# How to pick which startup to work at

**Author:** Justin Kan, Sam Altman
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/AQ-how-to-pick-which-startup-to-work-at
**YouTube ID:** cN62reafxLg

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YC alum Justin Kan and former YC President Sam Altman talk about why you should or should not work at a startup, and what being an employee at one entails.

## Transcript

okay hello everyone and welcome to work at a startup this is the first time we've done this conference since 2012 so it's a pretty special day for us and I'm really excited to see that we had such an amazing turnout in a moment I'm gonna introduce our first keynote speaker Justin comm Justin is the founder of three YC companies he is now running a company called atrium which are going to hear about later this afternoon but before that he was the founder of Justin dot TV and he actually presented up here

on this stage eight years ago back when he was running Justin TV and he's going to tell you some really awesome stories from what happened back then and talk about why you should or should not work for a start-up so please welcome Justin Kahn [Applause] Thank You Jared for giving away my talk it's me Justin Kahn I am ycs remedial student I had lost

track actually have the number of times I've been through I see until Jared reminded me it's been three times actually four at least and some of those companies worked some of them didn't and my newest company which went through YC in the last batch and in winter 2018 is called atrium and one of my team members will be up to tell you about that later but what I want to talk about today and it was supposed to be a surprise twist but no longer is why you should but also why you shouldn't join a

start-up and I'm gonna start with why you shouldn't join okay there's a couple reasons and I'm my goal here is just to give you the most unfiltered raw feelings that I have to help you make an informed decision but there's lots of lots of good reasons why you shouldn't shouldn't join a start-up number one the management at startups generally really sucks I wish I was joking but no it's it's true I used to joke that there were YC companies there are two kinds of YC

companies there were the rocket ships with bad management and then there were the other companies with bad management and that's kind of a corollary to that it is likely that if your join a startup especially an early-stage one you won't necessarily get enough mentorship or direction on what you're doing unless you really actively force people to give it to you second reason you are likely to not actually get rich joining us startup it's statistically improbable if

you think you're gonna join a start-up and then be set for life that is unlikely to happen so that would not be a good reason to join I'm sorry I ever told you different and then the third reason which i think is a new reason in Silicon Valley actually is Silicon Valley has matured in the last ten years since Jared and I have kind of gotten here one of the things that I think has changed is people you know and originally when I got here I think people just want to work on interesting [ __ ] and it was a much smaller number of

people now I think that there's a lot of people who come to Silicon Valley because it's a great career and there's a great trajectory and there's stability and if you want like those things you should not join a start-up I've noticed more and more people even even people have recruited more recently a coming in and saying you know what's the career pathing here what's the you know where's the what's the what's the five-year plan and I'm like we don't have five years of money so if you want stability I think

you should go join Facebook maybe maybe not today but next next next week next week all right all right so now on to what you really came for which is why you should join a startup and I when I was writing this in the parking lot five minutes ago identified three reasons all right number one you will get access to jobs that you're completely unqualified for and you might not be able to do so

my example actually comes from that very first work first startup eight years ago you know I was on stage talking about justin.tv and we actually recruited someone from that and his name was Jim as if he was a from France programmer and actually he came to work for startup and got two offers from two different companies one was justin.tv and one was actually Scribd Jarrod's company and I sat down with game I remember in a coffee shop after work first startup and he said oh I have this offer from script and I said what was it he told me I was

like I'll pay you ten thousand dollars more right now to sign this instant and so he accepted sorry Jared he accepted any and he joined justin.tv and within a year he was running our entire rails back-end for a site that was like a top hundred site and I think a top 10 to 20 Rails site at the time was like in 2010 so the bar was a lot lower and that was a job he's like completely unqualified for he would never have gotten the opportunity to do if you didn't join us ARP where we

didn't really have anyone else to do it and I had he went on actually this is a pretty cool story went on we spun out a company called Socialcam a couple years later he went on to be a co-founder of that company as we spun it out of justin.tv went through YC and got an even greater scale challenge when they scaled to like from 0 to 128 million users in like two months and so you know just the rate of learning for him was like pretty incredible and he's gone on to now he's a co-founder at a company called triple byte that does recruiting

for YC companies and others ok so that's number one you are going to get access to jobs you are not qualified for number two is joining a start-up is a really good gateway to starting your own startup if that's a goal of yours in the second work for a startup we in 2012 I came back with with another company called exec and I recruited someone else actually someone really talented his name was Finbar and he was an engineer at Groupon at the time and I think you

really want to break into starts with the idea of eventually starting his own and I think one of the things that's really important is to just put yourself in positions where you're around people who want to do the things that you want to do or people who are like the person that you want to become one of my co-founders of twitch his name Emmett always told me that you know you are the average of your five closest friends and he wasn't talking about just me just talking about everybody in general and I really think that's the case so it was Finbar went on he was like you know working at exact that come but he didn't

work out super good but he ended up meeting a co-founder there and starting a start-up which was a horrible idea there's a terrible idea I told not to do it at the time but he ended up getting his start right he was like he became a founder that didn't work out he ended up joining YC for I think in just over a year and then start a new startup that just went through YC and is after the races and doing super good I won't give away that it's called Shogun you should check it out and probably work there okay so starting your own start that's the

second reason the third thing is to maximize your I should slow down I still have a lot of time sorry the third thing is to maximize your own speed of learning I think this is actually the most important reason why you should join a startup and I have kind of two examples of people who did that working working with me and they are both the two co-founders of Cruz and I I think

that they're cool examples because one is kind of maximizing learning on the way up and the other on the way down and I'll explain what that means so the first co-founder of Cruz his name's Kyle vote we recruited him at justin.tv in the early days - he was an MIT student and we had found him and he was like kind of this person that we thought we needed because it was this hardware hacker we thought we were gonna build a hardware company and so we convinced him to come out from MIT and for his like

the that month-long break during January and we bought him a one-way ticket and we were like just work for a month and then we never bought him a ticket back and Kyle Kyle basically became our VP Engineering and the use became a co-founder actually and the VP Engineering and Kyle's a amazing hacker he's always has been very amazing tinkerer and and one of those people with a can-do attitude he's just gonna you know if you're like hey let's build this thing he's gonna go figure out how

to build it but he didn't know jack [ __ ] about scaling systems or building you know scalable system architectures and so that was like the job that was available though as soon as we stopped we figured out that we should not build Hardware and so that was that's the the job we kind of assigned him and he had to figure it out really like on the fly and so he ended up you know packing this live video system there was

nothing kind of there was nothing there was there was like no precedent right we basically built this scalable dynamic live video system that he engineered and architected mostly badly at first actually and it would would go down all the time we ended up and there was this one kind of funny story where you know we had no idea about like we did no idea how to build reliable systems and so every time it would go down we would like call him which was like every like 36 to 48 hours

and he so he could like never go on vacation well which is like not really acceptable to him so it was just like one time he was just like I'm going goodbye basically and we're like no what's gonna happen if you're like not around he ends up he went to Tahoe or something like that we ended up of course like clockwork after you know 36 hours the site went down we had no we were calling him on the phone in like 10 times it's a live video site so if it doesn't work it doesn't have any value right like just right then so we started calling him and

he didn't pick up luckily I'd left the address we end up having to order a pizza to go to his house to read a message to him like a piece of delivery driver read the message like answer your phone the website is down so like that was like our concept of like a pager system at the time right so really figuring everything out one step at a time kind of inventing everything from scratch the end of the story is he eventually architected this live video system that by the time twitch sold to a

