- YC has developed a product called Work at a Startup, which is a common application for engineers interested in working at a startup, particularly a YC company.
- Founders of YC companies can browse and search through the applications to find potential hires and start conversations with them.
- YC created this product to address the challenge of hiring for startups, which face intense competition and struggle to find the right candidates.
- Work at a Startup aims to provide a more efficient and sophisticated version of the Hacker News jobs board and the internal forum used by YC founders to share candidates.
- The product focuses on solving the matching problem between startups and potential employees by considering factors such as company culture, size, profitability, skills, and technologies.
- The matching process involves comparing the preferences of applicants with the information provided by companies to filter out the most suitable matches.
- The initial beta launch of Work at a Startup was in December 2017, and it has evolved to include features such as requesting resumes from applicants.
- The product has surprised YC with the diversity of candidates and the range of skill sets and experience levels that companies are looking for.

- YC conducted a Hacker News thread to understand the pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018 and how YC can help.
- People liked the autonomy, ability to bond with a small team, work on interesting problems, and have control over the technologies used.
- Compensation was a prominent concern, with startups needing to offer fair compensation to attract top talent.
- Transparency in valuing equity and job security were also important factors.
- Remote work and flexibility in location were suggested as ways for startups to compete with big companies for talent.
- YC is hosting a Work at a Startup conference in July, featuring keynote talks, rapid-fire pitches from YC founders, and opportunities to meet and connect with founders.
- Attendees can expect to gain a compressed view of the startup job market and have the chance to network with founders.

- The speaker advises attendees to familiarize themselves with the companies and come with an open mind about working at a startup.
- There will be a selection process for attendees, and interested individuals must fill out an application on workatastartup.com.
- Bringing paper resumes is optional, as there will be a technological approach to indicating interest in companies.
- The conference is open to anyone, but willingness to work in the location of the companies may influence selection.
- The conference will be livestreamed online for those unable to attend in person.
- The conference will feature hardware demos, including a self-driving truck, a satellite replica, and a large industrial drone.
- The speaker emphasizes the broad range of options in startups, including companies focused on hard science.
- Over 3,000 engineers have already signed up for the conference, and the majority have received messages from YC companies.
- Over 80% of YC companies hiring engineers are on the platform, and there is a directory for browsing hiring companies.
- The response from the YC community has been positive.
- The URL to sign up or apply for the conference is not mentioned.

- YC has developed a product called Work at a Startup to help startups hire engineers.
- Founders of YC companies can browse and search through applications to find potential hires.
- The product focuses on solving the matching problem between startups and potential employees.
- Work at a Startup has evolved since its beta launch in 2017 and now includes features such as requesting resumes.
- YC conducted a Hacker News thread to understand the pros and cons of working at a startup.
- Compensation, equity valuation, and job security were important factors for potential employees.
- YC is hosting a Work at a Startup conference in July, featuring keynote talks and opportunities to meet founders.
- Attendees can apply on workatastartup.com and the conference will be livestreamed online.
- Over 3,000 engineers have signed up for the conference and the majority have received messages from YC companies.
- The response from the YC community has been positive.

Jared Friedman - https://twitter.com/snowmaker - is a partner at YC and before that cofounded Scribd (YC S06).

Matt Long - https://twitter.com/mateolargo - a software engineer at YC and before that cofounded Crocodoc (YC W10).

Today we’re talking about a project Jared, Matt, and several other people at YC have been working on. It’s called Work at a Startup - https://www.workatastartup.com/ - and it’s like a common application for engineers to apply to many YC companies simultaneously.

We’re also hosting a Work at a Startup Expo - https://www.workatastartup.com/expo - on July 28th in Mountain View where you’ll be able to meet 35 rapidly growing YC companies. You can learn more and apply to attend at https://www.workatastartup.com/expo.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon

So we are here today to talk about work at a startup.

Let's really quickly do some introductions.

The way I got into YC was I did a YC company in 1 of the earliest batches.

And then I joined YC 3 years ago as a partner.

I was a co-founder of a company that went through Y Combinator back in winter 2010 called Crocodoc.

And now I'm a software engineer here at YC.

I've been here for a little under a year now.

And you guys, in addition to a few other people at YC, have been working on a product called Work at a Startup.

Yeah, so Work at a startup is a common application for engineers that are interested in working at a startup, and in particular a YC company.

They'll go through a lot of typical biographical questions about themselves and their experience and background.

And then they're able to choose their preferences for what sort of company and role they're looking for.

We make all this information available to the founders of all of our YC companies who can then browse and search through them to find what they're looking for, indicate their interest, and start conversations with them.

Why make this instead of just relying on the existing infrastructure out there?

Paul Denis Yeah, so I guess hiring is notoriously hard amongst startups.

