Jessica Livingston: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. Well, let me ask maybe one other question. Was there a moment when you felt like YC was working? When it felt like, wow, maybe this is going to make it? There were sort of two moments that I remember I felt like YC was working, because remember, we started Y Combinator as 100% like an experiment. Could we fund younger founders with small amounts of money? That was it. Then that summer we created this batch investment idea, and then that became the idea of funding them in batches. And that was the first aha moment was after that first summer when we invited people to participate in the Summer Founders Program, which is what it was called. And remember, that first summer had Sam Altman, Emmett Shear, Justin Kan, Alexis and Steve of Reddit, they were in the first batch. And the batch thing worked really well because they all became friends. We could have dinner every week, and bring in guest speakers and then introduce them to investors at demo day, and that whole batch-investing thing was an aha moment and we said, "Oh my gosh, let's keep doing this. This really works." And so that was a moment where we knew we were onto something, and that's when we then did it in California in the winter. But the second big moment was probably, I remember it was like a year later, and no reporter would write about us, investors really didn't think that much of us, but I remember when Reddit got bought by Condé Nast in 2006. It was that, and then at the same time, I think it was like Charles River Ventures or one of these Boston, maybe it wasn't even Boston, but it was a VC firm, did the seed program where they invested maybe a 100K in startups, and the press loved that. They wrote all about this $100,000 investment, and they'd sort of mentioned Y Combinator as doing small investments. And then that, coupled with the Reddit press, sort of made us feel like, oh my gosh, we are sort of legitimate, and the eyes of outsiders became sort of aware of who we were. And I sort of felt like we've arrived, we've been in the press, people are finally paying attention. That's amazing. And it's funny that Reddit just went public, it's kind of the other side of that coin.…

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