Mazon in 2814 was the fourth largest bandwidth consumer in North America 15 points of presence around the world did 90 petabytes of data transfer a month and so you know I mean his rate of learning was incredible as a software architect and obviously kind of went on and took a lot of that to cruise which is also an incredible story the other co-founder of cruise was my brother Daniel who met Kyle actually as a intern at justin.tv when he was a college

student we recruited him not really recruited it was more like nepotism I'm sorry I hope he's not watching right now I just [ __ ] up this [ __ ] up to say oh so now he was he he also had a like crash course in startups over the next couple years didn't work for me for very long but when he didn't work for me he she recruited these guys to the site I remember justin.tv when we were doing like the kind of live streaming site he

recruited this this unknown band it was called the Jonas Brothers and they they ended up like crashing our Simon they were part of the reason that Kyle hated his life and of crashing the site over and over again but the cool thing was he joined as this intern who got to like you know interact and kind of like make a deal with like what was basically like became the number one kind of teen band at the time in 2007 and then later on you know he joined me as a co-founder when I started this other company exec in 2012 and the cool thing you know I

mentioned that you know Kyle's kind of the example of like how you might learn how to startup as the sarbs growing and on the way up I think Daniel is a perfect example of how you will also learn and maximize your learning if the startup is completely and horribly failing because we in 2013 by the time we had worked out exact for a couple years we realized that the home cleaning business is not a great business I'd recommend you don't join a home cleaning startup and he we ended up trying to sell it and this is a great story is my

last story this is a great story so we were we were trying to sell it we ended up negotiating a deal with a company called handi that's in the East Coast and against all odds has survived in this industry and we negotiated the deal and I'm like it was taking forever there was like tons of lawyers it was dragging and dragging and dragging and I was so burned out I was just like I'm going on vacation Daniel you have to deal with it it's not a very responsible thing to do but and so he ended up having to be the

one who closed this deal over the next like month while I was in Thailand I mean I was like kind of doing stuff on the phone but he was mostly like running this ille for not a lot of money you know just a bit of stock from handy and he ended up like it was like a horrible experience he learned all about like negotiating we know from and and when you want to have leverage in a deal when you you know what when you should like all the things although different minutiae of negotiating a deal and he learned it on this very small horrible deal which we were mostly trust trying

to offload because we why were so burned out we want to get out of the business and two years later fast forward two years he had become a co-founder of cruise cruise had built an amazing technology team that was executing super well and you know you guys know the end of the story they end up selling to GM for a billion dollars and he applied the cool thing I think is that Daniel applied all those horrible lessons he learned from like trying to negotiate this shitty piddling deal for our company to his next company and ended up you know they sold it for over a billion

dollars so you're gonna learn something whether the company succeeds or fails you'll probably walk away with something valuable the last thing I'll say is that the way I think about it is the way I think I think about growing and like your your your speed of Laurium maximizing your speed of learning is from a quote that our YC partner Paul boo Hyde had as generally said I think he says it to every batch which is that you know it's not your y-intercept but it's your slope that's important and so

I think you wanna you know the way I've always thought about it is how do I figure out ways that I could put myself in the position to maximize my own personal rate of growth and rate of learning and I suggest that you do the same regardless of whether that's at a startup or not all right best of luck next up I'm supposed to introduce you I'm sorry I forgot next we have YC president Sam Altman

[Applause] all right Justin covered a lot of what I was gonna talk about so I'm gonna have time for questions that was awesome though so I want to talk about how to pick which startup to work at the most important considerations you all already know picking a company you're excited about people you're excited about a role you're excited about that's more important than the rest of the stuff I have to say but that's also intuitive and so I'm gonna talk about the things

that are not intuitive or at least haven't been for me and I want to just echo one thing that Justin said because I think it's so important every job I've ever had and probably every job Justin's ever had as well Osby for myself at least I've been wildly unqualified for and doing that I think is like the number one secret to having a really great career like that's the way you have a super fast rate of personal growth and I think the way careers go is you should put in the most of the effort at the beginning because there's it's

this compound interest like thing where the work you do now the learning you do now the improvement you make early in your career gets to pay off for all the rest so you may as well work hard and take a chance on a role that you feel unqualified for early and if you flame out you flame out and you go try something different but my experience is when someone does role they're unqualified for it either goes way worse or way better than expectations and a lot of the times it goes away better and if you hold yourself back from doing this because you're afraid of not working out which is totally understandable sometimes it doesn't I

think you missed this opportunity to have the sort of most impactful career you can and that is what's so cool about startups is you can get jobs you are qualified for so I want to talk about how to pick a startup and I want to talk about this from the perspective of being an investor because I think what you're doing when you go to work at a start-up is making one big investment if you're really good you are going to take way less cash comp you can then you could get at Google or Facebook and you are

going to be compensated for that by investing your time in the startup in return for equity so people have different risk Awards write-offs you might want a later stage startup with its lower-risk or return you might want high-risk high-return a very early-stage startup but I think the right framework of this is to think about it like you're investing in a start-up and for me at least learning to invest in startups was deeply counterintuitive and I'm gonna talk about eight things that I learned about how to evaluate startups for investment this mostly applies to sort of the stage of startups you'll see here

today number one this is a Paul poo height another probably height ISM it's more important that a start-up have a small number of users that really love the product rather than a lot of users they really like the product most startups either have no one who cares at all or a lot of people who are kind of like yeah that's okay very rare to find a start-up where people love the product so much they spontaneously tell their friends but if you think about the really big companies today Google Facebook you probably heard about it cuz someone was like this is awesome you got to sign up and you know people talk

about product market fit all this other stuff I think it's sort of hard to evaluate but one thing you can do is either like talk to some users of the company or ideally you are one yourself or know some and like is this product so good that people are telling other people they've got to use it and that I think matters much more than the vanity metrics number of users current growth rate whatever that most startups throw around so if you only do one piece of diligence this is the one I would do number two trust in exponential growth

and as a byproduct of that trust in momentum momentum is sort of this really important concept to startups if things are feeling good if it's growing if people are loving the product if good people are joining that tends to keep going and if that falters it's very hard to get it back so does the startup have a good sense of momentum and is there some sort of exponential growth model by the way I've been investing in startups for like I don't know eight or ten years now I still have not managed to get good at intuiting exponential growth in my head so I have to do it in the

spreadsheet every time but I've learned to trust it and if it's if it's if a startup is growing exponentially and it's not fake it's not like you know they're buying all the users or something it tends to keep going and making that leap of faith because almost no one understands just how powerful exponential growth is even if they say out loud they do making leap of faith and trusting that is super valuable related concept this is the third one the size of the market today

matters almost not at all it is the growth rate of the market and how big the market will be in ten years so I think the number one mistake investors make when they miss out on a really great opportunity is they look at the size of the market today now they only care about how fast the startup is growing they don't care about the size of the revenue today and why they can't make this same leap of faith for the market I've never understood but if you make a really great decision on what startup to join it will probably be a smallish market today that's growing

really quickly you know I saw this morning on the way down here this is like the 10-year anniversary of the iPhone App Store so ten years ago not very long the size of the market for iPhone applications with zero dollars and a lot of investors you know somewhat rationally but obviously wrongly said all right well we're not investing in these iPhone apps because this is a small market I also saw it this morning the uber deck when they first raised money and they said you know their tam is like two billion dollars or something

and if you think about the world from a certain set of constraints that was true but it turns out that like the market of people that want to move around cities easily grows quickly when you have a better product so thinking about the growth rate of the market not just the growth rate of the startup super important if you're going to identify something really big and in a related concept to that is the biggest companies that we have been able to be a part of and I think the biggest companies in the technology industry as a whole

happen when there's a technological platform shift so for example the I've stick with the iPhone example the iPhone App Store launches in 2008 in a period of say 2009 to 2012 there were a lot of companies that you could never have started before and that all of a sudden you could you know obras a good example but there's other ones like snapchat which really just didn't quite make sense before mobile phones and apps and so trying to identify these platform shifts that's that's another

place where I think you can find almost all of the big startups most people are wrong about this so you have to learn to trust your own intuitions here it's very hard to differentiate between real trends and fake trends the technology journalists in particular seem easy to trick about this but honestly so is everybody and so if you read the news you're not gonna find the answer here if you talk to most people you're not going to find the answer here but if you think hard and you really pay attention sometimes you can that the metric that I

use to differentiate between a real trend and a fake trend is similar to loving a product it's when is there a new platform that people are using many hours every day so the iPhone comes out not that many people buy it but they use it all day VR headsets come out a lot of people buy it but they never come off the shelf so VR by that metric is not yet a real trend and at the point where people start you know having their headset on hours a day that might be a good time to start a VR company the fifth consideration is the company

exciting and here's why that's important the hardest thing to get especially right now in Silicon Valley is critical mass of talented people at one company it's easy to get the first few employees you can give them a ton of equity give them big job titles but that stops to work and then you get to employee 30 employee 300 why are they still gonna join rather than start their own startup join a small startup go to Google and and this ability to have an exciting enough mission to be able to concentrate

talent this is why I think it's easier to start a hard startup an easy startup because people care and if you don't have this it's really hard I have basically in my life tried had to recruit a lot for two different startups one was a company I started a long time ago they did social networking on iPhones and another was open AI and in the first one we could tell people like hey you know like you should come do this it's really cool and it was kind of cool and open I we can say like you know if we

don't do a good job or if someone does not do a good job building a G I like the world will vary likely get destroyed and we need you specifically to do this piece of it and if you don't do that it's really bad for the world and that is a really hard pitch to say no to and so a startup that has a reason why people need to join it is super powerful the sixth one is hot it's thinking about how impressed you are by the founders and the early employees at the startup so as a general observation it is extremely powerful

whenever you can identify something in the world that is true and important and that most people don't believe and in fact I think this is one of the two major market inefficiencies that startups get to exploit there exists a small number of founders in the world that are so good that they end up bending the world to their will and they can do this without a lot of business experience and they are like hundreds of times more effective than people that aren't like this and you know there are programmers that are I know people hate

