by Sam Altman10/23/2018

We’re excited to announce our new and expanded request for startups andnonprofits focusing on frontier technologies to remove carbon from theatmosphere. Read the RFS here .Climate change is one of the biggest problems we face as humans and we want YCto be part of driving these solutions.

by Kat Mañalac3/6/2018

The application deadline for YC Summer 2018 is on March 24, and in honor of thedeadline, we published an update to our Request for Startups (RFS).While many of the best ideas we’ve funded were ones that surprised us, there arealways a collection of ideas we wish more founders would apply with. Weperiodically take time to write those ideas down and publish them here.This RFS lists 25 categories — including 9 new ones:1.

by Karen Lien9/19/2017

At YC, we’re deeply interested in education because of its power to transformlives and societies and to maximize human potential. On a micro level, webelieve technology can help reverse the trend in K-12 of spending more and moremoney to achieve the same learning outcomes. We believe tech can also createalternatives in higher education that will prepare adults for the careers theywant without the burden of excessive student debt.

by Y Combinator1/31/2017

If you’re working on a startup or non-profit that addresses any of thechallenges discussed below, we’d love to see you apply.News: We’re facing two major issues with news. The first is fake news. Thebusiness model for online media rewards the people who get the greatest numberof page views, clicks and likes. That results in a system that prizes viralityover truth.

by Y Combinator1/3/2017

We’re optimistic we will beat climate change. But, at the same time, we need toprepare for things to get worse.One area we think a lot about is water—natural fresh supplies could be atserious risk around the world. We’re close to a tipping point where technologywill let us make clean water extremely abundant and cheap. We will create morethan enough clean water for everyone in the world, for any use necessary.We’d love to help founders working on this problem get there faster.

by Sam Altman9/12/2014

We’ve updates some of the RFSes, and also added some new ones:http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/As a reminder, these mostly exist to get you thinking about ideas.  We’ll veryhappily fund startups that have nothing to do with anything on this list.

by Sam Altman7/2/2014

We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million jobs. There are alot of areas where it makes sense to divide labor between humans andcomputers—we are very good at some things computers are terrible at and viceversa—andsome of these require huge amounts of human resources.This is both good for the world and likely a good businessstrategy—as existing jobs go away, a company that creates a lot of new jobsshould be able to get a lot of talented people.