People

The partners, founders, and team behind Y Combinator.

President & CEO

Garry Tan

Garry Tan is President and CEO of Y Combinator. He was a partner at Y Combinator from 2011 to 2015, where he built key parts of the YC experience for founders including Bookface and the Demo Day website. Garry is the co-founder of Initialized Capital and Posterous (YC S08), a blog platform acquired by Twitter, and prior to that, he was an early designer and engineering manager at Palantir (NYSE:PLTR), where he designed the company logo. Garry holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford.

Partners

General Partner

Gustaf Alströmer

Gustaf Alströmer is a General Partner at YC. He spent 4.5 years at Airbnb where he worked as a Product Lead on the Growth team, a team he helped start in 2012. Prior to Airbnb, Gustaf was Head of Growth at Voxer, and before that, he was CEO & co-founder of Heysan, which was part of the YC W07 batch.

General Partner

Harshita Arora

Harshita Arora is a General Partner at YC. Previously, she co-founded AtoB (YC S20), a Series C company building financial infrastructure for the trucking industry. Often described as "Stripe for Trucking," AtoB offers fleet cards, instant payouts, and modern financial tools to over 30,000 fleets across the US. Before AtoB, she built Crypto Price Tracker, a portfolio management app that was featured by Apple and subsequently acquired—earning her India's Bal Shakti Puraskar, one of the country's highest honors for young achievers.

General Partner

Grey Baker

Grey Baker is a General Partner at YC. He was a co-founder of Pincites (S23), which was acquired by Filevine, and Dependabot, a developer tool used by over a million people that was acquired by GitHub in 2019. Previously, Grey was an early employee at GoCardless (YC S11) where he led product and engineering. He has an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge, where he graduated top of his year.

General Partner

Tom Blomfield

Tom Blomfield is a General Partner at YC. He was co-founder of Monzo, one of the first app-based challenger banks in the UK. Monzo raised more than £500m, counts 10% of the UK population as customers, and was the #1 recommended brand in the UK for two years running. Previously, he founded GoCardless (YC S11), an online payments processor for the Direct Debit system. In 2019, he was awarded an OBE for increasing competition in the banking sector.

General Partner

Tyler Bosmeny

Tyler Bosmeny is a General Partner at YC. He was the co-founder and CEO of Clever (S12), which lets students and teachers access all of their learning software in one place. 60% of students in the US log into Clever regularly. In 2021, Clever was acquired for $500M. Tyler graduated from Harvard and has a BA in Applied Math and an MA in Statistics.

General Partner

Nicolas Dessaigne

Nicolas Dessaigne is a General Partner at YC. He was the co-founder of Algolia (YC W14), a growth stage Search API used by millions of developers. He led the company as CEO up to 350 people before hiring a successor in 2020. He is still very involved in the success of Algolia as Board Director. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Nantes.

General Partner

Aaron Epstein

Aaron Epstein is a General Partner at YC. He was co-founder of Creative Market (YC W10), a marketplace for graphic design assets, which he sold to Autodesk in 2014 and spun out as an independent startup again in 2017. Aaron founded the company to make beautiful design simple and accessible to everyone, and has since helped generate more than $100M in sales for independent creators around the world. He has a BS in Business from the University of Maryland.

General Partner

Brad Flora

Brad Flora is a General Partner at YC. He was co-founder and CEO of Perfect Audience, an ad network funded by Y Combinator in 2011, acquired by Marin Software in 2014 and used by companies like Eventbrite, Atlassian, and New Relic to market to more than a billion people. He is an active angel investor, occasional contributor for Slate.com and lives in San Francisco with his wife and three children. He has a BA from Princeton University in English and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern.

Managing Partner

Jared Friedman

Jared Friedman is a Managing Partner at YC. He was cofounder of Scribd, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2006 and grew to be one of the top 100 sites on the web. Jared previously worked at a pioneering AI company and studied computer science at Harvard.

