How to pronounce “combinator” in English

Certainly make sure that there's room for healthy debate of political kinds of issues,Y Combinator is doing a study.

Finally end up at Y Combinator.Y Combinator folks tell them to go to New York, and they kind of figure it out.And what they figure out, what becomes a key process for them, is hosts.

So the concept of Rise Justice Labs is an accelerator for civil rights.Think like Y combinator for civil rights.It's a 12-week program.

ANDY McAFEE: Not in descending order.I think what Y Combinator is doing is pretty interesting.

And so he left.They went to Y Combinator.And today, you can actually find, on an exclusive basis, these over at Selfridges.

And of course, you tell the story about how your Y Combinator experience was really pivotal to that.But the Y Combinator connection comes back in almost every chapter of the book that follows.I'm sort of curious, one, what do you think about that community and its value, not just to your company, but to the startup scene in general?

somebody has to initiate the meeting-- it's on the calendar, but unless somebody stands up and says, we should have this meeting, it doesn't exist--He founded Y Combinator.

accelerated cultural change in the way sex accelerated biological change.Culture is a combinatorial thing. It brings together ideas, it reorganizes atoms and electronsin different combinations. So every technology we look at is actually a combination of other technologies and of other ideas. And its ideas coming together in changing each other that

So it's great to have Sam Altman here with us today for Talks at Google.Sam is the President of Y Combinator, which is widely regarded as one of the top startup incubators in Silicon Valley.He went to Stanford and studied computer science and was the founder and CEO of a mobile location-based startup

You created Blogger. You sold it to Google, right?The whole point of Y Combinator for the last couple of years has been how to manipulate and get an edge on the investors.

trying to make Airbnb work.Finally end up at Y Combinator.Y Combinator folks tell them to go to New York, and they kind of figure it out.

And then maybe a harder question.If that pitch at Y Combinator had not worked out, what do you think would have happened?Wow. OK. Well. So first and foremost, Steve and I-- I got to give you the full thing.

their own 'V', then that really helps lock predictable success in.male #12: You mentioned Y-Combinator and a bunch of and I was wonderingwhat you think that says about and what works and what doesn't in that ?

money um in fact I was just reading an an Inc magazine article uh today by um who they're profiling um Paul Grahamwho's the founder of Y combinator and he was saying you know um he always he gives people who enroll in the Ycombinator program um get a teacher that says make something people want um and I think also about the about the dream big

money is going to corrupt the people that create ASI?And as the flaws in this combinatorial way affect your own understanding of your own flaws and self-reflection. So yeah, it's a beautiful mess, and all of us have that line.

Velcro. Velcro, yeah. Associational thinking.Einstein said creativity is nothing more than combinatorial play.So Version 1.0 lacks this discovery orientation, and it's hurting its effectiveness.

He felt like the guy who wrote this thing in the 13th century in Sanskrit -- probably there was nobody he knew who understood what he was talking about.But he had these ideas about combinatorial -- what we now call combinatorial math -- and Knuth found a translation of this document, and he felt like this guy was talking to him.Like, he understood him. And he's like, "I had those same thoughts as I was getting started in computer programming." And so, this poor guy -- he'll never know

In 2012, Y Combinator calculated that 75% of their returns came from just two out of the 280 startups they invested in.

and I've interviewed Sam Altman from Y Combinator about this from my new book and a couple of other folks, concerns about this kind of superintelligence

half million and now has gone through Y Combinator and now is you know doing millions of sales it's in bloomingdales it's in sul purges it's all over the

What they really are is we're building models of very combinatorially, high-dimensional spaces that, you know, if you try to brute force a solution,

Now the neat thing about this type of combinatorial structure is that we don't need to learn all these words separately.

information as it might seem because if you do the combinatoric s-- and ask how

So this is known as lotto designing in combinatorics.

Yeah? Combinatorial explosion. Rules that are interacting with each other.

into a little more detail here first let's talk about combinatorics this is one of the aspects of dealing with puzzles so here's a

Paul Graham, who started Y Combinator, suggested that he started working with those guys because his own startup sort of floundered.

and then relentlessly prune down and focus quickly on the ones that you like and the ones that seem to be working.So in some sense, this is the Y Combinator model of fund a lot of startups with a little bit of money.And then, you know, most don't work out, and some work really well.