In Silicon Valley it's just so much intense competition.

The more established players in the tech industry.

Just like internal surveys we've done with founders of YCU companies confirm that we're overwhelmingly hiring, and in particular hiring engineers.

It's the number 1 problem they face going through the YCU program.

YCU decided we should take the same approach we've done with everything and try to apply software to this to help find a nice scalable solution.

And just another way that YC can help out our portfolio companies and made our own hiring portal that's a little bit particular to the way and the types of companies that go through YC.

And so Jared, you have experience with this directly, having hired quite a bit at Scribd before.

And you were also part of the Work at a Startup, before it was known as Work at a Startup Conference in 2010.

So it's actually not a new idea per se for YC to try to help its companies hire.

Hacker News, from the very beginning, When we first created it back in, I think, 2009, part of the goal was to help companies hire.

When I was at my startup, I used the Hacker News job section a lot.

I think probably half the engineering team that we hired came through Hacker News.

And that's not atypical for YC companies.

We've also long had an internal forum for YC founders where they share candidates that aren't right for them, but could be great for somebody else.

And so the origins of this project were kind of like, We saw that this was working and that there was tremendous demand for it, and everybody wanted us to do more.

And so the work of the starter product is trying to build just a better, more efficient, more sophisticated version of the Hacker News jobs board and the internal forum that we've had for a long time.

Collins In particular, what are the additions that differentiate it from HN job posting, for example?

So the way I think about hiring is it's fundamentally a matching problem.

There's a great company for everyone, and for every company, there's a set of people who would be perfect for them.

But it's really hard to make that match happen.

For large companies like Microsoft, they hire people of all kinds.

And so the matching just becomes easier because they're hiring for so many roles.

You apply to Microsoft, there's a good chance there's a role there that could be a good fit for you.

But with startups who are only hiring for a couple roles that don't have brand names, you don't know who they are, what they do, if you'd be interested, what roles they're hiring for.

And so the matching problem is particularly hard for startups.

And that's why we've been working really hard on it.

Matt would be a great person to talk about some of the ways that we're trying to solve the mashing problem.

It's still early days, it's a really hard problem, but I think we have some interesting ideas.

Matthew Fischel Yes, I think the main thing we're going to be looking at is around what sort of culture and company feel potential employees are interested in.

Anything from more objective measures like size of the company, number of people in it, whether or not they're profitable or not.

How important is that to a potential new engineer?

And then also, of course, kind of ranging into what sort of skills and technologies the engineers have mastered, the various degrees, and kind of lining that up against the tech stack of a given company is using.

And then going more into the culture thing, it's kind of looking for what's more important to them.

Are they interested in solving more product-focused questions, or really digging in the deep, hard technical problems?

Just things like that, what's most important to them, or what they're looking for.

And then of course we can get all this exact information from all the companies that are going to be in the system as well.

So that will give us 2 sets of data to match against each other.

We think we're pretty confident this will be a nice way to filter out the most interesting and the best matching companies to the top for these applicants.

And the founders as well of companies, just kind of show them which applicants might be right for them.

How do the companies report and measure their own culture in these engineering problems?

What questions exactly are they answering?

We actually haven't put these questions in their final form in front of founders just yet.

But really you could go look at the application that's on work at a startup.com and go through the career and culture section.

And then you can imagine there'd be a fairly similarly worded question that we're going to pose to our founders.

And to start with, it'll be trusting them to answer them honestly about what the conditions are like at their office and the state of their company.

Whether or not we're going to have to editorialize that or curate it all or make sure everything lines up with their reality is yet to be seen.

But certainly the star will be self-reported from the founders themselves.

been doing the matching thus far, because this product has been around.

The very first beta was in the middle of December 2017, so just around 6 months ago.

I think it might be interesting for people to find out how this has evolved to this point.

Back then it was just the data we're gathering from applicants.

That wasn't nearly as much as we have now.

And it's kind of pretty simple, watered down version of what you might be asked on other kind of hiring portals like Hired or AngelList.

Just who you are, what's your email address, a few free-form questions like, why do you want to work at a startup?

And purposefully we steered away at that point from asking people for a resume.

Just because there is a lot of thoughts internally that it may not be the best thing or the best way to judge someone based on where they worked before, but look at them more holistically.

It's finding someone that's going to be aligned with your mission and can get on board with the goals of the company.

Much more, we think, than that might matter at a larger company.

So it's a smaller and different set of questions than you might normally see.

We didn't really focus on work history at all, or even education especially.

What school you went to shouldn't matter nearly as much as what neat stuff you've done as an engineer more recently.

And it certainly has evolved a lot since then.

We actually now do ask you for a resume, just because after not having it for a long time, a lot of times the first thing founders would tell us when we asked them how they were liking the product is, well, this is great, but I don't know anything about them.