the 10x engineer mean because it's so often used to justify being a jerk but there are plenty of people who are ten times as good as average programmers and also nice people and in companies where you find a lot of these people concentrated in the early hires this is a huge deal and these startups consistently outperform and the quality of the early people at a company the quality of the founders is so determinant of success and it has such a bigger impact than people like to believe or want to believe about the world that when you find this it is one

of these secrets about the world that is critically important and that people try not to believe so I think that's a really great thing to look for the other the other big market inefficiency to look for is ideas that sound bad but are good so most ideas that sound bad are unfortunately bad and you should try not to join those companies but there exists a class and this is where YC has made most of its money of ideas that sound bad but are good if an idea is good and

sounds good then the big companies will try to do it and usually I'll compete you but there's a really important difference between startups and big companies if you have the same idea at a big company and you want to do it you have to get your boss to say yes your boss's boss to say yes your boss's boss to say yes and then sundar to say yes and then Larry Page to say yes and in that chain of 21 no kills the entire idea and if the idea sounds bad someone will rationally so say no if you're a startup you may also have 20

conversations you may go up and down Sand Hill Road trying to convince someone to fund it but you only need one yes and the one yes you get to go do it even if it's 19 knows it's it's very different than one has to happen at a big company so one idea I often ask startups is can you tell me why this idea sounds bad to the big companies but actually is good um and then a final thing that I look at are what this has been a long-standing YC metric what are

the smartest sort of recent college graduates excited about in our experience now over more than you know 13 years the YC has been in business that group of people consistently is 3-4 years ahead of what investors focus on and that has been a model for us of identifying real trends before they happen that group is not always right there have been some big failures but directionally speaking young people I think have more time they're more on the

forefront of technology they're less than in their ways whatever it's for that you know what what those people are going into is an area that we have always looked at so another question that's related to all of this is how to get good advice about what startup to join and you have to choose the peers whose opinion you care about in your life very very carefully most people will have bring whatever biases they

have about what a career should look like or what a safe choice is or what a good thing to work on is they'll bring all that to the table and most people have let bad processes and behind their firewall and they will give you bad advice and so trying to find a group of people that you can go to in your life so whenever you have a big career decision that are kind of open minded and intellectually rigorous thinkers and who care about the similar kinds of things that you care about whatever that is is a really valuable thing to do um I was lucky to find a

handful of those people very early in my life I still ping them on every big decision and the advice that they give me I think is generally quite good and very different than what I'd get from most of my friends so finding people who can give you good advice about what startup to join is really important I was gonna talk about how to think about equity at a startup but I only have one minute left so I will say this you probably aren't getting enough I think most startups are not nearly generous enough with employee equity the

difference the amount of value that you create as an early employee versus a founder is not the hundred x difference that you usually see reflected on a cap table we try to get YC startups to be more generous with equity and I think over time it's trending in that direction but like remember startups need really talented people startups need people they could otherwise go work at Google and make a gigantic salary and I think you should demand to be treated fairly for that that's my that was

supposed to be five minutes but there's the 25 second version all right thank you very much we are going to start with company presentations now and thanks for coming today [Applause] hi I'm Jose we're gonna go alphabetically the first company up is our Marie [Applause]

hello YC armories here and we believe that software is the highest leverage way to improve humanity but how do you feel when you hear deploy to production how is that gone for you maybe so roll back or fire drill time but

don't worry armory is building a next generation deployment platform to help software teams ship better software faster and we're looking for skilled individuals that want to grow together and learn from one another and growing we have done tremendously last year we are at $60,000 annual revenue today we're at 1.3 million there's a lot

more to talk about find our booth thank you [Applause] hi everyone I'm John and at astronomy are building small low-cost telecommunication satellites why are we doing this because four billion people

in the world are not online right now this is a huge problem there are so many people out in the world who do not have the access to knowledge and education and all the things that they need to improve their lives the other side of this is this is an enormous business opportunity for the right company to tackle this problem there's actually very few things in the world that grow exponentially 30 plus percent

year-on-year and the world's hunger for bandwidth is one of those things there really is just a few things out there you could imagine Sam talked about growing markets and there are very very few things with a few places where the market grows this fast and this consistently so why is this still a problem after all of these years and all of the many billions of dollars have been spent in space and the answer I

think is captured pretty well in this picture so this is a picture of what telecommunication satellites look like today they are massive double decker bus sized satellites that cost several hundred million dollars or half a billion dollars each with small satellites we can do the same job at a fraction of the cost at astronomy Vall ready put our first test satellite in

space and it's orbiting right now working great we launched it a few months ago we have raised a very large funding round series a from a firm called in recent Horowitz so very well funded gonna be around for a little while see this thing and we have a spectacular team of engineers we're just over 30 people now from Google SpaceX skybox some of the larger air space companies a huge array

of specialties across software mechanical controls you name it every possible type of engineering you can imagine and really I mean I just can't say enough about how fortunate we are to have this team you may have heard that SpaceX is doing a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to try and solve this problem and the lead antenna engineer for that constellation just

left SpaceX to join us Ranas yes oh sorry one other really important point you do not actually have to have space experience or even embedded experience to join the team we have a whole group of veteran engineers they have put the operating into operating system in place this is more application level code so please do not let that dissuade you I wanted to talk a little bit about the company culture so we're very hands-on

we build lots of hardware we build it fast we iterate quickly you have an opportunity to learn from all these different disciplines and engineers of all stripes like I mentioned if you want we have something we're very proud of which we call a blameless culture these things are hard and we know things are going to go wrong and the other thing is we take work-life balance seriously at Estrada's and we have baby goats suppose random thing ever but we'd love to do trips out to

the farms to farms outside of the Bay Area do these retreats and do fun things with the team and and that's the Stratus so thank you very much [Applause] hi everyone my name is Chris Szymanski and I'm the head of engineering at atrium a tech enabled law firm for

startups and at atrium we're making legal services fast and transparent and we're building a platform that turns documents into data so legal is broken and we hear this from our clients all the time it's like this atrium works to fix legal and we do that with a fully digitized legal services platform that's powered by both real lawyers and AI so our team of lawyers makes better decisions thanks to our AI technology

this is a massive market over four hundred billion dollars per year and it's highly fragmented with the top 25 law firms only holding a 13 percent market share there's also very few in fact only one law firm startup whose tackling this market and that's atrium we employ cutting-edge ml technologies and every day we work hand in hand with both lawyers and you'll see here engineers and lawyers working together we're working to transform an extremely outdated industry and lowering barriers

for entrepreneurs to get access to legal services we'd love to have you join our team we're hiring software engineers and you'll get to work with Justin Cohn our CEO myself head of engineering max Cantor our head of data and our twenty other engineers we'd love to have you apply at atrium Co slash engineering thank you so much [Applause]

okay hi hello hi my name is Tammy Sun I am the co-founder and CEO of carat fertility we make customized fertility benefits for modern companies what does that mean that means that we make it easier and more affordable for employees to access everything from personalized fertility education through text video voice chat with fertility experts data-driven learning modules and making

egg freezing IVF and everything in between all the way to surrogacy easier and more affordable and so our mission is fertility care for all the first goal of our mission is to make fertility benefits and carat in particular as standard in the modern workplace as medical dental and vision coverage this is a mission that has met it's moment today even more than 50 percent of Millennials believe that fertility should be equal with dental and vision as coverage at work and so these trends

have helped carat become the leading provider of fertility benefits in the US for mid-market companies and moving very quickly into the enterprise we have thousands of members who we call employees across the country and were operational in nearly 30 countries around the world so why join us well there's three reasons first it's the product what sets our engineers apart is that each of them is a key player in every aspect of developing the product you're not just simply releasing release after release

you're gonna help decide what to build next and you're gonna be responsible for making sure how we measure success after the release after the release the second is product market fit so we know that companies want carat and we're really lucky and proud that companies who are working with us love it so we're really proud to be working with some of the most important public and private technology companies in the world we're also breaking into finance media real estate and even retail so the

market opportunity is enormous and this is a really exciting time to be at the company where you're going to be pushed and challenged to be doing way more than probably what you're qualified for and the last is that this is a mission that matters um and if it matters to you then this is my promise to you you're gonna have the opportunity to do some of the best work of your life on a solution whose time has come and in exchange carat and me personally promised you a 50x opportunity for growth in ways that

you won't be able to achieve anywhere else so I'm here today with my product engineering team Pat Dan in a room where you guys are if you could raise your hands and please come find us afterwards to talk about fertility what we're doing why we're doing it how we're doing it what's egg freezing and why you might be our next teammate thank you [Applause] hey guys I'm Dave from cheerio and our

