Founders at Work.pdf

Do you remember anyone else in that first batch?
Jessica Livingston 449
Livingston: Looking back, it was an amazing group that we had. Sam Altman of
Loopt was in that batch. There’s actually a funny story about him, too. He had
submitted an application and at the time he’d been working with a few other
people, but he was the only one who could come to Cambridge that summer.
So Sam emailed us saying he was the only one who could come and Paul wrote
back to him, saying, “You know, Sam, you’re only a freshman. You have plenty
of time to start a startup. Why don’t you just apply later?”
Sam wrote back something to the effect of, “I’m a sophomore, and I’m coming
to the interview.” I’ll never forget that—how we tried to brush him off.
Sam was in a Stanford business plan contest the same weekend as our interviews.
He wound up winning on Saturday and he took the red-eye to Boston
that night and arrived for his interview—just him—on Sunday. We met with
him for 25 minutes or so and I remember thinking in the first 5 minutes, “This
guy is amazing.” All of us were just blown away by Sam. His poise and intelligence,
and just the way he was. We knew that there was something special
about him.
We also had Justin Kan and Emmett Shear of Justin.tv. We originally
funded them to make an online calendar called Kiko. They built it that summer
and got a little bit of angel funding, but Google Calendar came out soon after
and crushed them. So they came to us later on and said, “I think we’re gonna
move on from Kiko,” and they started talking to Paul and Robert about new
ideas. I remember I walked in and Paul said, “Hey, Jessica, listen to their new
idea. Justin’s going to wear a camera on his head 24 hours a day and film his
entire life.” I thought this was one of the craziest ideas I’d ever heard. But
Y Combinator funded them because we really liked them, and Paul, Robert,
and Trevor liked their idea.
And we had Phil Yuen, who started TextPayMe, which was acquired by
Amazon. Originally he was working on a different thing called FireCrawl,
which was going to crawl your company’s website and find errors and broken
links, etc. But Phil and his cofounders found they weren’t super excited about
that, so in the fall they switched to a new idea for cell phone payments.
Do you remember learning anything surprising that summer?
Livingston: I learned a lot that summer, because it was our first run at everything.
Looking back, I think the most surprising thing was all the convincing we
had to do that this idea of Y Combinator—providing small amounts of funding
to batches of startups—would work. It had never been done before, so everything
was brand new. I tell founders this all the time—that if your idea has
never been done before, everyone will think it’s crazy.
A lot of people either pooh-poohed our idea or didn’t care at all. Very early
on, we met with a big VC firm and one of the founding partners was there. We
told them all about our new model and hoped they’d be interested in meeting
with some of the startups. At the end, we invited them to come to one of our
dinners to meet the startups and the senior partner made it very clear that he