Download The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups AudioBook Free
Twice annually in the heart of Silicon Valley, a small investment company called Y Combinator chooses an elite band of young internet marketers from about the world for 90 days of intense work and instruction. Their brand-new two- or three-person start-ups are given a apparently impossible task: to carefully turn a organic idea into a feasible business, fast. Each YC procedure culminates in a demo day, when shareholders and business capitalists flock to hear pitches from the new graduates. Anybody of these might grow to be another Dropbox (school of 2007, now respected at $5 billion) or Airbnb (2009, $1.3 billion). Randall Stross is the first journalist to acquire fly-on-the-wall access to Y Combinator. He says the full story of how Paul Graham started this super exclusive organization, how it selects among a huge selection of aspiring Draw Zuckerbergs, and exactly how it teaches them to go from theory to profitability in record time.