mission we call it join people on data and basically what that means for us is excels been around for about thirty years anyone can work with data it's it's really easy to use but as soon as the data gets bigger than a spreadsheet as soon as you're working with databases of data all a sudden you have to no sequel you have to be a data scientist you have to be an engineer to work with it we think that's really stupid and we're out to solve that one of the ways we've solved it is we've created what we call visual sequel we've made sequel visuals so it's just drag-and-drop and we can do it it's a way better way to explore data just like

windows made Dass visual so way more people could use computers we've done that with sequel and it's one visual drag-and-drop language that works with all the databases redshift my sequel hadoop i've liked all the databases also salesforce Marketo HubSpot all the different sources of data you can be coming from one language for all and then we make it really easy for you make charts and dashboards and share that with your whole team so we're in the BI space we compete with like tableau we consistently get rated just really really well there's four main categories that were rated on in our space we have

a lot of competitors and we're number one in three of those categories and number two in the fourth so we do really awesome because of that we have 800 sub customers and some really great brands these guys are using primarily Cheerios the main data tool and we're profitable we've done all this with 10 or less engineers our competitors have hundreds of Engineers we've done this because one our engineers are really awesome too we just keep really good coding practices

we keep minimal technical debt we have really strong coding review processes we keep really pragmatic about our codebase and it's never been a better time to build more features onto char do we keep it that way because this will be a product that that will always have continually more and more interesting awesome projects to build on top of it it's like a data language there's all kinds of things to continually build on it so we know that so we're looking for more soon senior and mid-level engineers to join our awesome team and we're also looking for some junior year junior engineers who are really smart and

interesting learning from a really top-notch team so thanks a lot hi everyone my name is Trenton and I'm co-founder and CTO at checker at checker we do background checks we started four years ago and built an API and then discovered a lot more issues around the industry there's a lot of unfairness lot

of inaccuracies and a lack of transparency and we are working to change that every month we work with great customers such as uber and lyft and run 1 1 million background checks every month our team is more than 200 people and we are profitable and making money on the ensuring side I want you to highlight a few challenges we have identity matching Israeli on and it's got to the accuracy of the background checks we use ml to

improve automation and efficiency and it's in production platform reliability is also really key as we process millions of transactions every month and it's really at because we work with 10,000 plus data sources that are really unreliable in unstable and then every feature that you would work on we touch millions of users come chat with us and none more thank you [Applause]

hey everyone I'm John gun co-founder of coin tracker a portfolio and tax manager for cryptocurrency raise your hand if you own cryptocurrency all right pretty tech savvy crowd here basically what coin tracker does is it integrates all the top crypto exchanges and wallets into one unified dashboard and with the click of a button you can file your crypto taxes to underneath the hood in order to file your taxes we are building some foundational tech that relies upon

billions of rows of pricing data across over 2,500 coins over a hundred exchanges and it complies with the local regulations in different places all under a simple easy-to-use interface since we started building this in September we've grown to over 350 million dollars of crypto assets tracked over 55,000 exchange accounts generating over $300,000 of Revenue and this puts us in a unique position to now we can

build even bigger products such as a unified front end for cryptocurrency non-custodial wallets and enterprise crypto accounting software and were backed by some of the best in the industry including the co-founder of Reddit and the founder of protocol labs the first seed investors and coinbase and a bunch of others previously I was a product manager at alphabet my co-founder John was a Google software engineer and successful founder and now you have the opportunity to be a founding engineer and a hyper-growth

startup come find us afterwards and the blue shirts to learn more thank you [Applause] hi we're crowd a aye and we're building an API for change detection for aerial satellite and SAR data why are we doing this we're trying to replace large-scale operations that are primarily manual why is this interesting for you guys to join well we're solving a two-prong technical

problem right the first is the lack of training data for segmentation and we currently have one of the largest segmentation training datasets in the world in over 126 countries and secondly we've built our own convolutional neural net architecture for segmentation of geospatial data in fact we recently placed that cvpr so what are our customers using our data for we currently confined roads better than what's on Google Maps and on open street maps and we work with ride-sharing companies and mapping companies the same

product that we have built is also used by the US government for various finding different types of objects the same the same type of tool that we use for ride-sharing companies mapping companies we also use for insurance and utilities companies in this case we find destruction post wildfires in Santa Rosa as well as flooding in flooding and regions after hurricanes we currently have rolled out a new product for E&P

companies we're one of the only companies if not the only company that can find fracking on a weekly basis if not daily basis why are we so good at what we do we've got a fantastic team of 10 from Google open AI IBM Watson and University of Oxford please come join us as a machine-learning engineer and please talk to me and my colleague Joe Garr over there in the back thank you [Applause]

hi my name is yen hi i'm barsa and I'm max and we're from door - now I was mingling a little bit earlier and people asked door - are you guys still a startup and we are a startup we're still a startup it's been you know four or five years I think one of the advantages of being an older startup is that the founders can now send people to events like this so I'm not a founder but I represent door - and so what is door - I think most of you know what we are we're

a technology company that specializes in food delivery and last-mile logistics I know we're known for food delivery but we are actually expanding into other verticals like groceries so you may have heard this spring we actually started a grocery pilot with Walmart so we're growing very very quickly now some fun facts this spring we raised through 535 million from top investors like Sequoia and Softbank we deliver food from over a hundred thousand

merchants across the nation every day and we're expanding into cities new cities every week and expect to be in sixteen hundred cities by the end of the year now there is you know something with a more mundane service or ordinary service like food delivery but I think one thing you should think about is why do we take it for granted and we take it for granted because that's where society is trending so in a world where you same day delivery becomes ubiquitous and it's actually the norm you know that's kind

of what we're thinking about and that's where we are sort of taking our platform so come join us our booth is pretty obvious so I you know we're good we were very good people work with us and and get you know 80% of a startup experience without all the risk thank you [Applause]

hi I am Peter the CEO of Amber's we issue corporate cards that enforce expense policies so as an employee when you spend on behalf of your business the expense is pre-approved a report is generated and a budget is tracked in real time we started the year with just two full-time founders and we're now at nine employees with three engineers we have 210 clients who collectively spend

more than seven million dollars a month using our product we've been able to scale our business to its current size with just three engineers by being disciplined about code maintainability and by preserving a simplicity of infrastructure I was one of the technical cofounders of a company called Crocodoc that was acquired by box and I've had years of experience working with the other two engineers on the team together we've launched credit cards using both MasterCard and most recently

on the visa payments network as one of the first expense solutions to launch a product using stripes new issuance API as we build our business we're looking for an engineer to take ownership of a sizeable piece of our infrastructure by augmenting our fraud detection algorithms using machine learning or by designing new bot interactions for our slack integration again my name is Peter and I'm joined by Cameron and Winston

the other two engineers on the team we have the only purple table in the other room and I hope to talk to you afterwards [Applause] hi I'm Jared see Hoffer I'm the CEO and co-founder of enzyme I'd like you all to remember three numbers 4 7 and 10 average time to market for a new software medical device is four years

for a hardware device like a pacemaker at seven years and for a new drug ten years why is that well it's kind of a complex question but this is one reason that's an FDA submission and yeah that picture is taking the 60s we've evolved a little since then you can send PDFs now but you're still upset a paper copy bottom line is that if you're in life science tech you're dealing with enormous quantities of data the problem is is that regulated companies have terrible information systems and this

leads to things like wrote work doing paper pushing delays and arbitrary decision making the good news is as software engineers we have an idea on how to fix the terrible information system part how do we do it well we combine a rails web app with an NLP ml back-end that extracts data that users upload and programmatically writes FDA submissions and even though we're working in a regulated environment we still follow software development best practices with hourly CI and weekly

deploys to production most importantly though by automating the FDA approval process we're helping Life Science innovators get their products to market one to three years faster than they otherwise would and our customers are making some really really cool stuff if this excites you we'd love to talk we're hiring for both full stack and NLP and all roles thank you [Applause]

hey everyone i'm michael from vocal systems for the past several decades there's been little to no innovation inside the four walls of brick-and-mortar retail whether it be inventory management like out of stocks or

bear with us cool yeah so where I was leaving off his inventory management is a big problem with inside brick and mortar retailer hasn't been much innovation how we find things on sale or items in the store and the checkout process in general is extremely inefficient there's a lot of friction there and all the friction inside of brick-and-mortar retail right now is driving a lot of us to go a shop online what we're doing at focal systems is we

deploy hardware and software inside retail environments and we use images to provide solutions like out-of-stock detection automated checkout or indoor location to let you know where you are while you're traveling throughout the store currently we're working with six of the world's biggest retailers to solve these challenges and we're looking for deep learning engineers mechanical engineers web engineers and data scientists to scale our business come talk to me at the focal systems booth and looking forward to automating

brick-and-mortar retail with you hello I'm Rock and I had engineering for her her is the largest world's largest LGBTQ female space and queer consumer app we run our mobile app that is used by over

