The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator

290 Pages·2013·3.568 MB·English

by  Randall Stross

The Launch Pad
Randall Stross is the author of several acclaimed books, including
eBoysy Planet Google and The Wizard of Menlo Par\. He has a PhD
in history from Stanford University.

THE
LAUNCH
PAD
Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s
Most Exclusive Sehool for Startups
R A N D A L L STROSS
/ t
PORTFOLIO
PENGUIN
PORTFOLIO PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London wc2R orl, England
- Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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First published in the United States of America by Portfolio/Penguin, a member
of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2012
First published in Great Britain by Portfolio Penguin 2013
001
Copyright © Randall Stross, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn: 978-0-670-92349-6
www.greenpenguin.co.uk
For R ebecca, Martin, Jacob, and Alex

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
1
YOUNGER 9
2
OLDER 22
3
GRAD SCHOOL 34
4
MALE 45
5
CRAZY BUT NORMAL 56
6
UNSEXY 67
GENIUS 77
8
ANGELS 86
9
ALWAYS BE CLOSING M
10
CLONE MYSELF 110
vii
viii CONTENTS
11
WHAT'S UP? 118
12
HACKATHON 130
13
NEW IDEAS 140
14
RISK 150
15
MARRIED 161
16
FEARSOME 171
17
PAY ATTENTION 183
18
GROWTH 194
19
FINDADROPBOX 206
20
DON'T QUIT 218
21
SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD 227
Acknowledgments 241
Appendix: The Summer 2011 Batch 245
Notes 251
Index 269
INTRODUCTION
San Francisco Gray Line is the largest sightseeing tour company in
Northern California. It offers tours of San Francisco, of Muir Woods
and Sausalito or the wine country north of the city, but it no longer offers
a tour of Silicon Valley, immediately south. From a bus seat, there just isn’t
much to be seen.1
Silicon Valley’s past is more accessible than its present. There’s the
Computer History Museum, and Intel has a museum of its own. And there
are the garages, of course, beginning with Hewlett and Packard’s, then
Steve Jobs’s parents’, and then the rented garage that served as Google’s
first off-campus office space. But these are ghostly places, the uninterest­
ing physical vestiges of startups that have long since departed.
To glimpse what comes next in Silicon Valley, you need to see the most
promising startups, not museums and historic garages. There are literally
thousands of startups, dispersed along the sixty-mile corridor that extends
between San Francisco and San Jose, but they all operate under secrecy un­
til they are ready to launch their first product. That’s why there can never
be a Gray Line tour of Silicon Valley’s future.
It’s a shame, because this place is creating everyone’s future. Software
is eating the world—the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has come up
with a rather catchy way of describing the disruption, under way or com­
ing soon, to industries seemingly distant from the tech world. Software-
based startups will do much of the disrupting. They take advantage of
1