Today marks the 20th anniversary of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has fostered companies that have changed the world. YC has brought us innovations like “making everything an app” and horrifying founders we all have to live with, like “Sam Altman.”
Founded in 2005, Y Combinator has helped to launch thousands of companies. Its mere existence disrupted how venture capital-backed technology firms do business. We all live with the consequences. Here are some of them.
DoorDash
A taxi for your burrito. That’s the pitch. Founded in 2013, the company promised to improve food delivery for everyone. It ushered in an era where anyone could get delivery from any restaurant at any time.
To make that happen, it brutalized delivery drivers, ripped off restaurants, and raised prices on its customers. It’s a bad deal for everyone involved except, of course, DoorDash. All so you can get cold food from a chain restaurant at double what you would have paid if you’d just gone and eaten it there.
Airbnb
Airbnb’s disruption of the hotel industry is so far-reaching that it’s spawned a new subgenre of horror fiction. Airbnb fits a Silicon Valley template that will be repeated throughout Y Combinator’s history. Take a solved problem and disrupt it so you can make a mint rent-seeking.
Over thousands of years, humans had developed customs, laws, and systems for providing travelers and visitors safe lodging. Airbnb said, “What if you could make your home a timeshare and skip all those pesky norms and laws?”
The result? A corrosive hit to the U.S. real estate market, TikTok videos in which the host is living in the walls of the Airbnb, and the movie Barbarian.
Twitch
What if you could play video games with your friends, but like, as a job? Say hello to Twitch, a place where some of the worst personalities on the internet would eventually gather and develop parasocial relationships and wage war with reality around them.
It’s hard to make money on Twitch; only a small percentage of people break through. But if you do, you can look forward to working 10 hours straight without using the bathroom, getting banned by a capricious Amazon-owned company, fighting audience capture, and wrecking your physical health.
Sam Altman
OpenAI founder and AI evangelist worked for YC from 2011 to 2019 before he left to run OpenAI full time. Altman was president of YC starting in 2014, and his tenure saw explosive growth at the company.
Now we see his pinched little face every time we open up a news story about AI and live in a world where large language models like ChatGPT are helping kids cheat on their homework and writing your boss’s PowerPoint Slides.
We have not even begun to reckon with Sam Altman and his consequences for the human race.
The appification of life itself
In 2011, Marc Andreeseen declared that “software is eating the world.” He was right. We live in a world filled with unnecessary intercessions between us and basic tasks. It seems you can’t buy basic goods and services these days without downloading an app to support them.
Did you buy new lights on Amazon? They run on an app. Want to get a new car? Gonna have to get an app to make it run. Wanna grab brunch on a Sunday? Better use the restaurant’s app to reserve a table. Wanna browse the menu before you go? App.
Why is this happening? In part, because the world saw the success of companies like Instacart, DoorDash, and other YC-backed ventures. Software and apps were a great way to create new middlemen. Some of them offered new services, but a lot of them just figured out a way to charge for stuff that once was simple and cheap, if not free.
9 gag
If your buddy sends you a meme that hasn’t been funny in 10 years and it doesn’t have an “ifunny.co” watermark on it, then it probably came from 9gag. This website is where jokes, memes, and videos from last year’s Reddit threads go to die. Y Combinator funded it.
Speaking of Reddit …
Look, we all love Reddit. Yes, it’s been the birthplace for some horrible things. But it’s also one of the only places you can go to get real answers to burning questions. Adding “Reddit” at the end of a Google search query is one of the only ways to find stuff on the internet now.
However, Reddit has birthed weird cultural trends we all have to contend with. Worst among them …
Couples who met on Reddit
If Y Combinator had never backed Reddit we wouldn’t have Malcolm and Simone Collins, the pro-natalist weirdos who go viral every few years. (Most recently in The New Yorker) Where did they get their start? Reddit. Malcolm proposed to Simone on Reddit using “advice animal” memes. Then he wrote about it for The Huffington Post.
A lot of people have Malcoms and Simones in their real life. People who are too online and spend so much time on Reddit they can’t hold a conversation without bringing up bacon, narwhals, or the disappointing contents of an ancient safe.
The tech hype cycle
Selling Silicon Valley to the rest of the world requires keen marketing. To get people to buy a new app, a new piece of software, or a new “innovation” requires a good story. It requires hype. YC is a machine that builds hype. To be incubated by the startup machine is a story itself and being chosen by YC is enough to make audiences, and the market, pay attention.
Sure, most of these ventures fail. Bubbles burst. But a lot of people will make a lot of money while it’s inflating. See: YC Alum Sam Altman.
“Founder” Culture
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. Founders. Mythological figures that stride through America’s consciousness bending the world to their will. YC has incubated more than just companies, it’s incubated founders. If you’re a CEO picked by YC and you’re savvy enough, you can become a celebrity in your own right and use that to parlay into the next thing if your company fails.
And it’ll probably fail.