3 million users in specific 5 countries we reach 48 million people per year and we organize over a hundred events that attract or ADA gay people our goal is to make home for world's identities and we want to make every lesbian queer and bisexual person feel at home for us our core values that we feel reflect the entire team is that were great together

that we foster ownership and responsibility that we try to learn and contribute back to the team and we were kind of lonely oh and we will always struggle to do more with less some of the things that that engineers have done and our team recently is a deep and wide deep learning recomendar for meeting new people is this camera detection tool using NLP and we've recently internationalized both more apps first language French for for many

more to come currently we're mostly looking for mobile engineers we're kind of looking for for footfall product oriented engineers who care enough about UX and and are going to help us create some space that has been like traditionally super underserved into something that community will feel and take for its own and we we all work tirelessly on this

goal by by believing that this is something bigger than us that we're creating a better new future for a lot of the demographics that have traditionally been overlooked thank you very much [Applause] hi everyone I'm Betsy Larkin I'm the founder of honey love we are a

direct-to-consumer fashion brand that makes clothing with built-in targeted compression that accentuates body shape we are part of the current YC batch and we're hiring a founding CTO some of you might not be familiar with this space but we've been able to prove that there's a strong demand for our products we raised over $300,000 on Kickstarter in the spring and this past week we started shipping and also launched sales from our website and in just the first

week we brought in over 30,000 dollars in revenue and are also profitable right out of the gate in terms of the founding CTO position we're looking for people who are passionate about creating amazing ecommerce experiences so on on the front end custom checkout flows on the back end you know fulfillment warehouse inventory management software and then as the third team member you guys would also be instrumental in

helping us to build out the team so if that sounds interesting to you please find me thanks [Applause] hello hello my name is Alex Harmsen I'm one of the co-founders of iris automation we build collision avoidance systems for industrial drones drones

that are being used for a railway inspection farming surveys mining exploration even things like package delivery and air taxis about a year ago pretty much every single Aviation Authority around the world mandated this type of collision avoidance system to be on board millions of drones everywhere essentially these drones can't be used for any sort of beyond line of sight operations anything autonomous anything scaled any one of the industries that I

just mentioned without this critical technology and the way we build it is we use computer vision an AI software to be able to allow these drones to see the world the way a pilot does and this is not easy I mean essentially were trait taking these current drones and we're adding these systems to them to be able to actually allow them to see objects at thousands of feet away in real time with size weight and power constraints this

needs to be aviation quality a problem similar to self-driving cars but way harder we do this by modeling human perception and really understanding how pilots see the world ultimately it's software were able to do remote software updates continuously improve the product using the latest embedded GPUs and cameras and we do this by layering sort of traditional geometric computer vision algorithms with more semantic

understanding through artificial intelligence so far we've collected more than 50 terabytes of data of real collisions we have a chief pilot on staff we have drone operators we're going out into different landscapes environments different conditions and collecting all of this data as well as all of our customers internationally not just that we're being we're able to do hundreds of thousands of collisions in simulation in hardware in the loop environments we built up an entire architecture behind the scenes to

make sure that every new algorithm is tested and is worthy for the world we currently we have a twenty five person team we've raised over ten million dollars these systems are actively going out and for us it's a combination of people from the self-driving car world's avionics me my co-founder me and my co-founder we came from Boeing in NASA originally with lots of experience in the drone space so if you're interested in any of what you just heard specifically for computer

vision experts and anyone who's worked on C++ come and find us we have a booth in the other room and a huge sign that you won't miss [Applause] hi everybody my name's Andrew quarry I'm the CEO of level 5 so autonomous cars they're like a really hot thing in 2018

and there's so much hype but autonomous cars still suck and that's really sad so we make maps maps you say haven't maps already been created no we make HD maps and HD maps are really different than regular maps because there are these 3d representations of the environment it includes everything from lean lines

traffic lights signs pedestrian crosswalks pretty much everything you name it and so we're mapping this using cameras and computer vision and how do we do this well we have a program called paver and if you have an iPhone you can download paver and make money just by driving so we have a lot of uber drivers on the platform doing this for us and pavers are really special application because it has on edge machine learning and we really get your phone cooking like we use metal we use Carmel we use

everything and we're running powerful computer vision algorithms to do segmentation to detect cars pedestrians lane lines buildings we like literally get your phone cook and it uses 5% of battery every two minutes or something it's like it's so basically what I'm saying is we need people that help optimize this we have over 10,000 drivers and yeah so we're getting a ton of data and we have like 500 terabytes or 500 we have almost a petabyte of data

and so we take all this the reconstruction happens on the phone but then we send all these point clouds up to the server and we aggregate all this stuff together server-side to create these really really high detailed centimeter level maps of the world and this is like really important for self-driving cars it's like a git diff for maps and self-driving car companies would really need this but we really need you especially if you're an iOS engineer or just someone interested in mapping or autonomous cars or vision or anything like that come

talk to me so yeah come map the world with us thank you so every company you're hearing from today has potential to shape the world but they all have one big problem in common they can't hire enough talent we're fixing that make schools a new model of college focused on training students for high-growth

tech companies like all the companies you're hearing from today we're starting with computer science eventually we might look to robotics biotech and more we have placed our alumni at Google X we've placed alums at open AI one of our alums leads mobile at line bike and about 40% of our students get offers from YC companies that gives you a sense of the talent that's coming out of here but we also care a lot about diversity forty percent of our students are underrepresented students of color and fifty percent are low-income students

we are the first bachelor's granting institution where students can graduate in only two years and they can pay tuition as a percentage of earnings once they graduate instead of building software we want you to build developers but this is not just like any teaching job this is like being a senior engineer mentoring and coaching junior developers our school feels much more like a workplace than a classroom building developers will accelerate the future and maximize your impact it's really high leverage because instead of working

for one company you're training an army of students to go work at all of them you should work with us if you're passionate about teaching and coaching and mentoring if you want to build a scalable system for upward mobility for all the people who don't have the opportunities that we do and you want to help accelerate economic growth everywhere in the world thank you [Applause] got some giggles okay hi my name is hua

I'm the CEO and co-founder of meadow we build cannabis SAS so our products include retail point of sale systems inventory management's automatic compliance reports and delivery we process over 10 million dollars of weed per month and it's growing our mission is to build the best software in the cannabis industry and it's growing from

nine point seven billion dollars last year to forty seven billion dollars in the next ten years this is our team we're a team of ten people working together in San Francisco our engineer team is four three of which are my co-founder so you one of you lucky or two will be our next second or third engineering hire which we're really excited about our front end consists of three react apps the power of the point of sale the power the dispensary management system and then we

have one iPad point-of-sale app that's deployed across all these dispensaries in California we utilize nodejs and really run the latest version utilize the latest JavaScript technology such as async/await come say hi my co-founder Scott and Rick are here wearing our meadow shirts we're looking forward to hanging out with you guys thank you [Applause]

welcome my name is Keith with mystery org we create video explanations for kids questions like why is the sky blue most questions that children ask grown-ups don't know how to answer eventually kids stop asking and their curiosity fades away so we're creating explanations for every question kids have think of us like a visual Wikipedia for kids we're already used by teachers and 50%

of elementary schools in the u.s. we'll do nearly 8 million in sales this year and now we're scaling our platform to answer every question and reach kids everywhere and we need a couple engineers to help us there's 30 people on our team eight of them are engineers these are teams former Facebook Palantir Google and we move fast we deploy code a dozen times a day to production but that's just table stakes we're looking

for engineers that are passionate about creating great product experiences you'll work closely with our designers our customers you'll make product decisions and you'll be surrounded by a group of people that you'll learn from every day people who've contributed to Rails people from the bundler core team people who find Ruby a little slow and will drop in to see and write a custom gem but what is it that you're building this is a new kind of wiki software wiki's are great for a group of people

to collaborate on creating a text document we're building a platform so a group of people can collaborate on creating video explanations for kids so come join us if you want to help the next generation of children grow up and stay curious we'll be across the way Thanks [Applause] who here rents cool 93% of landlords use credit as the primary indicator of who they're going to rent to 67% of people

under the age of 35 have subprime credit scores in America and less than 5% of people will ever be evicted in their life when it comes to renting credit is broken but we figured out how to fix it so neighborly is a credit bureau that has built an AI based credit score for the rental industry that helps landlords know who they're renting to while helping tenants access fair credit and build their credit by just paying their rent we give our product away completely for free and we which includes a credit

report criminal background check everything we make money selling renters insurance and that's allowed us to grow from a thousand to 350,000 rentals in 18 months which is like 1/2 of a percent of America now using us that means that every day 20 people at neighborly decide where thousands of people live which is a responsibility we take super seriously and that's what we need your help with so if you want to solve hard problems with real-world applications of AI building inclusive user experiences that like really need to matter for a

