Y Combinator: Partners

Partners

Trevor Blackwell is the founder of Anybots, where he developed the first dynamically balancing biped robot. He has published papers on congestion control in high speed wide area networks, signalling protocol architecture, and file system performance. For fun he reverse-engineered the Segway, writing all the software in one day. He has a BEng from Carleton, and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Paul Buchheit is the creator of GMail. While at Google he also built the prototype for AdSense, and came up with Google's now famous slogan "Don't be evil." In 2007 he was one of the founders of Friendfeed, which in 2009 became Facebook's largest acquisition to date. He has a BS and MS in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.

Paul Graham is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first SaaS company, which in 1998 became Yahoo Store. In 2002 he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm that inspired the current generation of filters. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Jessica Livingston was previously VP of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness, where she managed an award-winning rebranding of the company. She is the author of Founders at Work (2007), a book of interviews with startup founders. She has a BA in English from Bucknell.

Robert Morris is a professor of computer science at MIT, where he is a member of the PDOS group. He has published extensively on wireless networks, distributed operating systems, and peer-to-peer applications. In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public. He has an AB and PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Geoff Ralston was a founder of Four11, where he built RocketMail, one of the first web mail services, which in 1997 became Yahoo Mail. At Yahoo Geoff worked in engineering, then ran a business unit, then became Chief Product Officer. After Yahoo he was CEO of Lala, which was acquired in 2009 by Apple. He has an AB in Computer Science from Dartmouth, an MS in Computer Science from Stanford, and an MBA from INSEAD.

Harj Taggar was previously founder of Auctomatic, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2007 and was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008. He graduated in 2006 from Oxford, where he studied law.