General Partner

Chris Golda

Chris Golda is a General Partner at YC. He was the co-founder and CEO of BackType (YC S08), a data infrastructure & analytics company acquired by Twitter in 2011, where he subsequently launched and ran the Ad Center product, growing revenue to over $1B. The distributed data processing work at BackType became the basis for the Lambda Architecture, and Chris helped open source Apache Storm, an early distributed real-time computation system. Post-Twitter, he has been working with founders to help them find customers and raise capital, participating in early-stage rounds of startups like Benchling, Coinbase, Stoke, and Supabase. Chris graduated from the University of Toronto and has a BASc in Electrical Engineering.

General Partner

Ankit Gupta

Ankit Gupta is a General Partner at Y Combinator. He was the co-founder of Reverie Labs, which developed machine learning models for drug discovery, and ultimately advanced its own medicines to the clinic. Reverie was acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks in 2024. Prior to Reverie, Ankit was a deep learning researcher and has published at conferences like ICML. He has a BA and MS in Computer Science from Harvard.

Managing Partner

Diana Hu

Diana Hu is a Managing Partner at YC. She was co-founder and CTO of Escher Reality (YC S17), an Augmented Reality Backend company that was acquired by Niantic (makers of Pokémon Go). At Niantic, she was the head of the AR platform. Previously, she led data science at OnCue TV that was sold to Verizon. Originally from Chile, Diana graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a focus in computer vision and machine learning.

General Partner

Pete Koomen

Pete Koomen is a General Partner at YC. He co-founded Optimizely (W10) which helps companies run experiments on their websites and apps. He helped Optimizely grow from inception, to $100M+ in ARR to, ultimately, its acquisition in 2020. Pete holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

General Partner

David Lieb

David Lieb is a General Partner at YC. He was previously the co-founder and CEO of Bump (S09), a mobile app used by more than 150M people to share photos and contact info by bumping their phones together. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and an unreleased photo-sharing app they were building became the foundation of Google Photos. Before Bump, Dave was a researcher in the Stanford AI Lab and a software engineer at Texas Instruments. He holds EE/CS degrees from Princeton and Stanford and finished half an MBA at Chicago Booth before dropping out to start Bump.

General Partner

Andrew Miklas

Andrew Miklas co-founded PagerDuty (YC S10, NYSE:PD), which became the backbone of digital operations for thousands of businesses. As founding CTO, he designed the original product and its high-availability architecture, and scaled the engineering team to 70+ people. After PagerDuty, he became an early-stage investor at s28 Capital, supporting companies like Clerk, CaptivateIQ, and Teleport. Andrew brings deep experience in building resilient systems and scaling engineering teams from zero to impact.

Managing Partner

Harj Taggar

Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at YC. He was previously founder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15) and Auctomatic (YC W07), which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008. He first joined YC as a partner in 2010, leaving in 2014 to start Triplebyte and rejoining in 2020. He graduated in 2006 from Oxford, where he studied Jurisprudence.

General Partner

Jon Xu

Jon Xu is the co-founder and former CTO of FutureAdvisor (YC S10), one of the first robo-advisors to make quality investment management accessible to a broader consumer audience. After the company was acquired by BlackRock in 2015, Jon continued to lead product and engineering, building an enterprise-grade robo-advisor platform for large financial institutions. His background gives him unique expertise both in building high-trust consumer products and B2B platforms for regulated industries. Jon holds a degree in Computer Science from MIT.

Founders

Founder, Retired

Trevor Blackwell

Trevor Blackwell is a roboticist who in 2007 built the first dynamically balancing biped robot. He has published papers on congestion control in high speed wide area networks, signalling protocol architecture, and file system performance. He has a BEng from Carleton, and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Founder, Retired

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first SaaS company, which in 1998 became Yahoo Store. In 2002 he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm that inspired the current generation of filters. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Founder, Retired

Jessica Livingston

Jessica Livingston was previously VP of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness, where she managed an award-winning rebranding of the company. She is the author of Founders at Work (2007), a book of interviews with startup founders. She has a BA in English from Bucknell.

Founder, Retired

Robert Morris

Robert Morris is a professor of computer science at MIT, where he is a member of the PDOS group. He has published extensively on wireless networks, distributed operating systems, and peer-to-peer applications. In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public. He has an AB and PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.