your DOB in the format YYYYMMDD and find a submission for it!
This has been true since https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=20190615 was posted on June 15, 2019.
Arubis
It took me a moment to think through what a leading zero on a DOB meant and that it wasn't a Long Now foundation thing.
TeMPOraL
52950
What format of DOB is that? M/DD/YY?
dredmorbius
Or possibly a Julian date for a first-millennial.
null
jessekv
Huh. I upvoted it.
null
_sentient
YC changed my life, and I'll be forever grateful to PG, Jessica, and the team for taking a chance on a homeschooled, GED-wielding solo founder.
rrr_oh_man
It's really good to read those stories.
I applied twice (once alone, once with a really amazing co-founder) and it felt like applying to a large faceless corporation, both times.
Automatic rejection after 30 days with zero feedback.
Kind of sucky, to be honest.
I'd just love to hear that the idea was shit, the application was shit, that my face was ugly, or anything, really.
TechDebtDevin
Probably hard to give valuable feedback on tens of thousands of rejected applications.
whiplash451
Quick bump for The Social Radars which is an amazing podcast co-led by Jessica. A treasure trove of true startup stories.
firefax
I keep forgetting there's a front page to this website. What a cool story!
antirez
[I guess the tweet refers to YC the incubator, not the web site of news, but I want to focus on the latter]: I registered on HN a few days after it was created. The HN community was incredibly instrumental to my career, my ability to keep up with the development community, with like-minded people, and to have a voice, the times my posts and projects reached this home page. Thank you, for for all of that. Now, I see that, inevitably, as this place becomes bigger and bigger, there is no longer that strange, odd and wonderful "90s News Groups" alike quality. Despite the decline, I still find quite some value visiting this place every day.
Karrot_Kream
Agreed. HN was how I learned about tech growing up in poverty (back when I used to think Googlers all wore lab coats!) and gave me the inspiration to both study CS and pursue the career I was lucky enough to end up in. The bigger HN gets the more it has qualities I don't really like, but it's also the last text platform I consume without curation on my part. (I know dang and the mod team do a heroic job, but I do very little curation of my own here, unlike Bluesky, X, or Discord where I do a lot of things to keep my feeds/channels useful to me.)
sam0x17
I agree. For me though it was only when slashdot started to shrink that I heard about HN, so I was a bit late to the party. To be fair, I still check slashdot almost daily!
manoweb
ciao
I still use newsgroups (NNTP) and IRC everyday, hackernews is pretty good considered it's HTTP based
fsckboy
https, if we're goin oldskool
null
subless
Also, thanks to @dang for keeping the community in-line with the rules/guidelines.
junon
@dang is far and away the best community manager / moderator I've personally seen or interacted with on the internet. Nothing is ever black and white, but he makes managing that look easy. Huge respect.
eru
Dang is great!
Btw, Scott Alexander also does a pretty good job.
dang
I wish. But thanks!
raldi
My list of "greatest all time community-runners" is pretty short, and I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone I'd put ahead of you.
ignoramous
As an ultimate service to newsboards all over, dang should consider writing a book at some point distilling all his thoughts, practices, advice, lessons learnt.
johnfn
+1
jppope
nah its true, this is one of the few places left on the web thats friendly and thoughtful (most of the time at least). That is directly related to your work keeping things civil. thank you
rossant
Yes, thank you @dang. HN wouldn't be HN without you.
monkeydust
Echo this!
Somewhere in the multiverse a universe exists with HN died a horrible death because Dang made alternative life choices.
Melatonic
Hell yeah !
dangrape123
[dead]
light_triad
There's going to be a lot of "the big successes already happened" type comments about YC but I think they're wrong.
Sure all big successes are unique in time, and entrepreneurship & web tech are mainstream now. But there's still lots of industries to disrupt. What gets harder is that the level of expertise needed to disrupt an industry is now much higher. You didn't need to work in hotels to create Airbnb, or a bank to create Stripe, or deliveries to do Doordash, etc. A bunch of scrappy web founders that were hosts, or trying to sell on the internet was expert enough to get started. This may be changing in important ways, but huge successes will surely happen.
borski
When YC started, people were saying literally the same thing; the dotcom bust had already happened, and the era of big internet companies was 'dead.'
