People

President & CEO

Garry Tan is President and CEO of Y Combinator. He was a partner at Y Combinator from 2011 to 2015, where he built key parts of the YC experience for founders including Bookface and the Demo Day website. Garry is the co-founder of Initialized Capital and Posterous (YC S08), a blog platform acquired by Twitter, and prior to that, he was an early designer and engineering manager at Palantir (NYSE:PLTR), where he designed the company logo. Garry holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford.

Partners

Gustaf Alströmer

General Partner

Gustaf Alströmer is a General Partner at YC. He spent 4.5 years at Airbnb where he worked as a Product Lead on the Growth team, a team he helped start in 2012. Prior to Airbnb, Gustaf was Head of Growth at Voxer, and before that, he was CEO & co-founder of Heysan, which was part of the YC W07 batch.

Tom Blomfield

General Partner

Tom Blomfield is a General Partner at YC. He was co-founder of Monzo, one of the first app-based challenger banks in the UK. Monzo raised more than £500m, counts 10% of the UK population as customers, and was the #1 recommended brand in the UK for two years running. Previously, he founded GoCardless (YC S11), an online payments processor for the Direct Debit system. In 2019, he was awarded an OBE for increasing competition in the banking sector.

Paul Buchheit

Partner Emeritus

Paul Buchheit is a Partner Emeritus at YC and the creator of GMail. While at Google he also built the prototype for AdSense and came up with Google's 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.

Dalton Caldwell

Managing Partner

Dalton Caldwell is a Managing Partner at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO of imeem (acquired by MySpace in 2009), and the cofounder and CEO of App.net. He has a BS in Symbolic Systems and a BA in Psychology from Stanford University.

Nicolas Dessaigne

General Partner

Nicolas Dessaigne is a General Partner at YC. He was the co-founder of Algolia (YC W14), a growth stage Search API used by millions of developers. He led the company as CEO up to 350 people before hiring a successor in 2020. He is still very involved in the success of Algolia as Board Director. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Nantes.

Aaron Epstein

General Partner

Aaron Epstein is a General Partner at YC. He was co-founder of Creative Market (YC W10), a marketplace for graphic design assets, which he sold to Autodesk in 2014 and spun out as an independent startup again in 2017. Aaron founded the company to make beautiful design simple and accessible to everyone, and has since helped generate more than $100M in sales for independent creators around the world. He has a BS in Business from the University of Maryland.

Brad Flora

General Partner

Brad Flora is a General Partner at YC. He was co-founder and CEO of Perfect Audience, an ad network funded by Y Combinator in 2011, acquired by Marin Software in 2014 and used by companies like Eventbrite, Atlassian, and New Relic to market to more than a billion people. He is an active angel investor, occasional contributor for Slate.com and lives in San Francisco with his wife and three children. He has a BA from Princeton University in English and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern.

Jared Friedman

Managing Partner

Jared Friedman is a Managing Partner at YC. He was cofounder of Scribd, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2006 and grew to be one of the top 100 sites on the web. Jared previously worked at a pioneering AI company and studied computer science at Harvard.

Diana Hu

General Partner

Diana Hu is a General Partner at YC. She was co-founder and CTO of Escher Reality (YC S17), an Augmented Reality Backend company that was acquired by Niantic (makers of Pokémon Go). At Niantic, she was the head of the AR platform. Previously, she led data science at OnCue TV that was sold to Verizon. Originally from Chile, Diana graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a focus in computer vision and machine learning.

Pete Koomen

General Partner

Pete Koomen is a General Partner at YC. He co-founded Optimizely (W10) which helps companies run experiments on their websites and apps. He helped Optimizely grow from inception, to $100M+ in ARR to, ultimately, its acquisition in 2020. Pete holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

David Lieb

General Partner

David Lieb is a General Partner at YC. He was previously the co-founder and CEO of Bump (S09), a mobile app used by more than 150M people to share photos and contact info by bumping their phones together. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and an unreleased photo-sharing app they were building became the foundation of Google Photos. Before Bump, Dave was a researcher in the Stanford AI Lab and a software engineer at Texas Instruments. He holds EE/CS degrees from Princeton and Stanford and finished half an MBA at Chicago Booth before dropping out to start Bump.

Surbhi Sarna

General Partner

Surbhi Sarna is a General Partner at YC. She was the founder and former CEO of nVision Medical, which developed a first-in-kind microcatheter for the detection of ovarian cancer. After raising $17M in venture funding, completing three clinical trials, and obtaining two first-in-class FDA approvals, nVision was acquired by Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) for $275M, more than 15X money-in. Surbhi stayed at Boston Scientific for two years, running the 150+ person commercial organization in preparation for launch. She sits on both private and public company boards.

Michael Seibel

General Partner

Michael Seibel is a General Partner at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO of Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and under the leadership of Emmett Shear, Justin.tv became Twitch.tv and sold to Amazon in 2014. Before getting into startups, he spent a year as the finance director for a US Senate campaign and in 2005, Michael graduated from Yale University with a BA in political science.

Harj Taggar

Managing Partner

Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at YC. He was previously founder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15) and Auctomatic (YC W07), which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008. He first joined YC as a partner in 2010, leaving in 2014 to start Triplebyte and rejoining in 2020. He graduated in 2006 from Oxford, where he studied Jurisprudence.

Visiting Partners

Tyler Bosmeny
Tyler Bosmeny was the co-founder and CEO of Clever (S12), which lets students and teachers access all of their learning software in one place. 60% of students in the US log into Clever regularly. In 2021, Clever was acquired for $500M. Tyler graduated from Harvard and has a BA in Applied Math and an MA in Statistics.
Andrew Miklas
Andrew Miklas is the co-founder and former CTO of PagerDuty (S10, NYSE:PD), a digital operations platform used by thousands of businesses to coordinate their responses to mission-critical issues. As PagerDuty's founding CTO, he scaled the product & engineering team to 70+ individuals and led the team that designed the initial product and its high availability architecture. After leaving PagerDuty, he joined the team at s28 Capital, where he invested in early stage startups, like CaptivateIQ, Retool, and Clerk, and worked with founders to help them scale their companies. He has a BSE (Software Engineering) from the University of Waterloo and an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
Jon Xu
Jon Xu is the co-founder and former CTO of FutureAdvisor (S10), one of the first robo investment advisors that made high-quality investment management available to everyone. FutureAdvisor was acquired by BlackRock in 2015 where Jon continued to lead Product and Engineering as Managing Director in Aladdin Wealth Tech. FutureAdvisor powered robo investment services for the largest banks and broker dealers in the US and managed over $2B in client assets. Prior to starting FutureAdvisor, Jon graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and worked on mobile data synchronization protocols at Microsoft. Jon is dedicated to helping others on their startup journeys and is an active angel investor and board member in early-stage companies.

Founders

Trevor Blackwell
Founder, Retired
Trevor Blackwell is a roboticist who in 2007 built 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. He has a BEng from Carleton, and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.
Paul Graham
Founder, Retired
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
Founder, Retired
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
Founder, Retired
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.