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Y Combinator

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For the fixed point combinator, see Y combinator.

Y Combinator is a seed-stage startup funding firm, started by Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston. Startups it has funded include Kiko, Reddit, Pixoh and Infogami. Y Combinator provides seed money, networking, and two "boot camps" a year in Cambridge and Mountain View. In exchange, the five founders generally take about 1.2% of the seed's equity (in total, about 6% of the company). Unusually among startup funding firms, Y Combinator provides very little money- about 6000 USD (per founder). This reflects Graham's conviction that software is the key tool for web startups, and with the advent of Free software, the direct monetary cost of software is neglible.

The company was started when Graham (known for his essays[1]) was giving a talk at his alma mater, Harvard (Graham having a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard) about one particularly popular essay, "How to Start a Startup" [2], when he gave them advice to seek seed money not from venture capitalists but rather from "angel investors", or like-minded wealthy technologically-inclined people- like Paul Graham.

A number of seed companies have been doing well, like Reddit.

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