As usual, the death of entrepreneurship and startups has been greatly overstated. :)
JambalayaJimbo
Doesn’t YC still predominantly fund young men who aren’t at all industry experts in some mature field? It appears like the majority of startups I see are “AI for X” type applications.
light_triad
I think this is more a reflection of the applicant pool. It's easier to put together a team when folks are early in their careers - also if you've been in industry for some time you might know VCs and are already an 'insider' to that industry
ellis0n
The business is built on the fact that young founders have an extra 10-15 years to learn everything compared to older ones. I think this will soon change when older people start rejuvenating and extending their lives. Also, it's just a trend like TikTok and startups founded by 25-year-olds sell better. Given the startup maturation cycle of 7-10 years, the founder will be 32-35 yo and they'll need another 10 years to present a success story for the system to work
arjunaaqa
Jessica is my hero. Paul is a guiding force.
Every effort has some defect but it’s intention and effort which matters.
World would be a very different place without YC.
Thank you all !
Apocryphon
Did Stilgar write this
EGreg
Haha wow, good one
Apocryphon
Looks like the Dune show even introduces a YC:
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Ynez_Corrino
Incidentally, querying "YC Dune" on DuckDuckGo / Bing yields that link in the results, but Google does not, which seems rather troubling for the modern state of that search engine.
dowager_dan99
>> but it’s intention and effort which matters.
I think I understand what you're saying, but this is a very dangerous generality. I think the HOW matters more than the intent.
nine_k
The idea here, AFAICT, is that the right intention matters even if the implementation is lacking and imperfect. If the intention is there, the implementation will improve.
The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then the intentions would include doing an evil thing as an intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention does matter.
milesrout
Intent is the only thing that ever really matters.
0xCE0
HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the ambient and relevant view of the techland.
I love the near-non-BS nature of it. And even though the techland changes, HN itself has had very little change, so it acts somewhat safe stable ground/forum/club for observing the ever changing techland. Although I recognize there is somewhat minimal degration in comment quality (less professional pragmatic comments over the years, at least so I feel), it still trumps every other alternative there is.
So, thank you PG/HN, and of course the HN community that makes most of it.
PS. I have been read-only mode for the past ~15y (and there was nothing valuable for me to comment on anything), but now I created account and this is my first comment :)
cobbaut
> HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the ambient and relevant view of the techland.
I bet a lot of people here would say the same thing about Slashdot ten to fifteen years ago. @HN: Thanks and please don't change.
echelon
HN has outlasted Slashdot by a wide margin at this point.
IIRC, Slashdot stopped being great around the same time as the decline of the Digg era. It started to sink in quality around 2007, which gave it ten years at most of being a central part of the online tech community (1997 - 2007).
I started reading HN in 2008. It's lasted nearly twenty years as an incredible community.
Here are some graphs:
null
SLHamlet
LOL thanks for the link!
redox99
You visit every day for 15 years and never left a comment? That's kinda crazy. It makes me wonder if this is actually common and we don't realize.
hakaneskici
I'm at ~19 years - HN as daily home page since inception :)
Before HN, I used to hang out on Joel on Software and Eric's Business of Software forums; I occasionally used to post there and here but lost old accounts. If you have friends who have friends who has HN archeology skills and access, maybe I can recover my old account :)
dang
We can try to dig up your old account if you want! You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com, or if you want to "do it live", post here and we can ask for the community's help if needed.
cruffle_duffle
Oh man I used to hang out on Joel on Software as well. Good times.
mamurphy
I remember reading a stat on reddit that 10% of users upvote and 1% of users comment. So if my memory is (near) accurate, that's very common behavior.
dredmorbius
The 90-9-1 rule, which is common across many mass-participation media modalities, not just online.
miki123211
I have plenty of semi-technical friends that do this. Some of them only look at the links (e.g. via social media bots), and aren't even aware that HN has comments.
They're the kind of people who consider themselves "tech enthusiasts", they can install a nifty tool via pip if the instructions are clear enough, maybe even figure out what's wrong if there's an error, but they're definitely not programmers by any means.
