Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way back in the early days in 2005. It also reminded me that no reporters ever responded to my email.

From: Jessica Livingston

...We’ve recently kicked off the Summer Founders Program, a new program that lets people start startups as a summer job. [Background: http://ycombinator.com/sfp.html] We’re testing a theory that technology is enabling a new model to evolve where founders of startups can be a lot younger than they used to be. As the age of startup founders creeps downward, we foresee an alternative path for the smartest and most ambitious: instead of going to work for Microsoft, they start a startup and make Microsoft buy it to get them. We got 237 applications (in less than two weeks!), from which we chose 8 to fund. They're doing very varied things: click fraud, software for cell phones, a dating site, a news aggregator, desktop search, etc. Each group has recently moved to Boston, received funding from us, and incorporated etc. One thing that’s different about Y Combinator is that the three other founders have deep technical backgrounds (founders of Viaweb, a startup that developed the first web-based application, which was sold in 1998 to Yahoo) and we believe this gives us an edge in terms of picking good ideas even before a business plan exists and providing important technological advice early on...





The "news aggregator," incidentally, was Reddit.





We hadn’t even realized then that one of the most innovative aspects of Y Combinator would be funding companies in batches and thus applying mass production to startups. Instead, I played up the idea that it was now easier for younger people to start startups.





I admit that I was never very good at PR. This pitch isn’t very gripping, except maybe in hindsight. But if anyone had clicked on the link to the Summer Founders Program (SFP) background description, they could have discovered some new ideas that would redefine the way early stage tech funding happened.





When I reread the SFP description, I find the diffs between then and now fascinating. For example, we thought it would be ok to work on your idea each summer and go back to school in the fall. We gave founders $6,000 per person. There’s a vague offer to help with getting follow-on funding, which during the summer evolved into Demo Day.





But most of what’s in there is spot on. 12 years later, YC hasn't strayed too far from its origins.





It’s fun for me to think about our origins. They are happy memories. We were working on something that we were really excited about and that was totally new, and we got to watch as it started to work almost immediately. And since no one cared about us at all, we were free to focus entirely on helping the startups. And of course no one cared about the startups either. YC was a little group of people everyone ignored, working together to do new things with no distractions.



