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Havish Gupta
Figuring Out • 2m
Why and How YC Was Started? So, raising seed funding was always slow, complicated, and a hard job. Founders often relied on informal investments from friends or family, with little to no standardization, leaving them vulnerable to legal and financial pitfalls. This was exactly what Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston were discussing on their way to home. Paul always wanted to invest in startups, while his wife, Jessica, was fed up with her investment bank job and applied to some VC companies too. While discussing, they realized that they had both the skills and money to start their own investment fund, so why not do it? Thus, Paul agreed to put $100k into the new fund, and Jessica agreed to quit her job. Over the next couple of days, they recruited Robert and Trevor, who put in another $50k each. So, like this, Y-Combinater was started with $200k investment fund. It was earlier called Cambridge Seed but was soon changed to make it more universal. Their initial goal was to fund young, technical founders, especially students and hackers, rather than traditional "suits" from corporate backgrounds. Also, their terms were straightforward and standardized, where they invested $10,000 to $20,000 for 6-10% equity. And with these thoughts, they started to fund startups across the summer of 2005, and that’s how YC was started. YC's First Batch 👇
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