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Office Hours at Startup School 2013 with Paul Graham and Sam Altman

Y Combinator · 81.3K views · 2013-10-26 · 29:08

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Overview

A Startup School 2013 session where Paul Graham and Sam Altman hold live office hours with startups including CodeCombat, Flexport and others. The founders pitch and get on-the-spot feedback.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as a look at what YC office hours are like and as an early glimpse of Flexport and CodeCombat pitching.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2013–2020

Topics

Startups & entrepreneurship
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y combinatorpaul grahamsam altmanflexportpitchingstartup advice

What people said

dmnd · 2015-08 · Recommendation

Flexport is hiring engineers: [LINK] As an engineer starting at Flexport in a couple of weeks, here are some more interesting resources that shaped my thinking: Interview with Ryan Petersen (Flexport CEO) [LINK] Office hours at startup school 2013 with pg & sama [VIDEO] I also happened to have recently read Zero to One. Plus, Flexport has an appealing mission. Removing friction in something as basic as shipping makes pretty much everyone in the world better off.

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quadrature · 2015-06 · Recommendation

I agree its really great of them, you can watch office hour sessions on youtube from the Startup School that YC runs [VIDEO]

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aerosmile · 2020-12 · Reference

As someone who went through YC and met PG while he was still actively running it, I can tell you that at least in our batch he was 100% spot on about who was going to do well. He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well. It would be easy to be dismissive about this and say something about doubling down on his best investments, etc. But during our batch many of those companies had not yet become the clear cut winners that they are today, and instead only turned into them a year or so down the road. One of the best companies from our batch is Flexport, and PG had been super impressed by Ryan Petersen even before he was officially accepted into YC [1]. It's pretty clear in hindsight that taking note of who PG was hanging out with was a very investable strategy. In fact, one of my batchmates had some money to put into other companies in our batch, and when he asked me for my opinion of who to invest in, that's exactly what I told him. I just did some quick math and would estimate that his ROI today is somewhere in the 1,000x range. I am not the only who figured this out - while this wasn't quite as much of a factor during my batch, nowadays there is an entire cottage industry of YC-only funds who invest only during YC demo days. As you can imagine, the way they differentiate from each other is by how much insider knowledge they are able to accumulate leading up to demo day (I am not implying that the partners ever leak a

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Sources

Video by Y Combinator, played through YouTube.

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