Not sure if sam or any of the YC team will ever explain this, but how does the partner structure work - really?

Is it like partnerships at a Law/Consulting/iBanking firm?

Are they just paid a salary and a % of the carry?

Given the recent "promotion" to partners, just curious.

I don't know Elizabeth (sure she's great), but the other three are amazing and always quite helpful.

Kat's been an amazing connector both within the YC community and in supporting applicants. She's connected me with some potential fintech applicants, which I think is a great way to leverage alums.

We met with Yuri a few times before he was a part-time partner and he was quite helpful and encouraging. We're in the enterprise space and he told us to just keep fighting the long-sales-cycle fight. That advice came at a critical moment where we really needed to just keep going through the slog.

I haven't talked to PC much since leaving Stripe but he obviously build a great company and culture there that I really enjoyed. He's going to be an amazing resource for YC companies.

Elizabeth is awesome, we're in the life science space and she has always been very helpful. We aren't YC, but has taken phone calls, talked with us at conferences and answered emails.

I have to agree, Elizabeth is fantastic. Super nice, easy going, and clearly very intelligent :) Really happy to see that she is getting involved in this, looking forward to seeing how YC picks up science based companies.

Elizabeth is brilliant, both from a biotech and from a startup perspective. Kat is one of the best connectors I've met. YC is growing muscles in very needed areas. Can't wait to see what they have in store for the next few cycles.

I remember debating with friends a few years ago about how YC is helping startups. The conversation was mostly about what is more important, "PG time" or "Network effect".

With batches growing more and more, we kind of agreed that PG is not scalable and so that "Network effect" was slowly becoming more what companies were getting out from YC vs the "PG Time" they used to get in earlier batches.

Since, I've seen so many quality folks added to the team, I feel like the "PG Time" (which now is not only PG but all the partners) is becoming again more important than the network effect, and it's amazing.

Founders must be learning SO MUCH now going through YC...

congrats on that!

I don't understand how the CEO of a high-growth startup does anything at this level of commitment outside their existing jobs.

I barely understand how CEOs do even the one job.

I already spend a lot of time talking to early stage startups (it's really important that we understand them well); this seemed like a good way to formalize that in a way that helps them too.

(That is, my hope is that this is good for Stripe, for YC, and for the startups.)

In general, I'm very leery of distracting time commitments, and I don't sit on any boards or anything like that. I think this is a (pretty rare) example of one that makes sense for all parties.

Good point - I hadn't thought about how early stage startups are your customers.

It seems that some people can just handle this .. consider Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk.

It's probably some combination of having more energy than most people, and being ruthlessly efficient with their time.

Definitely an awe-inspiring quality.

I guess its the spirit of giving back. Y Combinator helped shape Stripe, get it investors, and all that, so he is kinda carrying the torch forward. I don't know him personally, but seeing the rate at which Stripe is growing, he must feel pretty strongly towards YC to have this level of commitment for it. YC ftw!

hire yourself out of every job, filling every spot with someone superior to you at the task and you will have 1) opened up your time 2) a superior company

To be a successful founder or CEO you have to grow a startup support system (a Mafia) around your startup. An active network of other entrepreneurs, investors, experts, can lead to opportunities for the company and mutually-supported survival when you really need it. You have to give before you get. Giving back to the startup community rises the tide for all boats in the long run. The wider the network, the better the CEO/Founder, the better off the company and its team.

I agree with you. It reminds me of an interview about Steve Jobs. I don't have the link, but one of his executives was offered a BOD position in another company. Upon asking Jobs if he can take the board seat, Jobs told him he was barely making it at Apple as is...

I also don't buy the example of Musk and others, I think we have context as to how much better each of these companies would have run if they had put 110% of their efforts into just one.

Steve Jobs managed to be pretty effective as CEO of both Pixar and Apple at the same time for a while. Admittedly, his involvement at Pixar was mainly strategic whilst he was running Apple, but still.

Though Jobs was obviously the exception to so many rules.

CEOs and other high-level execs do take board positions in other companies, so the time commitment is not unusual. Admittedly, they're not usually startup execs.

> Several founders from the most recent batch went out of their way to tell me how much they’ve liked working with [Yuri Sagalov].

After 2 years working with Yuri and Weihan at AeroFS, I second that :)

As someone who lives outside the U.S, can someone explain what does making him/her a partner means in this context?

I think it means they'll get more of a say in the companies YC invests in, and they probably will get to share in the profits of such investments. Much more involvement than other roles.

I hadn't realized that Patrick was part of Auctomatic. Huh.

The depth and breadth of the YC partner community is astounding. They keep building from strength to strength. I've always viewed the weakness of the model as talent - it's harder to scale people than money. So far they seem to be relieving PG as the bottleneck pretty well. Let's see if they can keep the quantity of good entrepreneurs from being a bottleneck too.

Can YC company's get office hours with Patrick?

Yes, they can.

I'm pretty excited about what some of these additions mean for the direction of YC. More enterprise/B2B experience, more bio-tech experience - YC is pretty awesome, so diversifying to more spaces will just make more spaces awesome.

It is really awesome, though I'm kind of bummed that they held off on announcing this (or didn't otherwise finalize the details) until after the summer applications were due. As someone working on some bioinformatics tech, that definitely would have persuaded me to apply.*

* And not primarily because of Elizabeth – who I'm sure is fantastic – but more broadly because of what it signals with regards to YC's focus and energy.

Congrats all! A stellar batch of folks.

Well deserved! YC is better for it.

I imagine this expansion will hopefully lead to a larger batch being selected this year as there are more mentors available.

Congrats!