This Week at YC

March 15th, 2024

This week Garry, Jared, Diana and Harj are back with a brand new episode of the Lightcone Podcast, this time all about San Francisco and why it’s emerging as the epicenter of all things AI.

YC recently moved its headquarters to San Francisco so we thought it’d be fitting to have Jared open up the newsletter by walking us through YC’s own journey to SF. Today Jared is a Group Partner at YC, but his connection to YC goes back to some of its earliest days — he went through YC as a co-founder of Scribd back in the summer of 2006.

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YC’s New Campus in San Francisco

Most people don’t know this, but Y Combinator didn’t start its life in Silicon Valley. The very first YC office was actually in Cambridge MA, near the Harvard campus. YC started there as a summer program for college students.

Soon after the first batch, YC founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston realized that the program needed to be in Silicon Valley. (“... I didn't want someone else to copy us and describe it as the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley,” PG wrote in 2012. “I wanted YC to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley.”)

So they moved YC into a building in Mountain View.

Why Mountain View? Many tech companies were in that area at the time — Google making Mountain View its home had made it the de facto center of the tech industry. But it’s also where one of YC’s four founders, Trevor Blackwell, happened to have some office space YC could use.

In the years that followed, the center of startups moved from the suburbs up to San Francisco proper. This shift was driven, in large part, by YC itself. YC inspired a generation of young founders to start companies. These founders, many of them recent college grads, wanted to live in the city, not the suburbs. So the early YC companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox ended up based in San Francisco, and that created a feedback loop.

By 2019, it was clear that we needed to move YC to San Francisco, too. We’d had small satellite offices in SF over the years — but we needed to make it our official home. We began looking for the right place. Someone even leaked the news to TechCrunch.

In early 2020 we were closing in on this new home and then … well, you know what happened next. When Covid hit, we were forced to shelve our plans to move and we spent the next few years running YC as an all-remote program.

Once we were finally able to go back in-person, the search was back on. As one of his first acts as YC’s new president, Garry Tan — who has long been an ardent fan and defender of SF — moved us into an amazing, historic building in the Dogpatch area of San Francisco. The Dogpatch is a great part of SF, with lots of beautiful places to walk. We moved in just in time to run the summer ‘23 batch from there.

One batch in, we loved this new area — but we realized we’d need a lot more space. As luck had it, the building next door became available. This other building was huge, but needed a good amount of work. We got it done and moved in just in time for the winter ‘24 batch.

We finally have what feels like a proper San Francisco campus, and it’s instantly made YC so much better.

When YC was in Mountain View, founders would live all over the Bay Area — over an hour’s drive – creating a lot of friction for spur-of-the-moment meetups.

This batch we encouraged founders to be as close as possible to the new office during the program. The result is that many of the founders in this batch are within walking distance of the office; it’s easy for them to pop over for events, and we’re all bumping into each other constantly at local restaurants and bars. It also makes it much easier for us to host the thousands of Bay Area YC alumni (who overwhelmingly live in SF) for happy hours and other meetups, making the YC community more connected than ever.

The new YC campus is a flurry of activity, with hundreds of startup founders coming and going each and every day. It’s the most concentrated focal point the early stage startup ecosystem has ever seen. Some of our favorite YC companies are right next door! And shortly after we moved in, OpenAI decided to move their headquarters to a building a few blocks away.

During the pandemic, the future of SF as the center of tech was in doubt - even we were not sure what would happen. But between the AI revolution that is happening here and YC’s new campus, SF is back.

- Jared Friedman, Group Partner, YC
Twitter: @snowmaker

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