Quite a few of them speak "tech English"; they can figure out a settings window or a signup form, they know enough tech vocabulary and basic grammar to mostly understand manuals, maybe with some help here or there, and can barely string an English sentence together. Ask them to define "lettuce" or "salmon" and they're lost.
gus_massa
Everyone is an expert in their own activity. If they have something insightful to say (or to ask) one trick is to write the comment in their native language and use autotranslation (double check technical words, because sometimes autotranslation picks the wrong synonym) (also check the output, because if the original has a one letter typo, sometimes it's translated to a very different word).
Another possibility is to write the comment in English inside gmail, and let suggestion gmail fix all the errors.
null
deadbabe
If you comment once on HN you are easily in the top 5% of users by comment count.
fabcore
Yes, after a decade or so of following by E-Mail newsletter, I made an account. Long live to HN!
btally
This thread made me finally make an account after at least 5+ years reading through the top 30 nearly everyday :)
romanhn
Very common. I was a daily reader of Slashdot for ten years without ever creating an account. Took me only five to create one for HN :)
pbhjpbhj
You read raw Slashdot!? You must be a connoisseur of copypasta and frosty piss.
To me that's like 'I love doughnuts, I buy one every day, but the paper bag bits do get stuck in my teeth'.
kbenson
Probably. I created my account almost 13 years ago, but I read for years before creating it. I didn't create a reddit account until 2014, or a twitter account until 2015. I was reading Slashdot in the 90's though, to give you a sense of my age and how long I've been following stuff. I'm just a very late adopter...
nniroclax
Absolutely. Some of us see (or at least I see) the level of discussion and feel it would be hard for me to say something worthwhile that sounds kinda smart. So I mostly lurk while being grateful for those who do write incredibly insightful comments.
mezi
Same here. I have been reading this site for 10 years and even though it got a bit worse, it's still the best source out there. Keep it up everyone.
simonebrunozzi
Me, too. It took you a little while to make that jump. How do you explain it?
callc
HN is the only internet community I’ve found to be largely good. Thank you to everyone for all your kind posts and comments, and intellectual discussion. Love to you all.
999900000999
It’s the only place where you can causally talk to multi millionaire startup founders and CS legends.
It’s also amazingly inclusive. There was a poster here who complained that they were effectively homeless and upset their Pixel phone would no longer hold a charge. Someone offered to send them a used laptop.
I think we thoughtfully discuss issues related to tech, even though we don’t always agree.
Freedom2
Agreed. Thank you to all for the endless curious discussion.
mempko
It's a good community. The part I struggle with is the anti-science trend I've seen here over the last 10 years.
tempaccount420
For me, it's the politics. There's a certain kind of user that keeps pushing them here, to people who don't care about them, and which are barely related to technology if even. If you point it out, they will say "everything is political"...
genewitch
Space isn't political!
closewith
[flagged]
null
null
scubbo
I like it enough to keep coming back, but lobste.rs is slightly preferable in my experience; more goodwill/less pedantry, and less Trumpelon apologism.
(If you are gearing up to reply to the last three words of the previous paragraph, I can promise you I'm not interested in hearing it. You have your preferences and priorities, and I have mine)
milesrout
I found that lobste.rs had a much narrower range of views on every topic. And the intolerance of other views is presented far less eloquently than here. People just get hard downvoted or banned. Not just the obvious political ones but technical views too: dynamic typing is rubbish, cryptocurrency is rubbish, etc
nullstyle
Or perhaps the community has less tolerance for someone who trolls and runs from challenges before providing any support for their opinions, and your broken behavior has led to a unrepresentative perspective. Thats what i’m betting. Still want to try claiming mallen baker is only providing rage bait? Perhaps with some evidence that doesnt involve your poor analysis.
scubbo
Hmm - YMMV, of course, but I've found quite the opposite.
I worked with pg in a three-person startup in a basement in Harvard square just before he started YC. I was an undergrad at MIT and met him after arguing with rtm (who was a TA for my class) about TCP backoff. It was called Aspra and we were trying to build an app development platform for mobile phones. The idea was that you could build an application that could "render" to either an IVR system, for dumb phones, or the kind of web page that a Motorola "smartphone" of the day could view. Ahead of its time, like Paul. It didn't go far, and not long after he started YC. Good thing he did, for the industry and many of the folks here! Anyway, the "20 years" got my attention because I didn't feel that old, and thought someone might like the little story.