About Y Combinator's software team (which is currently hiring)
Y Combinator is hiring a few people to work with us on our small software team in SF. In particular, we’re hiring a couple of people to help us build some websites we run, and also someone who’s good with infrastructure to help us keep things running.

But I thought that rather than write a regular job post about them (boring!), it would be more fun to write about the history of the YC software team and what we've been up to. YC is a somewhat unusual place to work, and I wanted to give you a flavor of what it might be like.

First off, a lot of people don't know that YC even has a software team, and for most of YC's history, we didn't. The first software YC wrote was Hacker News, and Paul Graham built and ran HN all by himself for many years.

But around 2012, a young YC Partner named Garry Tan built this website to be a private directory and forum for the founders YC had funded. He called it "Bookface" as a tongue-in-cheek joke.

Hacker News was built in Lisp (and still is), but Garry had used rails for his startup and didn't really want to learn lisp, so he built Bookface in rails. Bookface was an instant hit, but for several years after, the only people working on it were Garry Tan and a couple of other YC partners, who spent most of their time working with companies, and only really got to code on nights and weekends.

In 2015 I joined YC, and my first job on literally my first day was to try to figure out what to do with our software. By then, Bookface was getting big enough that it seemed clear to me that we needed full-time people working on it, and so we ended up finding a few key people to do that.

Now that we had a small but real team, for the first time we were able to think about doing more ambitious things. We launched a website (https://workatastartup.com/) to help our companies hire people, and that did well. Then we launched a website (https://www.startupschool.org/) to turn YC's advice about startups into an online course (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13801376). A few years later, we launched a co-founder matching platform (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750298).

Along the way we built a lot of other stuff we haven't talked about publicly, like all the internal tools that run YC. We've tried to make YC scale by writing software to automate as much of our business as possible. We have software that helps us read 60K applications every year, our own Calendly-like software for scheduling the 10K+ meetings we do with founders every year, software to automate our financial and legal reporting and lots more stuff like that.

As we've launched new products, we've added one or two people per year to the team so we can work on more things in parallel. We're up to about 10 now.

When people are interviewing with us, they often ask us what the culture of the team is, and the answer is that if you've read Paul Graham's essays or watched our videos on YouTube, you already know what our culture is like. We try to operate according to the same advice we give to our startups.

We've also tried to make the YC software team as closely connected to the batch as possible, which is part of staying close to our users (who are mostly YC founders and employees). Most of us work on the third floor of the YC building, and the batch happens on the first and second floors. So if you want to join one of the famous YC batch dinners, you just walk down to the first floor.

One of the things we hoped would happen was that some of the people on the team would take what they learned from working at YC and start their own YC companies. That turned out to work - there are now 7 people who have done exactly that.

We've historically only hired a couple of people per year, but we've got a couple of roles open now. We're looking for someone to help Mark with infrastructure (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019063), and we're also hiring someone to work on YC's private founder community site Bookface, which is more traditional full-stack web development. It's a little hard to describe Bookface if you haven't seen it - it's like LinkedIn and Facebook and Quora rolled into one, but just for YC founders. Most YC founders use it every day.

Working at YC isn't a good fit for most people. I think it could be a good fit if you have been following YC for a while, if you are confident building web products all by yourself, if you like having a lot of responsibility and owning the development of products end-to-end, and if you like startups and have already worked on one or likely will someday. You’ll also need to live in SF or want to move here.

YC is fortunate enough to be doing very well as a business. A nice side effect of that is that we can afford to compensate everyone who works here generously, including giving people the equivalent of equity in the firm.

If you're interested, you can read a traditional job post and apply online here (https://www.ycombinator.com/careers?ashby_jid=00c6950f-341f-...), or just email me at jared@ycombinator.com.