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How Y Combinator Changed the World
December 22, 2021/
Y Combinator Paul Graham will send off a transcontinental bolt from his countryside Olympus. In his essays he has written that the best founders were hackers, and he has espoused a philosophy of what might best be called founderism. If Y Combinator were a movie, the plot would be a hero’s journey, with intrepid founders overcoming obstacles to attain glory and eventually win the T-shirt that YC bestows upon companies achieving liquidity by buyout or IPO: “I built something someone wants.” As “a professional billionaire scout,” Graham believes in the goodness of founders. “Bad people make bad founders,” he argued in a recent essay.
As if launching Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox weren’t enough, the famous accelerator has had an outsize—and mixed—impact on all of us.
