How The Author Of “Founders At Work” Helps Y Combinator Discover And Mentor Startups – with Jessica Livingston
How does Jessica Livingston do it? How does she look at new, (usually) unproven entrepreneurs and figure out which of them are worth banking Y Combinator’s money, reputation and mentorship on?
When I asked her co-founder at Y Combinator, Paul Graham, he said she has a “social radar.” “She is very rarely wrong,” he told me.
I invited her to Mixergy to find out what she looks for. How can she tell who’s going to be clever and persistent enough to see a business through to success? And, more importantly, how can you be as perceptive when you’re deciding who to work with?
I also wanted to find out how she wrote one of my favorite books on entrepreneurship, “Founders at Work,” a collection of interviews about how the founders of admired companies like Apple and Adobe launched their businesses.
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Jessica Livingston is a founding partner at Y Combinator, a seed-stage venture firm based in Cambridge, MA, and Mountain View, CA. She was previously VP of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness. In addition to her work with startups at Y Combinator, she organizes Startup School. She has a BA in English from Bucknell.
Andrew: This interview is sponsored by Grasshopper, the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs love because you can use your own phones and manage it on the Web. Check out Grasshopper.com. It’s also sponsored by Wufoo where you can go right now to get embeddable forms and surveys that you can add to your website for free. Go to Wufoo.com. And it’s sponsored by Shopify. When you go to Shopify.com, you can create a store within minutes and have all the support and features that you need to make that store grow. Check out Shopify.com. Here’s the program.
Hey, everyone, it’s Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Today, I’ve got with me – man, I’ve really been looking forward to this interview. I’ve got Jessica Livingston, she is a founding partner of Y Combinator, the seed funding firm that helped launch over 200 startups and the author of “Founders at Work,” a book of biographical interviews...
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