And one thing leads to another.A few weeks later, he announces Y Combinator.He had given us really good feedback on MMM.

And that became what would become Reddit.And so, all that's to say Y Combinator changed our lives.Even after the success we had with Reddit, for Steve and Adam and me to some extent, it was a no brainer to do Y Combinator with Hipmunk.

What's a good balance between providing users that agency and not having a combinatorial explosion of how can my piece of software handle all these different cases based

And it's about the problem with-- how does evolution actually work on a combinatorial level?

And the microbes, through this combinatorial possibility, can develop strategies to break them down and inactivate them.

which of these two innovations we want in the species. But if they're having sex then of course at some point you can get an organism that has both of these. So, the effect ofsex--the invention of sexual reproduction--enabled evolution to become cumulative and combinatorial.It wasn't the case before that.

can't get the ideas coming together and therefore culture never builds. It's not progressive, it's not cumulative in these animals. That's what's different about us, not that we'vegot culture, but we've got cumulative combinatorial culture. And it's this process of exchange, this process of swapping things with each other that's had a huge impact on our development.So why is it? Why does exchange cause innovation? Why does exchange raise living standards, indeed? And the answer really is a pretty old one. David Ricardo, a stockbroker, in

So Paul Graham, one of the cofounders of Y Combinator, has an amazing essay, from years back, still very relevant, called "Do Things that Don't Scale."

And it's really striking to me in reading the book, you tell the story.And of course, you tell the story about how your Y Combinator experience was really pivotal to that.But the Y Combinator connection comes back in almost every chapter of the book that follows.

were the first ones to really show, if you invest less money than it costs to get a Ford Focus, you can have a billion dollar company within a few years.I mean look, no matter how you feel about Y Combinator, I think part of reason it's been so special is they genuinely care about founders doing rightby their founders. And I think that more broadly helps the greater ecosystem, because now investors can't get away with being jerks in the way that they used to even 10 years ago.

I'm really curious about your prospective in a world full of hardcore coders, not being one.You know, the running joke in that first batch of Y Combinator-- and this is back when it was in Boston, all right,but it was maybe a dozen or so companies-- was, what does Alexis do?

Mitch Kapor: I've been involved in helping a number of Accelerators, Y Combinator and others, and heard about NewMe.

Kind of playing with the emergent kind of phenomena, you think there's so many combinatorial options that, and then here you go,

So I would say just as background, tons of like combinatorics are happening.

And we're applying, essentially, combinatorial feature selection routines over the explanatory attributes in order to pull out these high-level summaries

And so you do get this huge cognitive burden dealing with that and some sort of combinatorial explosion.

As a result of all this, you get what I call "combinatorial chemistry." Each of these compartments is a microscopic test tube and each compartment is different

Now the invention of exchange had the same impact on cultural evolution. Because you can actually have cultural without sex--as it were, you know--you can have culture withoutexchange. And the effect is you get no cumulative combina--combinatorial. Chimpanzees have culture's,they have traditions of how to break open nuts with rocks. And the fascinating thing is that if you go to different parts of Africa--indeed even to different parts of the same forest--you'll

So he talked about looking at Babylonian manuscripts of how they described the algorithms in ancient Babylonia 4,000 years ago just to sort of see how did they think about algorithms.And then, he found a Sanskrit document from the 13th century about combinatorial math and really felt that this was actually quite sweet.He felt like the guy who wrote this thing in the 13th century in Sanskrit -- probably there was nobody he knew who understood what he was talking about.

And what we learned here in Silicon Valley, obviously, is that looking at Y Combinator and so many incubators, you can't just give someone a check

called Loopt, which was funded by YC as part of its first class of startups in 2005 and acquired by a financial services company GreenDot in 2012. In 2014, he was named president of Y Combinator.And since then, he's worked on a wide range of initiatives from YC Research, which is a non-profit branch of Y Combinator that focuses on doing pure research