[HN Gopher] About Y Combinator's software team (which is current...
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About Y Combinator's software team (which is currently hiring)
Y Combinator is hiring a few people to work with us on our small
software team in SF. In particular, we're hiring a couple of people
to help us build some websites we run, and also someone who's good
with infrastructure to help us keep things running. But I thought
that rather than write a regular job post about them (boring!), it
would be more fun to write about the history of the YC software
team and what we've been up to. YC is a somewhat unusual place to
work, and I wanted to give you a flavor of what it might be like.
First off, a lot of people don't know that YC even has a software
team, and for most of YC's history, we didn't. The first software
YC wrote was Hacker News, and Paul Graham built and ran HN all by
himself for many years. But around 2012, a young YC Partner named
Garry Tan built this website to be a private directory and forum
for the founders YC had funded. He called it "Bookface" as a
tongue-in-cheek joke. Hacker News was built in Lisp (and still
is), but Garry had used rails for his startup and didn't really
want to learn lisp, so he built Bookface in rails. Bookface was an
instant hit, but for several years after, the only people working
on it were Garry Tan and a couple of other YC partners, who spent
most of their time working with companies, and only really got to
code on nights and weekends. In 2015 I joined YC, and my first job
on literally my first day was to try to figure out what to do with
our software. By then, Bookface was getting big enough that it
seemed clear to me that we needed full-time people working on it,
and so we ended up finding a few key people to do that. Now that
we had a small but real team, for the first time we were able to
think about doing more ambitious things. We launched a website
(https://workatastartup.com/) to help our companies hire people,
and that did well. Then we launched a website
(https://www.startupschool.org/) to turn YC's advice about startups
into an online course
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13801376). A few years later,
we launched a co-founder matching platform
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750298). Along the way we
built a lot of other stuff we haven't talked about publicly, like
all the internal tools that run YC. We've tried to make YC scale by
writing software to automate as much of our business as possible.
We have software that helps us read 60K applications every year,
our own Calendly-like software for scheduling the 10K+ meetings we
do with founders every year, software to automate our financial and
legal reporting and lots more stuff like that. As we've launched
new products, we've added one or two people per year to the team so
we can work on more things in parallel. We're up to about 10 now.
When people are interviewing with us, they often ask us what the
culture of the team is, and the answer is that if you've read Paul
Graham's essays or watched our videos on YouTube, you already know
what our culture is like. We try to operate according to the same
advice we give to our startups. We've also tried to make the YC
software team as closely connected to the batch as possible, which
is part of staying close to our users (who are mostly YC founders
and employees). Most of us work on the third floor of the YC
building, and the batch happens on the first and second floors. So
if you want to join one of the famous YC batch dinners, you just
walk down to the first floor. One of the things we hoped would
happen was that some of the people on the team would take what they
learned from working at YC and start their own YC companies. That
turned out to work - there are now 7 people who have done exactly
that. We've historically only hired a couple of people per year,
but we've got a couple of roles open now. We're looking for someone
to help Mark with infrastructure (see
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019063), and we're also
hiring someone to work on YC's private founder community site
Bookface, which is more traditional full-stack web development.
It's a little hard to describe Bookface if you haven't seen it -
it's like LinkedIn and Facebook and Quora rolled into one, but just
for YC founders. Most YC founders use it every day. Working at YC
isn't a good fit for most people. I think it could be a good fit if
you have been following YC for a while, if you are confident
building web products all by yourself, if you like having a lot of
responsibility and owning the development of products end-to-end,
and if you like startups and have already worked on one or likely
will someday. You'll also need to live in SF or want to move here.
If you're interested, you can read a traditional job post and apply
online here
(https://www.ycombinator.com/careers?ashby_jid=00c6950f-341f-...),
or just email me at jared@ycombinator.com.
Author : snowmaker
Score : 1 points
Date : 2024-02-19 17:00 UTC (6 hours ago)
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(page generated 2024-02-19 23:00 UTC)