
Welcome Kat, Yuri, Patrick, and Elizabeth - sama
http://blog.ycombinator.com/welcome-kat-yuri-patrick-and-elizabeth
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marcamillion
Not sure if sam or any of the YC team will ever explain this, but how does the
partner structure work - really?

Is it like partnerships at a Law/Consulting/iBanking firm?

Are they just paid a salary and a % of the carry?

Given the recent "promotion" to partners, just curious.

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zt
I don't know Elizabeth (sure she's great), but the other three are amazing and
always quite helpful.

Kat's been an amazing connector both within the YC community and in supporting
applicants. She's connected me with some potential fintech applicants, which I
think is a great way to leverage alums.

We met with Yuri a few times before he was a part-time partner and he was
quite helpful and encouraging. We're in the enterprise space and he told us to
just keep fighting the long-sales-cycle fight. That advice came at a critical
moment where we really needed to just keep going through the slog.

I haven't talked to PC much since leaving Stripe but he obviously build a
great company and culture there that I really enjoyed. He's going to be an
amazing resource for YC companies.

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kayhi
Elizabeth is awesome, we're in the life science space and she has always been
very helpful. We aren't YC, but has taken phone calls, talked with us at
conferences and answered emails.

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omnisci
I have to agree, Elizabeth is fantastic. Super nice, easy going, and clearly
very intelligent :) Really happy to see that she is getting involved in this,
looking forward to seeing how YC picks up science based companies.

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jypepin
I remember debating with friends a few years ago about how YC is helping
startups. The conversation was mostly about what is more important, "PG time"
or "Network effect".

With batches growing more and more, we kind of agreed that PG is not scalable
and so that "Network effect" was slowly becoming more what companies were
getting out from YC vs the "PG Time" they used to get in earlier batches.

Since, I've seen so many quality folks added to the team, I feel like the "PG
Time" (which now is not only PG but all the partners) is becoming again more
important than the network effect, and it's amazing.

Founders must be learning SO MUCH now going through YC...

congrats on that!

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far33d
I don't understand how the CEO of a high-growth startup does anything at this
level of commitment outside their existing jobs.

I barely understand how CEOs do even the one job.

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pc
I already spend a lot of time talking to early stage startups (it's really
important that we understand them well); this seemed like a good way to
formalize that in a way that helps them too.

(That is, my hope is that this is good for Stripe, for YC, and for the
startups.)

In general, I'm very leery of distracting time commitments, and I don't sit on
any boards or anything like that. I think this is a (pretty rare) example of
one that makes sense for all parties.

~~~
far33d
Good point - I hadn't thought about how early stage startups are your
customers.

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gregschlom
> Several founders from the most recent batch went out of their way to tell me
> how much they’ve liked working with [Yuri Sagalov].

After 2 years working with Yuri and Weihan at AeroFS, I second that :)

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derengel
As someone who lives outside the U.S, can someone explain what does making
him/her a partner means in this context?

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mintykeen
I think it means they'll get more of a say in the companies YC invests in, and
they probably will get to share in the profits of such investments. Much more
involvement than other roles.

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tptacek
I hadn't realized that Patrick was part of Auctomatic. Huh.

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mathattack
The depth and breadth of the YC partner community is astounding. They keep
building from strength to strength. I've always viewed the weakness of the
model as talent - it's harder to scale people than money. So far they seem to
be relieving PG as the bottleneck pretty well. Let's see if they can keep the
quantity of good entrepreneurs from being a bottleneck too.

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jameshk
Can YC company's get office hours with Patrick?

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katm
Yes, they can.

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edanm
I'm pretty excited about what some of these additions mean for the direction
of YC. More enterprise/B2B experience, more bio-tech experience - YC is pretty
awesome, so diversifying to more spaces will just make more spaces awesome.

~~~
sakai
It is really awesome, though I'm kind of bummed that they held off on
announcing this (or didn't otherwise finalize the details) until after the
summer applications were due. As someone working on some bioinformatics tech,
that definitely would have persuaded me to apply.*

* And not primarily because of Elizabeth – who I'm sure is fantastic – but more broadly because of what it signals with regards to YC's focus and energy.

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brandonb
Congrats all! A stellar batch of folks.

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razvanr
Well deserved! YC is better for it.

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infoseckid
I imagine this expansion will hopefully lead to a larger batch being selected
this year as there are more mentors available.

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kimonos
Congrats!