YC has a whole “founders directory” that will let you sort through the famous faces who have passed through its doors. Sure, companies are collaborative enterprises that require massive amounts of talented and hardworking people cooperating to succeed. But in today’s social media and celebrity-driven world, it’s the “face” of the company that matters. Over the past 20 years, YC has helped founders become that face.
Last year, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham went viral with his essay titled “Founder Mode,” which detailed the power of founders not listening to the beaurocrats around them and going with their gut.
Those founders now think they’re the center of the universe. Backed by VC money and plumped up by parasocial online relationships and an army of yes-men, founders are doing some of the worst work in America today.
Anti-journalist sentiment in tech
Some people think the tech press is too easy on tech. “Founders” and YC think it’s too hard. The beef between the YC-backed founder community and journalists is long, fraught, and complicated. YC founder Paul Graham signed a petition that chastised The New York Times in 2020.
When the Wall Street Journal outed Theranos as a fraud, then-YC president Altman rushed to her defense on Twitter. “Slam pieces tell one side of a story. I do think Theranos should be more transparent, but ppl shouldn’t pray for failure.”
Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan gave a speech at a YC event in 2013 that ruffled journalists’ feathers. Later, Srinivasan sent an email to tech-right weirdo and Peter Thiel court wizard Curtis Yarvan advocating for the harassment of a journalist to set an example. “If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to their advertisers/friends/contacts,” he said in the email.
YC and its founder culture fostered the ideology we now live with, one that’s hostile to journalists. One where a tech-bro is rampaging through the federal government.
Coinbase
All your worst tech-brained friends saw the possibilities of cryptocurrency when Bitcoin launched in 2009. The problem was making it easy for normies to get their money into the system. Enter Coinbase, the YC-backed company that helps people trade crypto of all types in just a few minutes.
OpenSea
Do you remember NFTs? The blockchain-backed JPGs were all the rage among a certain kind of terminally online person just a few years ago. The bottom dropped out sometime around when Paris Hilton told Jimmy Fallon she’d bought a Bored Ape.
YC-backed OpenSea was a place where people could buy, sell, and trade all their favorite ugly JPGs and helped make the trend accessible to normies. Then, the whole market collapsed.
Assembly HOA
No one likes their Homeowners Association. HOA’s are draconian nightmares that sick the cops on people who haven’t cut their lawns. They levy fees and punish people in communities who don’t conform to often arbitrary standards.
What if you added AI to that process? Say hello to Assembly HOA, a YC-backed startup that promises to make running an HOA transparent and efficient.
OMGPop
Largely forgotten now, OMGPop was a flash game studio that was gobbled up by Zynga in 2013. The bigger company ate its games and then shut OMGPop down just months after buying it.
OMGPop was a pioneer of the flashy, fun, and addictive quick and simple games that would come to dominate the mobile video game market. Six years after its closure, hackers uncovered millions of plaintext passwords and email addresses related to OMGPop in a Zynga database and exposed them online proving that your favorite game may vanish but the personal data it housed will live forever in an unsecure corporate database.
uBiome
uBiome is the Showtime to Theranos’ HBO. Elizabeth Holmes promised fast and safe blood tests. uBiome promised safe and fast poop tests. The promise of extracting data from stool samples was powerful enough for YC and other investors to invest $83 million.
But uBiome’s founders were lying and the FBI raided its labs in 2019. Two years later the SEC charged its co-founders with defrauding investors.
Cruise
The ultimate goal of Tesla and Uber is the self-driving car. Silicon Valley dreams of a world where automated cars cruise up and down America’s highways. YC-backed Cruise was one of the first companies to pitch this dream to the world.
It’s not working out at the moment. There have been a lot of self-driving car accidents, and it’s hard to know if the technology will ever be safe and widely available to the public. Tesla, Uber, and others keep hoping and pushing for us to let go and let tech take the wheel.
GM gobbled up Cruise in 2016. It began the process of shutting down in 2025.
Future horrors
Y Combinator isn’t done fostering innovation. Tomorrow’s Twitch.com, DoorDash, or OMGPop is waiting somewhere on the list of companies it’s backing. Let’s take a look at some upcoming contenders.
Big Tech finds Jesus
America has a long and strange history of Christian revival movements. This country loves to shape the word of the Lord to its own ends. Last year, billionaire ghoul Peter Thiel gave a “sermon” at a meeting of a nonprofit called the Acts 17 Collective. Y Combinator’s newest CEO, Garry Tan, was there to lead the discussion as well. The group is putting millions into spreading the tech-tinged Gospel throughout San Francisco. A spiritual and religious revival in the Bay Area? These things have never gone wrong before.
Ares Industries – Disrupting cruise missiles
What does the future hold for Y Combinator? Missiles. In the summer of 2024, the startup accelerator backed its first defense company. Ares plans to build low-cost cruise missiles for the DoD.
Optifye.ai – Keeping an eye on factory workers
Another new venture fostered by Y Combinator is Optifye.ai, a company that will provide “AI performance monitoring for factory workers.” The bold new company will use AI and surveillance to watch factory workers and allow the boss to yell at them remotely from the comfort of their home office.