incredibly diverse group of people and you wanna have an impact on something that really matters like housing and credit in America then you should come talk to us thank you [Applause] hello I'm Scott Patterson I head up the engineering team at notable labs where we're doing personalized drug discovery for blood cancer so the basic idea is

that we take a patient's actual cells we test different combinations of approved drugs and we see what kills the cancer and keeps the healthy cells alive we focus on combinations because many of the driver mutations are very difficult to drug with a single drug and in blood cancer particularly if you start with a single drug and they lead to a resistant clone and relapse of the cancer broadly our goal is identifying personalized combinations of approved drugs that a patient can use today we're using the same platform to do drug discovery so

both internally and in partnership with a number of pharma companies the platform we're building consists of our proprietary biology where we're miniaturizing the microenvironment around the cells so that we can scale up and do the number of combinations that we need to test we have our custom built software machine learning to handle automating the analysis and handling these complex scientific workflows and we've automated the whole thing with robotics and lab automation so that we can scale up and have a reproducible assay we're actively hiring software

engineers data scientists and cancer scientists so if you want to work on an awesome mission where you can have an impact on patients lives today with a team super talented and diverse engineers and scientists on a modern tech stack come and talk to us thank you [Applause] hi everyone I'm Lucas from Innova credit I'm the CTO and co-founder and Nova is

the world's first international credit history platform and we have successfully raised a series a recently and are backed by general catalysts and in expenses and of course actively hiring and I'm going to tell you a little bit about about a problem first and in a solution so what is what what is it that we're solving for the problem is that immigrants today they just cannot get credit in foreign markets so all of your credit histories that you

have and you're boring behavior and your payments details they are stuck in their market and this is a really big problem there's a really big problem because if you get into a new market you want to get started you want to get like rental you want to you know sorry renting apartments you want to get a credit card you want to lease a car so how do we solve this problem we solve this problem by having one API for global data so this is creating one standardized format across the world for credit history data

we aggregate from database across all over the world and expose that with one unique API data points so why do you want to want you to work at Nova so we have technical challenges that are really interesting so we have massive ETL pipelines we have infrastructure systems that need to be cross region I need to talk to each other at all times and we face a lot of graph machine learning problems because of all these database across the worlds so come talk at us or sorry come talk to us at our

booth we have talented thirty people at our San Francisco office beautiful furs and yeah just come talk to us we are looking for info infrastructure system engineers spec and engineers for our engineers full psych engineering fiscally across-the-board thank you [Applause] hi everyone i'm kevin the co-founder and CEO of pat rice we are yc4 careers

instead of companies so what does that mean that means we help and mentor students and young professionals to get the best possible job and find fulfilling work everything from outreach tactics the resume review to interview preparation and to negotiation advice one of the things to keep in mind is that we're not a coding bootcamp we're not an interview prep course we're not a replacement for college instead what we do is we guide you through your job search afterwards and help you figure out the stuff in your early career that

nobody else is gonna teach you the catch is it's completely free until you get hired and start work the whole point is that our fellows pay zero dollars out of pocket and instead we recoup our investment back from an income share of their salary only after they've already started their employment it's affordable to anyone accessible to anyone online and we actually have aligned incentives with our fellows you might want to join our team if you want to do more than

just code and would love to spend a significant amount of your time working with students that are aspiring to be engineers you might want to join our team if you want to fix a broken model of career services that it's ridiculous how far and how bad it's gotten and you might want to join our team if you're not looking for a company that's building the next big social media app or gadget you're not looking for a company that's going to maybe provide marginal utilities the hundreds of millions of individuals instead you're

looking for a company that invests in every single fellow that we go through and one where I can say that even if we collapse today there's a hundred students where we've literally changed their lives and for those of you that are less experienced and aspiring engineers for those of you that are still students or recent graduates come talk to us we'd love to give you free advice and any help you might need no strings attached Thanks can't click for me hi my name is

Tracy young I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Plan Greg hello my name is Ralph Judy I'm the CTO and co-founder of plain grid plan grid builds beautiful simple powerful software for the 14 trillion dollar per year construction industry we are part of Y Combinator's winter 2012 batch in the last six years we've helped build over 1 million construction projects today we have customers paying customers in over 80 countries you probably don't

know this but one out of every 10 people in the world eat sleep and breathe construction every single day and for us it's a privilege to be able to write software for some of the hardest working people in the world as an engineer what excites me about playing grid is not only do you get to work on deep technically challenging problems you also get to work with customers that you get to know that love you that love your software and rely on it to get their job done so we're hiring across the board we're hiring mobile developers that's

iOS Android even Windows we've got web back-end Python data science machine learning we're hiring everything we've got a modern stack just like everybody else here we're a diverse team of 350 people and growing we deeply care about fairness in the world in 2016 plan grid took the United States Equal Pay pledge and I am proud to share that we pay our men and women equally we also have thank you

we also have great benefits for individuals and families and we pay well and we would love to meet you plan ger calm Ralph move your head slash careers we're also by this big ass fan over in the other building so come talk to us thank you hi everyone my name is Omni and I am the founder and CEO of poppy our mission

is to build the modern village for every family right now we're doing that by building the platform that connects parents with amazing vetted caregivers when they need childcare why is that important well there's a shiny happy version of Parenthood out there and then there's the super messy kind of reality the reality that needs lots of help and support but for lots of reasons doesn't exist but we believe that you can do that with the amazing people that live in our communities and with a little bit

of thoughtful technology our general thesis is that if you can connect parents with the people that they trust are available when they need them to be and are a really good fit for their families you can really approximate that idea of village and the amazing news is is that over the last two years we've been doing that for thousands of families in Seattle who we've been creating that experience that Sam is talking about that you're looking for that really fanatical product that is really solving real problems for people both on the parent and family side but

then also importantly creating really amazing jobs on the other side but we're only just getting started if you think about how to scale this kind of marketplace there's so many interesting and hard problems to work on what is the right matching model when you're talking about people and families and kids how do you think about supply and demand optimization how do you think about automation when you're thinking about people and overall just how do you create really simple and seamless technology that almost disappears and

becomes invisible within people's lives so we're looking for people smart people that want to solve a really hard really important problem and join our team in Seattle who is made up of really fun amazing dedicated people they really want to solve this really important problem so if you want to solve a real-world problem build features that get into the hands of our users the next day if you're driven by talking to users and really iterating

and understanding how a product can help them and if you want to use your superpowers for good and live in a city that you can actually afford to live in come come and talk to me you can either catch me on Twitter or find me at the booth in the other room thank you [Applause] hello everyone I'm Chris I'm the CEO of

precious precious uses AI to organize the photos of your kids here's the problem my daughter is three years old and I have twenty thousand photos of her in 2018 that's normal our technology will scan that mess well scan that mess find the meaningful moments and build the perfect album for your kids we believe that this is important we believe that this is

important because we believe it's very important to make families happier and stronger we're early C stage company and we're only three people but we already have a lot of traction users love our early product so much that they've given us four and a half star reviews over thousands of river views and we have sixty two thousand subscribers who pay five dollars per month to use our app and these are subscribers over 100 countries around the world that

translates to almost 3 million dollars in annual revenue with a three-person team joining precious won't be for everyone but here's why it might be awesome for you you'll get the impact responsibility and equity of joining an early stage company that also has revenue and profit on a small team we really do want you to take tons of responsibility and ownership come up with ideas on your own and ship them to users quickly and finally we're not a

sweatshop we truly value a work/life balance I have two toddlers and I get home to have dinner with them every single day except for tonight because I can't get home to San Francisco in time so in summary we're precious what we offer to you is a chance to use AI to organize the photos of people's kids we want you to take big responsibilities on our small team and you'll get a chance to come to work to make families happier

stronger everyday that sounds interesting to you please come find me and my co-founder wearing the icon of the smiling baby later I would love to chat with you thanks hi my name is Phaedra and I used to run revenue and operations and attend recent funded startup and I realized that technology

actually had the potential to do incredible good and so a friend and I co-founded promise and we're helping people get out and stay out of jail right now 75% of people in jail have not been convicted of the crime they were arrested for they're there because they cannot afford bail two-thirds of those folks are bail eligible are nonviolent offenders who are stuck in jail what we know is the longer you stay in jail the

more likely you are to go back to jail the more likely you are to lose your job the more likely AR you are to lose your housing the more likely you are to have serious consequences so what do we do about it well the good thing is that there is a solution with software first most people are likely to go to jail for technical violations that's like they miss an appointment with their probation officer and so software can actually help figure out how do you make your appointments where should you be how do you speak and connect we can do all of

that through software more importantly we can give people tools about how to analyze data so that we can start to figure out who should not be in jail we have an incredible team Mike to my left we got from uber who wants to work at that little startup when you could work here we stole our engineering lead from stripe again I mean come on big choice promise and so we have an incredible team of people who have not just raised money from incredible investors like

first round capital and jay-z but that we are committed to social change with the best people leaving the best places to create a company that actually can create equity and use technology to scale justice thank you [Applause] Wow what a motivating startup let's give it up for promise that was awesome yeah [Applause]