And the first thing I have to do all the time is just go look at their LinkedIn profile.

So we're taking that feedback and iterating on that quite a bit.

Any other surprises that you've learned from founders who are getting all these applications come through their door?

1 surprise is actually the diversity of candidates that companies are looking for.

When we first started, we worried that it might be hard for us to find great companies for people who are not in the Bay Area, because so many of the companies that we have are based here.

We actually have companies now hiring in over 12 countries.

We have a ton of companies who are hiring for remote-only roles.

And just the range of the different skill sets that people are looking for, everything from full-stack web to data science to DevOps, and a whole range of experience levels as well, has meant that we're able to find good matches for almost everyone who signs up.

Okay, so I'm curious about, before we talk about the conference, I'm interested in talking about the recent HN thread and what were the learnings from that?

Earlier this week, I think it was Jared, I think you posted it, right?

Basically a question to the community, right?

What are the pros and cons of working in a startup in 2018?

Jared Huffman Yeah, So it was a pretty amazing Hacker News thread.

We got about a thousand comments in response to the question.

People shared some amazing experiences of working at big companies, of working at small companies, of founding their own company, of being a consultant, and how all of them compared.

And there, the reason that we did it was we wanted to really understand what people liked and didn't like about working at a startup, and in particular, what YC could do to help.

Because I think we're in a position to be able to help with some of the things that aren't working as well as they could be.

So some of the things people really like about working at a startup is, for sure, the autonomy, the feeling that you're able to really move the needle on an organization that the company that you've worked at might not have been successful if you hadn't taken that job.

The ability to bond with a small team, the ability to work on really interesting problems, and with the newest technologies, the ability to have control over the technologies that you use rather than just inheriting a tech stack that's already set.

And then on the cons, the most prominent 1 was compensation.

And what we heard is compensation is important to people.

If you're going to take a job, you've got to feel like the compensation is fair.

And startups have to be paying fair compensation in order to attract the best talent.

I think it's gotten a little bit harder recently as compensation for engineers across the industry around the world has gone up.

But what some people on Hacker News may not yet know is that the compensation at startups has gone up a lot as well.

And so I think we may be closer than they think, But there's still more that startups have to do on that front.

Transparency is also very important, where people need to feel like if a big part of their compensation package is equity in the startup, that they really understand how to value that equity and how to compare it against other offers.

That's, I think, a basic thing that all startups can really do better when hiring people.

Job security is very important to people.

Sometimes when you're working in early stage startup, it can feel less secure than working at a big company.

I think this is actually something that YC and work at a startup can help with a lot, because while working at any individual startup may not be as secure as working at a large company, hopefully working for startups in general can be even more secure.

Because if the startup that you're working at now doesn't work out, there's going to be 20 other startups who are going to value the great work that you did there and want to hire you immediately.

Yeah, especially within a network such as the YC community.

Another thing to be clear about, I guess, if it hasn't been mentioned, work at a startup is working at YC companies.

They aren't just startups around the world, just in general.

Matt, did you learn anything from the thread?

Matt Fossum I think just that compensation came up so frequently was a bit surprising to me.

Because I guess for me that was kind of already a known quantity.

That going to work at a startup, you're probably in the general case going to be taking a somewhat lower salary than you might get at 1 of the larger FANG companies.

So just that there is so much, it's very black and white around that.

Some of the comments like, why would you go work at a startup when you can make double the amount at a large company?

And to me, yes, face value might be true, but there's other non-financial reasons you might choose or want to go work at a startup.

Which I think is really important, that you have to have these other issues.

Like Jared mentioned, this kind of forming these close bonds of the small team can be really appealing to people.

Certainly that was 1 of the big things I look back on from my startup experience.

Me and my co-founders, granted I wasn't an employee, I was a co-founder.

But just the bonds I formed with them, they're still to this day some of my closest friends.

And it's just things like that I think are 1 of the unique things that startups have to offer.

And just so that wasn't brushed over a lot in a lot of the comments.

But it makes sense again, because finances are important and if you're a software engineer right now, it is possible to make a pretty nice salary at a lot of places with relatively low risk.

Did remote work play a big role in the thread?

A lot of the feedback centered on the insane cost of housing in the Bay Area and in a few other large cities and asked the question why tech is so concentrated in this area.

A lot of people suggested that 1 way that startups could compete with big companies for talent is to be more flexible on that.

allow remote work, to have offices in other markets where the housing is not so insane.

And I think that's really interesting feedback.

And it's definitely a trend that we've seen among the YC companies.

More and more of them are taking advantage of that.

I think Zapier is a great example of 1 of those companies.

They were paying people to delocate from the bay last year, which was interesting.

