Mission Statement
YCUniverse.com seeks to be the most comprehensive unofficial collection of useful information about Y Combinator, Y Combinator funded companies, and the Y Combinator “process” from pre-application through beyond “Demo Day”.
Vision For This Website
This website exists for many reasons. For example, founders can use this website to:
- research original innovative ideas,
- prevent duplication of effort,
- write better funding applications,
- perform successful interviews,
- create more stable companies,
- perform a competitive analysis of their industry,
- differentiate their product offerings, and
- build productive, strategic, and profitable relationships with Y Combinator funded companies.
Disclaimer
This website has absolutely no affiliation nor endorsement with Y Combinator.
What is Y Combinator
According to Wikipedia:
Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year. In exchange, they take an average of about 6% of the company’s equity.
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). 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“.