I'm one of the founders of a company called quartz II I'm Jay and this is Sylvie and we are here to talk about how we accelerate the pace of scientific discovery so what is quasi we've built the operating system for scientific labs all over the world and labs use us to run their operations and the way we make money is not through the software we give the software away for free so labs in India in China all over the world can

benefit from the software productivity we make money when we labs buy their supplies from us so what we are doing is pretty hard we build world-class software for companies all over the world and we give it away for free and we make money when we ship supplies to them so it's Salesforce and Amazon put together we have a million cubic foot warehouse in the East Bay and we are opening up a new warehouse on the west coast in the coming year so who are our customers this is Elizabeth Elizabeth Blackburn she got the Nobel Prize in

2009 and she's one of the nine Nobel Prize winners on quartz e today we have more scientists who won the Nobel Prize using our application than any academic institution in the world but it's only not small labs biology is going to reshape the way we live the same way that physics and computer science change the 20th century biology will reshape the 21st century and we are building the platform to make that happen one of our customers is using molecular biology to make plant-based protein and

they buy from us but that's not just startups we have publicly traded Pharma and biotech companies who use us and buy from us we have 4,000 customers nationally we've made 30 million dollars in sales this year we're a 60% company so it's a right time to join us where we sort of like pull out the business model and now we are going to scale this up globally and while do you work with us so what's it like to work at courtsey I think at court see you could be joining a team of the most genuine ambitious and

driven people that I've ever met and we focus not only on helping art the scientist but also helping each other succeed so come join us you know we're located h HQ in palo alto if you like the sunny California weather but if you like breweries and cheaper rent we also offer remote positions so you could be working in Portland or if you want to be like the stock photo and code in a suit or take a month off in or not off but spend the month in Maui you know

we have those remote opportunities as well so all coming together we have science people and remote opportunities [Applause] alright hey everybody so we're reach labs and reach Labs is long-range wireless electricity but that's actually useful so we're able to

provide a reliable source of power to any enabled device without a physical tether and the reason that we're building this is not only to augment you know current devices charge cell phones charge robots etc but more to enable applications that couldn't exist without this technology and we'd be willing to talk more about that become say hi to us so the fun part is sort of how we do it and we use high dimensional adaptive antenna arrays wrapped with a lot of nonlinear optimization algorithmic control to pinpoint devices and a power

network with radio transmission so we're able to send energy through the air just in the same way that Wi-Fi sends data you know we're founded out of MIT so we're kind of nerds for research one of the big things that we really like to do is you know scrape the world of electromagnetic research optimization research and incorporate that into our core products so our initial applications are actually unfortunately not to charge your cell phones but are rather focused on need to have applications which arrives most often in

the industrial sector so that's you know IOT sensors autonomous robotics and then you know charging a lot of machinery concurrently company developments we did just close our Series A with data collective VC so they're very sort of top tier high tech firm so we refresh with funding and we're scaling up to be able to make our initial deployments and take on our first clients we've got a pipeline of clients that are waiting so all we need is the engineers to help us integrate like I said we're looking for

talented inspired people people that like researching fast-paced development etc we're a very small team there's only five of us all of us are here so a lot of people have talked about company culture I think that our culture is best demonstrated by our people we work out of an old cookie factory from 1903 in Oakland and if we're nothing if not eclectic so you can come see us we're all wearing these shirts and we're nice people this is what we're hiring for embedded systems RF Hardware electrical engineering and software development we

got a demo running so we'd love to chat with y'all Thanks hello everyone my name is I'm Jed mossad I'm the co-founder and CEO of repli'd so 2018 and it still sucks getting started into programming it's really hard I mean we're all engineers anyone here just loves sending

up the development environment like that's something they're looking forward to so what one person our back don't come work for us but it's still really hard so like imagine if there's a way to get started with programming in just two seconds an online IDE with zero setup a full-featured IDE you'll have things like code intelligence as your coding you'll you'll see suggestions and it's full-blown code intelligence for most of the languages that we support and we support 40 programming languages also

live deployment the moment you open a port and R applet you just deploy your app that's how easy it is to deploy apps there's a lot more I know people are talking a lot but I thought the presentation was only 90 seconds so I didn't put all the features which will take me an hour to to get through but you know if you like this kind of stuff if you like building tools if you're a hacker you know our mission is to get the next billion programmers online and we're only 0.1% of the way there you do

the math so fun and challenging problems we're working on container orchestration system on the back end should be two file system and we're building the world's fastest IDE so come talk to me afterwards Thanks [Applause] hey i'm david and we're retool retool is

a dramatically faster way of building custom internal tools so let's say your youtube and somebody's uploaded a really dodgy video you want to be able to approve or reject that video that's an example of a custom internal tool our insight is that all custom internal tools all have the exact same building blocks like tables buttons and etc and so retool gives you all these building blocks so you can drag-and-drop and mix and match them together and build any

custom internal tool you might want that's much faster than building it from scratch every single time and the market is huge 50% of all code written goes towards internal tools that might sound really surprising here in Silicon Valley but that's because our job is to write code for other people if you think about all the companies outside of the valley like coca-cola all of the code they write is all purely internal stuff and so so much code goes towards internal

tools and we can make internal tools so much faster that's a tremendously valuable problem we started around a year ago and we're currently just two founders so looking for a first engineer or a profitable over there's a seed round from the founders of stripe open AI etc so if you enjoy working on really hard problems and I want to have a high impact on the product and engineering come talk to us after Thanks [Applause]

hey everyone I'm Alex CEO and founder of scale our vision is to accelerate the development of AI applications it's no secret that deep supervised learning is training changing the world and the problem is really that you require a ton of data to build supervised deep learning Google's internal Street View data set was more than 2 billion images for a sense of scale what's really interesting is with supervised deep learning in particular you have a new

way to improve your software and that's labeling ground truth data so it turns out that for most of these production use cases labeling ground truth data is the biggest ball neck for ultimately building incredible applications so what we've built is an end-to-end API driven platform for getting ground truth data we've only been around for two years but we've already become the standard for ground truth data in the self-driving car in computer vision industries we work with almost every us-based

self-driving company including companies like cruise zooks lift as well as tech giants like Pinterest and Airbnb the real challenge that we have is using AI and great user experience to make humans very efficient at this task of labeling there's no better place than scale to work on problems like active learning and semi-supervised learning to make the process of getting tons of high-quality ground truth data very efficiently our

team is really really incredible we just wrote a blog post that shows everyone's backgrounds that you can read about they hail from companies like open AI Google Dropbox Facebook cruise etc we have two gold medalists on our team so I I'm very proud of the team that we've built it's about 30 people right now and then we're a series B company we've been invested in by accel Index Ventures as well as drew Houston and Greg Brockman so we're

building the AWS for AI data labeling is just our first product and really sort of building the shovels in the gold rush of AI thank you hello everyone I'm Dan Knox and one of the founders of science exchange science exchange is a marketplace for scientific collaboration or as The Economist put it

where Ober for experiments so core product is a online platform enterprise platform that is used by scientists at thousands of the world's top R&D organizations like the one shown here the life sciences aerospace consumer products and others we have true product market fit since raising our Series C last year we've tripled our revenue and it's a really exciting time for the company things are really taking off so a lot of

great companies presenting here today why should you think about joining science exchange so let's run through a couple of reasons so first we're a truly mission driven company our mission is an important one to improve the quality and efficiency of scientific research and it's the heart of everything we do second we're still a smallish team for a Serie C company there's about 80 of us so far eight zero with twenty across product and engineering so it's a scale wire you know scale wise it's a great time to

join the company because it's still a time we can make a big impact on the company's success and there's still a lot of upside third we have a collaborative engineering culture it's a supportive environment that really supports rapid skills development career growth and has a true ownership mentality fourth we have a diverse team we truly value diversity and inclusion for instance team currently has a 50/50 gender split we have a female CEO my

co-founder Elizabeth and a female VP of engineering and fourth fifth downtown Palo Alto we have an office just off University Avenue short walk from the Caltrain and about to move into a ball and use space to accommodate our growth there you go five reasons to think about joining science exchange you can learn more in our careers page come see me dear B or Shawn afterwards thanks so much [Applause]

hello everybody don't fall asleep on me okay I'm Luciano I'm the CTO and co-founder of scope AI or NLP powered analytics platform for customer conversations so today companies received thousands of unstructured customer feedback every day and they spend hours manually tagging it to be able to create reports and presentations for their companies we automate the entire process which is why they love us anybody can log in right now and find out what a customer saying about any topic and how they feel about it how do we do this we plug in directly to all

the sources we extract valuable data from the text and then we build one of the world's only text based analytics Suites to be able to explore that data what's extraction looks like so it's easy to find out in the text that somebody said cancel but what's hard is figuring out why that's a cancel and we use things like semantic role labeling a dependency parsing to decipher what customers are saying how they feel about certain things on the analytics suite we're building one of the only text-based analytics platform so you'll be building trending or trending methods

and anomaly detection methods for text as well as predictive models so what's gonna happen in December you'll be building visualizations for text that go way beyond say word clouds but it's even bigger than that so we have a customer feedback we ingest the business actions and we ingest the financial metrics and that allows us to automate decision-making for companies why you know what customers are saying you know what happened when they said that and you know what you did to remedy a situation so you know next time what you have to do like a door - team said we're

good people okay so come talk to us I met my co-founder Harvard we have an amazing set of X linked in X Google employees if you're excited about NLP if you're excited about ml and production if you excited about data especially textual data come shop with us I'm easy to make laughs so if you want to come tell me jokes I'm also great at that but yeah if you're excited about you know really being able to listen to customers and any be able to map that the decision-making please come chat with us thank you