I think they got a couple people to do it.

You guys are doing a Work at a Startup conference in July, correct?

Walker, Head of Cognitive Research, YC Yep.

So the Work at a Startup conference is actually not the first time YC has done it.

We did it a long time ago, back in 2010, and I know because I presented at it.

And the only reason that we didn't keep doing it was that it was a lot of work and YC was very short-staffed at the time.

And so we just sort of paused it for a number of years.

But I'm really excited that we're going to bring it back.

We're 10 times the size, and so the Converse is going to be about 10 times the size Hadoop was back then.

And so how it works is it's similar to YC's demo day, but for employees instead of investors.

Justin Kahn and Sam Altman are going to give keynote talks about working at a startup.

Why you should work at a startup, how to judge startups, what kind of compensation you should be looking for, how to negotiate an offer.

And then we're going to have 35 rapid-fire pitches from the founders of YC companies.

We've got an extremely broad range of companies coming who are hiring a very broad range of roles.

We have everything from established successful companies like Instacart, DoorDash, and PlanGrid.

Hair founders are going to come and give a personal presentation.

And then we have a whole bunch of really small companies that just raised a seed round and are looking for engineers number 1 or 2 and are giving out large amounts of equity and return, and then everything in between.

And we have companies who are hiring for roles.

The most common are probably full-stack web and back-end web and front-end web.

But there's a whole range of other roles as well.

We have the companies who are hiring for co-founder CTO roles.

We have companies who are hiring for machine learning and AI and DevOps and robotics engineers and embedded system design.

So I found that particularly cool, just how broad the range is.

Leeson And what's the experience going to be like for an attendee?

Walker So I think The most compelling reason to go as an attendee is if you think you might be interested in working at a startup, but you're not really sure which 1 or how to think about it.

come to the Work at a Startup event, you'll get in a short period of time a really compressed view of what's out there on the market, what your options are as an engineer right now in 2018.

And you'll get to talk to the founders, because after the talks we're going to have a mingling session where you can just walk up to the founders of any company and get to know them.

And so as an engineer, Matt you're an engineer right now, how do you think someone ought to prepare themselves to attend the event?

Or should they not worry about it and just show up?

I think it kind of depends on your background, where you're coming from.

If you're an engineer that's already worked at a startup or might be familiar with what's going on and what employment might look like at a startup, then you probably don't need to do much.

You might want to research the list of companies that are presenting.

Anyone should do this, I guess, just so you know what to expect and which ones you might be interested in listening to.

Because I believe there is going to be a separate track of other talks going on at the same time.

So sometimes you have to pick and choose between if you're going to be listening to the presentations or something else that's going on.

So familiarize yourself with the companies.

And then for someone that hasn't ever worked at a startup before, you probably have a set of ideas of what it would be like to work at a startup based on what you've read on Hacker News or elsewhere on the internet.

So I would say try to push all those out of your head and come with an open mind.

Because we like to think that especially YC startups are going to present you with a nicer all around employment offer.

And try to ignore any horror stories you've heard before and how bad it might be.

But also recognizing, like we were talking about earlier, that you may need to take a hit on salary if you are coming from a larger company.

And everyone's going to have their own take on whether or not that works for them in their current situation.

I think just coming with an open mind and being willing to think about working in an industry or for a size company that you haven't ever thought about before will be the best way to get ready for it.

And just in practical terms, should they bring a resume with them?

I guess we didn't mention this, but actually there is going to be a selection process for who gets to attend.

Since unfortunately we don't have unlimited space at YC's office in Mountain Views.

And so everyone will be required to fill out the normal application that's on workatastartup.com right now, as if you're going to be using the site online.

There will be a special section where you can indicate that you're interested in attending the conference, which will treat your application a little bit differently.

And it will just tell us who's all interested, so we can then go through where we're going to have the very difficult job of selecting who gets to attend.

Whether or not you need to bring paper resumes, if you really want to, we're not going to stop you from doing that.

But we are going to try to have a little bit of a technological approach to just making it easy for people at the conference to indicate interest in companies.

And is it open to people not currently living in the Bay Area?

Bateman Yeah, anyone that wants to come, I think.

Of course you'd have to pay your own way here and all that.

But I think it's more about if you're willing to work in a location where most of these companies are located.

If you're willing to relocate there, then that'll probably be the bigger kind of, we'll drive the decision a bit more.

But certainly anyone not from the Bay Area is very welcome to attend.

We are also going to livestream the conference online for anyone who can't make it out here.

I wanted to mention 1 other thing that I'm very excited about for the conference, which is for the first time we're going to have hardware demos.

Back in 2010, when we did the first work at a startup conference, we didn't have really any companies who were building hardware.

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Announcing Work at a Startup