We put together a list of the top YC companies by valuation as of October 2018. You can see that list at https://ycombinator.com/topcompanies.

Here’s a Q&A with Joris Poort and Adam McKenzie, Cofounders of Rescale, one of the companies featured on the list.

---

What does Rescale make/do?
Rescale is the leader in enterprise big compute. Rescale empowers the world’s transformative executives, IT leaders, engineers, and scientists to securely manage and accelerate innovation to be first to market. Rescale’s ScaleX® multi-cloud platform, built on the most powerful high-performance computing infrastructure, seamlessly matches software applications with the best architecture in the cloud or on-premise to run complex data processing and simulations. Rescale has over 125 Global 2000 enterprise customers including four of top five largest global automotive manufacturers and two of top three largest global aerospace and defense companies.

How many employees does Rescale have?
80+

How many founders?
2

What is your most impressive recent product milestone?
Rescale has recently released several hybrid platform solutions that allow customers to deploy on-premise, hybrid, cloud, and multi-cloud infrastructure strategies to execute on digital transformation capabilities managed by a single unified API and PaaS interface. Rescale’s infrastructure backbone has scaled through over a year of 30% month-over-month growth.

What is the larger impact / societal impact of your product in the space you work within?
Rescale enables the world’s leading companies and people to innovate faster across industries. For example, Rescale is directly accelerating the product development of the most efficient aircraft, automobiles and rockets. Semiconductor development and electronic design automation capabilities are significantly improved by the platform. Rescale is also accelerating advancements in computational drug discovery, medical device development and bioinformatics.

What’s an interesting element of Rescale’s company culture?
Rescale has embraced the leadership principles developed by Jeff Bezos (one of the first Rescale investors). Those include:

1. Customer Obsession
2. Ownership
3. Invent and Simplify
4. Are Right, A Lot
5. Learn and Be Curious
6. Hire and Develop the Best
7. Insist on the Highest Standards
8. Think Big
9. Bias for Action
10. Frugality
11. Earn Trust
12. Dive Deep
13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
14. Deliver Results

Additionally, here are Joris’ recommended top books to read:
High Growth Handbook By Elad Gil

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future By Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers By Ben Horowitz

The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership By Bill Walsh with Steve Jamison and Craig Walsh

Looking back, what motivated you to start Rescale?
Rescale started from our time at Boeing, where we were aerospace engineers optimizing the 787 wing structure. We needed an elastic high performance computing environment, including both hardware and simulation software, along with the glue to create a complex workflow and run it efficiently. A few years later, once high-performance hardware was available in the cloud, we set out to build the we were looking for when we were at Boeing, and deliver it to engineers and scientists around the globe.

Is what you’re working on now the original idea or did you pivot?
The original idea.

Were there moments where you thought the company might die? Describe one of those and anything you learned from it.
Market timing is one of the most challenging elements of any startup. Make sure you have the team and product strategy that will help you navigate the ups and downs. Treat every investment dollar as if it is your last and make sure you are building a long-term sustainable business.

What was a particularly important insight you had about your market that made your product work?
Many of the world’s most challenging problems are still compute bound – from optimizing the world’s most efficient aircraft to discovering life-saving drugs. Most people assume that there is ubiquitous access to the best and latest IT hardware in large enterprises that face these challenges, however most end-users are highly restricted in their ability to bring the latest computing capability to bear. Rescale helps to effectively bring the most efficient scalable compute capabilities to those that are solving the most impactful challenges facing our world today.

What’s one piece of advice you’d share with a young founder?
Avoid distractions and trust your instincts