Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator
228 comments
·March 11, 2025Dave_Rosenthal
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.
tjmc
Congratulations YC! I remember prior to HN, pg used to post his essays to Slashdot under the username Bugbear and all the attendant sniping and lame memes that would come back in response. Hacker News was a breath of fresh air and continues to be my favourite online community.
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.
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).
subless
Also, thanks to @dang for keeping the community in-line with the rules/guidelines.
dang
I wish. But thanks!
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.
Diederich
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 is always fun to look at, 18.5 years ago.
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.
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.
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jessekv
Huh. I upvoted it.
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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 :) )
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
_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!
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.
Tainnor
I've said it before but this place was a cesspool during COVID.
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
Everything is political, always was. It's just the case that you're seeing it now.
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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)
submeta
Started reading HN nine years ago, when I screwed up my third startup the year before, was devastated, and needed some inspiration. And among the shared news were stories that inspired me again, that made me come back to this site every single day ever since. I like the cultivated discussions, like the things I learn about, and I feel like I never miss any tech trend. Excellent community. Love it.
Thank you PG, thank you Dang! Thank you to all the contributors for the high quality content.
dwaltrip
You only discovered HN after your 3rd startup? :p
itsthecourier
what happened next!?
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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
ant6n
I‘m not so sure YC is really targeting industry experts in their fields who are doing startups, or?
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.