[Applause] oops hi everybody I'm clam from shown and as shown we are bringing autonomous cargo ships to market as I'm sure you all know autonomy is happening everywhere in cars trikes drones yet today cargo ships are still operated raining efficiently by a crew of 25 people so our solution that shown is to

retrofit existing ships with autonomous technology to bring that number down from 25 to 15 so we've started about a year ago and at that time we didn't have access to a cargo ship mainly because they cost 100 million dollar-plus so we bought a small boat like this one and retrofitted it to prove autonomy since then we've done a lot of work we've been through ways here at the beginning of the year we've raised the four million sit round and we have a pilot going on with the third biggest shipping line in the world and that

allows us to have technology installed on three of their cargo ships operating between the u.s. west coast and China in the same at the same time we've run from three founders coming from self-driving and drones to a team diversity of nine people including seven engineers and we are looking for many more talented people like you to help us by creating intelligent algorithms to understand what's happening around the ships but also communicate and information to the crew in a sensible way and also make the traumatic decisions based on that you

know in order for the ships to be autonomous we also have a ton of data every week we collect over a terabyte of data for every ship we have and finally we need people who can understand how all of the systems on a ship work and help us to integrate on new ships as well growing so thank you very much come talk to us [Applause] hey guys my name is Stefan and I'm the

CEO and co-founder of starsky robotics and we're making driverless trucks so some of you might know this some of you probably don't but the biggest problem in North American logistics is that it's really really hard to get a person to spend a month at a time in a truck the reason it's it's such a big problem that even though it pays sixty to ninety thousand dollars a year without a high school diploma there's still a shortage of fifty thousand drivers so the problem here is not make something autonomous the problem is make trucks drive without people at them and that's what we're doing we're making trucks autonomous on

the highway where autonomy is easiest but teleoperated for the first and last mile is gonna stop there we go um so what you're gonna see here is one of our trucks driving down the road in Florida with no person sitting behind the wheel the telly operator comfortably sitting in air conditioning a hundred miles away issues high-level controls like changing lanes changing speed the types of context based decisions that humans are great at and robots are really hard to teach we're gonna take

we're gonna take people out of the truck and haul Freight with them on a regular basis this year but we need help our core products built on top of Ross with with C++ and Python we're looking for machine learning people with experience and things like tensorflow and cafe we need a lot of help with controls people with experience with linear and nonlinear controllers but then we're also looking for full stack engineers data engineers and all sorts of other roles there's a it's really easy to apply for us you can just go to starsky dot io and and apply right now on your phone or on your laptop we're starsky robotics we're doing

driverless trucks [Applause] hello welcome to YC so my name is Joe I'm the founder of a company called universe universe is an app that lets you make an awesome website from your phone well there are plenty of website builders out there this is the only one designed from the ground up for phones here's how it works

your canvas is a grid on the grid sit blocks a block could be anything you want to put on your website whether it's a an image or a song and you move these around like Lego put them and do whatever you want with them the things people are creating are incredible diversity is absolutely staggering it's inspiring and it's working we were part

of ycs winter batch this past year we hit 175,000 sites created and we just closed our series a a 4 million dollar round by some of the best investors in the valley including General Catalyst and javelin partners so now we're growing we are looking for an iOS engineer someone who loves building incredible experiences and wants to help us make our app even better this is a roll who open to anybody anywhere we are

a distributed company we don't have a stocked kitchen with free snacks but we give you freedom and we give you purpose this is about check we believe that everybody should

build the Internet not just people like us and we build tools to empower everybody to do that we're looking for our sixth member we're looking for people who are self driven whip-smart and want to be part of something amazing so find us in the black t-shirts [Applause]

hi my name is Hannon I'm a co-founder at bland C we build and operate long-range high payload drones we started back in 2015 we are based in San Francisco and were backed by some of the most prominent Silicon Valley VCS I know what you're thinking I had the exact same thought when I started a company drone deliveries isn't Amazon doing that well first of all the answer is no second we're not planning to

deliver your toothbrush to your backyard using drones we help deliver critical supplies to our enterprise customers in need of a spare part and we help deliver medical supplies to hard-to-reach areas affected by a natural disaster we also do some super complicated cool stuff like landing a 15-foot drone on a moving vessel in the middle of the ocean to enable ship to shore deliveries and vice versa we are super experienced smart

team of 20 people spread across multiple groups and we are looking to hire more people for our production and our D teams if you're looking for your next challenge come speak to us after this presentation thank you [Applause] how's it going I am max I am one of the cofounders of volley and we make

voice-controlled games for Alexa and Google home so what is a voice-controlled game I got a couple examples for you here the left one yes sire basically choose your own adventure interactive fiction set in medieval times kind of like those old books probably some of you used to read the other ones song quiz is sort of a name that tune music trivia game where we play short clips of pop music and you try to name the title or the artist and that one actually is the number one game on Alexa which is pretty cool so why join volley three big reasons I think

one is reach the second is cool up-and-coming technology and the third look we literally make fun so first thank you Jed we have a number one game on Alexa we have over half a million monthly active players and growing and just a small team of eight full-time employees supporting that Alexa and Google home are exploding there are over 50 million devices sold last year and that's gonna double or triple again this year technology is the future look we make voice controlled software it's pretty cool we work on speech

recognition natural language processing and we do it all on top of a service AWS lamda stack we also get cool sort of early access to Amazon and Google technology so if you want beta programs and you kind of want to know what those companies are up to we're the first ones to do it on voice finally as I said we literally make fun I mean my job is to bring joy into people's lives every day and yours could be too I think it's a pretty cool opportunity and you know gets me up every day to go to work so we are volley

we make games for Alexa and Google home we have a number one game on the Alexus store we're working on up-and-coming technologies and look I mean if you want to get up every day and entertain people come find us afterwards thank you [Applause] alright hey everyone I'm Brandon Leonardo one of the founders of instacart we do same-day grocery

delivery it's actually kind of weird like six years ago is three of us in a building over there and and now here we are and we sell billions of dollars a year in groceries and we do millions of deliveries a month and we've got a team of about 150 engineers about 500 all in that are helping us do that our objective over the next few years is really to be the world leader in online groceries and our primary like you know goal and that is to build a team to win and that's something that's inclusive of

our shoppers so we've got tens of thousands of shoppers out in the field shopping every day and we're gonna need you know hundreds of thousands over the next year to achieve our goals and that also means you know we're about a team of 150 right now we're hiring about another 200 over the next 12 to 15 months so that's where you come in I think when you think about like where you want to work next there's a couple questions that like people seem to care about one of them is culture so I thought I'd touch really briefly on that and I'm wearing this shirt that you

can't see but it says solve for the customer which is our primary cultural value and at the end of the day the customer is placing their order on instacart getting the groceries delivered is our North Star and we're very like customer focused company that's something that matters a lot to us and then as far as challenges and engineering problems and things that we need to work on you throw a dart and you can hit one you know the things that keep me up at night are new more numerous and we have

scaling problems we're growing faster now than we were a year ago we've actually doubled our growth rate in the last year which is insane if you know that's like a completely magical experience our team is still pretty small I think that individually you can have a huge impact on the trajectory of the company I think that you can have a huge impact on your own growth and your own learning your own success so I would say come join us come ask us questions about the rest of our cultural values and the things that we care about come out there's questions about the rest of our engineering challenges we've got James over there

who's on the catalog team and Michael who Lee's recruiting and I'm also last so thank you so much for your time and thank you for hearing us how [Applause] you
