From Airbnb to Zapier, and Coinbase to Instacart, many of the tech world’s most valuable companies spent their earliest days in Y Combinator’s accelerator program.
Steering the ship at Y Combinator today is its president, Geoff Ralston. We’re excited to share that Ralston will be joining us on Extra Crunch Live tomorrow at noon pacific.
Extra Crunch Live is our virtual speaker series, with each session packed with insight and guidance from the top investors, leaders and founders. This live Q&A is exclusive to Extra Crunch members, so be sure to sign up for a membership here.
Ralston took on the YC President role a little over a year ago shortly after Sam Altman stepped away to focus on OpenAI.
In the months since, Y Combinator has had to reimagine much about the way it operates; as the pandemic spread around the world, YC (like many organizations) has had to figure out how to work together while far apart. In the earliest weeks of the pandemic, this meant quickly shifting their otherwise in-person demo day online; later, it meant adapting the entire accelerator program to be completely remote.
While still relatively new to the president seat, Ralston is by no means new to YC. He joined the accelerator as a partner in 2012, and his edtech-focused accelerator Imagine K12 was fully merged into YC’s operations in 2016.
No stranger to building products and companies, in 1997 his company Four11 was acquired by Yahoo! for $96 million, with Four11’s RocketMail serving as the foundation for Yahoo Mail. He was later named the CEO of music streaming service Lala, which was acquired by Apple in a 2012 deal reportedly valued at over $80 million.
Ralston is the latest to join the spectacular list of speakers who’ve stopped by Extra Crunch Live, along with folks like Aaron Levie, Kirsten Green, Mark Cuban and Roelof Botha.
We’ll have a ton to talk about, from how YC has changed over the years, to how it’s adapted its absolutely massive accelerator program into something that works entirely virtually, to what Silicon Valley looks like after much of the tech world gets used to working from wherever their laptop happens to be. What advice does he have for companies just trying to get started right now — or for those which are still trying to adjust? Tune in to find out.
Want to watch along? Find the Zoom link below. Got questions of your own? Send them our way through the Q&A function built into Zoom, and we’ll try to get them answered.
Details:
When: July 30, 12 p.m PT/3 p.m. ET
AddEvent Link
Where: https://zoom.us/j/99090877985