I’m Kat Mañalac, one of the partners at Y Combinator. I’m guest editing the YC newsletter this week. If you like the format, tweet me @katmanalac. If you don’t, email craig@ycombinator.com. 🙂

YC Startup Launches

It’s one week to YC S17 Demo Day, so we’re in the throes of helping this batch of startups prepare their presentation decks and lock in their last LOIs.

Here is a look at the YC S17 companies that launched in the past week:

70MillionJobs – It’s Hard For People With Criminal Records To Get A Job–This Job Site Can Help (Fast Company)

Dropleaf – Dropleaf has a dual-goal: Making it easier to find indie games and lift diversity (VentureBeat)

Honeydue – Honeydue is a management app for couples (TechCrunch)

Escher Reality – Escher Reality is building the backend for cross-platform mobile AR (TechCrunch)

Lambda School – Lambda School aims to cash in by upskilling untapped talent (TechCrunch)

PAYFAZZ – PAYFAZZ wants to build a network of distributed bank agents in Indonesia (TechCrunch)

Modern Fertility – Former Uber, 23AndMe Execs Launch Fertility Startup Offering $149 At-Home Tests (Forbes)

PullRequest – PullRequest wants to be your company code reviewer (TechCrunch)

On The YC Blog

Jeff Dean’s Lecture for YC AI: Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow in the Research Group, spoke to the AI companies in this batch of YC. This is the talk he gave, along with his slides.

Lessons From a Quarter Million Emails – Spencer Wright sends out a great newsletter on engineering and manufacturing called The Prepared. He shared some of the lessons he’s learned from sending out a quarter million emails since 2013.

Padmasree Warrior on Designing Autonomous Vehicles – Padmasree Warrior, CEO of NIO, has been called the “Queen of the Electric Car business“. In this fireside chat with YC partner Anu Hariharan, she talks about how she got started, where she thinks self-driving is heading and tactical advice on hiring.

Quick Links

Khallil Mangalji from Fiix (YC W17) made this video to share the story of how he “started a company, got into YC, got cancer, raised over $1m, and got cancer again.”

Katie Smillie, an iOS developer working on Breaker (YC W17) wrote How we Skip Silences in podcasts with AVAudioPlayer.

OpenAI created an AI which beats the world’s top professionals at 1v1 matches of Dota 2. They competed at The International and you can watch the video here.

Still Relevant

A video from our archive that seem particularly relevant this week.

The SoundCloud news this week reminded me of YC Partner Dalton Caldwell’s 2010 Startup School talk on why you shouldn’t start a music startup. Though it looks like SoundCloud will live to see another day, this piece “If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?” By Jenna Wortham is worth a read.

Top Posts on Hacker News

• Internet Draft: Let ‘localhost’ be localhost (ietf.org)
• Show HN: Is the stock market going to crash? (isthestockmarketgoingtocrash.com)
• Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them (newyorker.com)
• Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery (brendangregg.com)
• The Internet Archive has digitized 25,000 78rpm Gramophone records (archive.org)
• Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content (thewaltdisneycompany.com)
• uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions (discourse.mozilla.org)
• DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment (deepmind.com)
• Four Earth-sized planets detected orbiting the nearest sun-like star (ucsc.edu)
• A rising sentiment that IBM’s Watson can’t deliver on its promises (gizmodo.com)
• Ask HN: Projects that don’t make you money but you’re doing it out of sheer joy?
• Jessamyn West, Technology Lady (2015) (medium.com)
• I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon (petapixel.com)
• Big brother is here, and his name is Facebook (thenextweb.com)
• An Intro to Compilers (nicoleorchard.com)
• Annual note to self: most of the world exists outside the tech bubble (steveblank.com)