Accelerator

Y Combinator

Y Combinator

If you are a startup founder or a soon-to-be founder, you are likely to be familiar with accelerators and incubators. Rookie entrepreneurs encounter lots of challenging tasks they have never experienced before from developing products or services and building teams to raising funds and managing the press appearance. Luckily, there are various programs to support those who need finance and advice.

🙋What does Y Combinator do as an accelerator?

Y Combinator, often shortened in YC, was founded in 2005 in Silicon Valley. Since then, YC has actively invested in startups around the world, becoming one of the most well-known accelerators nowadays. In the accelerator program, YC interviews and selects 2 batches of companies in summer and winter each year. Selected companies participate in the 3-month program, during which they get booster in preparation for takeoff. Startups get fundings from YC in SAFE, intimately interact with mentors and other alumni, and graduate the intense program with the Demo Day.

🏆Y Combinator’s contribution to startup scene

As YC back up numerous startups for years, it noticed that traditional ways of raising funds are not appropriate for early-stage startups. Beginning businesses lacked performance results in numbers to assess the valuation, which is a requisite process in conventional equity financing and debt financing. Convertible notes were introduced to deal with such inefficiency, but still had some issues remaining unsolved. That’s when YC came up with the concept of SAFE(Simple Agreement for Future Equity), the right to get equity shares in the future, enabling to postpone the valuation until the startup is ready for it. Today, SAFE has settled as a mean of fundraising for early-stage startups.

In addition to this, YC provides numerous resources even to those who are not yet in the YC cohort. There is the Startup School, an online course on how to start a startup, and Co-Founder Matching where you can find a reliable companion. Startup Library, which is an extensive collection of useful resources in videos and essays, is an integration of YC’s 15-year experience. If you are not a founder but interested in startup scene, Startup Jobs section on YC displays a collective list of job openings.

YC graduates and relatively mature startups in their growing stage can still benefit from YC, too. YC runs an investment fund named YC Continuity to support later series of funding rounds. YC alumni have access to the Alumni Community of successful, experienced founders. Great ideas of collaboration often spark here. QuotaBook, a YC W21 batch, has recently teamed up with 4 YC alumni — Circular, Deel, Deskimo, Spenmo — to launch a B2B service package. They cover essential sectors of every business, from finance and equity management to workspace, HR and Ecommerce. Extra discounts and special offers are exclusively available through this package, so check out the benefits you can get from this package!

Want to learn more about QuotaBook, YCW21 Batch?


References

https://www.ycombinator.com/

※ Legal disclaimer

Make Equity Complete — QuotaBook is a global equity management platform with a mission to create an ecosystem for private companies and their investors and employees. Leaving spreadsheets and manual works behind, every stakeholder can connect online and sync crucial data on equity such as cap table or employee stock options. It is the leading platform used by top startups and VCs in Asia, backed by Y Combinator.

This piece is written for information purposes only and is not intended as financial or legal advice. QuotaBook does not assume any reliability for dependence on the information provided above.