- Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator, is hosting an all-women conference due to the increase in female partners and successful female alumni at Y Combinator.
- The conference was originally planned for 150 people but received an overwhelming number of applications.
- Livingston shares her own story of starting Y Combinator, emphasizing the importance of a founder's interest in the problem they are solving.
- Y Combinator started as an experiment to make it easier for more people to start startups, taking advantage of the cheaper costs and increased accessibility of technology.
- Funding startups in batches proved to be very powerful, as founders were able to support and learn from each other.
- Y Combinator has funded 632 startups with a combined valuation of over $20 billion, including successful companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly, and Stripe.

- The speaker is part of a startup accelerator with 12 partners and a supportive community of founders.
- The speaker advises founders to have determination, empathy, and create something people want.
- They also emphasize the importance of living cheaply and staying focused.
- The speaker shares personal advice for women in startups, including the challenges of balancing work and family and being a quiet co-founder.
- They also mention the difficulty non-programmers face in finding technical co-founders.

- Many female non-technical founders struggle to find programmers for their startups due to a smaller percentage of women being programmers and the tendency to be close friends with people of the same gender.
- Options for female founders include making friends with more programmers or learning to program themselves.
- Starting a startup with a significant other or spouse is a successful approach, as evidenced by the experiences of several speakers at YC.
- A quick study showed that 34.5% of startups with female founders had started the company with their significant other.
- The number of female founders in Y Combinator's batches has been consistently increasing over the years, indicating a positive trend of more women starting startups.
- Y Combinator's early investment and focus on funding outliers allows them to observe trends first, suggesting that the current batch's 25% of startups with female founders is significant.
- The speaker believes that 2014 may be seen as the tipping point for female founders and expresses confidence in the ability of the people in the room to drive this change.

- Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator, is hosting an all-women conference due to the increase in female partners and successful female alumni at Y Combinator.
- Y Combinator started as an experiment to make it easier for more people to start startups, funding startups in batches and creating a supportive community of founders.
- Y Combinator has funded 632 startups with a combined valuation of over $20 billion, including successful companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly, and Stripe.
- The speaker advises founders to have determination, empathy, and create something people want, while also emphasizing the importance of living cheaply and staying focused.
- Female founders face challenges in finding technical co-founders, but options include making friends with more programmers or learning to program themselves.
- Starting a startup with a significant other or spouse is a successful approach, as evidenced by the experiences of several speakers at YC.
- The number of female founders in Y Combinator's batches has been consistently increasing over the years, indicating a positive trend of more women starting startups.
- Y Combinator's early investment and focus on funding outliers allows them to observe trends first, suggesting that the current batch's 25% of startups with female founders is significant.

Jessica Livingston, cofounder of Y Combinator, at Female Founders Conference 2014

I'm 1 of the founders of Y Combinator and I'm so happy you're all here today.

I've been reading, like some of you have come from so far away.

I've been in the startup world for 9 years now and this is the first conference I've ever been to that's all women.

Except for Lawrence who's our honorary male guest who's here with Julia Hartz today.

The reason I decided to make this an exclusively female event is that we can.

We now have enough female partners at Y Combinator and enough successful female alumni that we can do this with all women.

Actually, the conference started out as something we planned to do for like 150 people in our office with just alumni speaking, And then we were flooded with applications.

So we switched it to the Computer History Museum.

But even so, with extra space, we still had to reject a lot of great applications.

This is the most oversubscribed event we've ever hosted.

And there are a lot of female YC alumni in the audience.

Female YC alumni, Would you please stand up?

I just want to see how many of you are here.

And all the alumni have orange name tags that say YC alumni, so please, I encourage you, if you're interested, go up to any of them and ask them about their experience with YC.

Okay, so I thought I'd start out by sharing my own story.

Y Combinator is basically a startup investment firm.

And the way things worked was much more like a startup than an investment firm.

These are the 4 founders, and it was during our first interview weekend.

I hadn't quit my job at the investment bank where I worked.

I didn't actually quit my job until after this weekend.

We had agreed to fund 8 startups, so I sort of had to quit then.

I had a book deal at the time for founders at work, but I remember that when I resigned, I told people it was to work on my book.

YC is a big deal now, but In those days, it seemed so crazy and so inconsequential that I was embarrassed to tell people that that was really what I was going to do.

In fact, the hardest part for me for starting YC was telling my dad that I had quit my job, that I no longer had medical coverage, and that I was starting this new kind of investment firm with my boyfriend.

But luckily my dad was supportive, so that was good.

Okay, so here we are at dinner during the first summer.

In fact, the 2 older guys sort of toward the front were the guest speakers.

In those days, we had absolutely no idea how big we'd become.

And I had no experience with startups at all.

Yes, I was writing founders at work, but other than that, I had 0 credentials.

So if you're worried that you might not be qualified to work on the idea you want to work on, I can tell you that you cannot be less qualified than I was.

But I did have what I have since observed many times is the most important qualification in a founder, which is a real interest in the problem you're solving.

Back then, we would have been happy to know that YSC would even break even.

I started it for the same reason that I was doing founders at work, which is because I was really interested in startups and I wanted to help founders, as I still do today.

By the way, this is often how startups get started.

You don't know what you're doing, but you test a hypothesis to see how it works.

The hypothesis we were testing was that it had become so much cheaper to start a startup that a lot more people would do it if we made it easier for them.

Everyone takes this for granted now, but this was news back then.

In 2005, it was a lot cheaper to start a startup than it had been a few years earlier.

Servers and bandwidth were cheaper, there was more open source software, and the internet had become a really good vehicle for getting attention, so you were no longer dependent on press and expensive PR firms.

But these changes were happening in the aftermath of the internet bubble.

So startups were so unfashionable then that no 1 was really paying attention.

When we started YC, none of us knew anything about angel investing.

So we decided the fastest way to learn would be to fund a whole bunch of startups at once, and we'd do it over a summer.

When the summer was over, we were just planning to fund startups asynchronously, as all investors did.

So we created this summer program for undergraduates, actually, and put a website up and an application, and we could reach this initial group of applicants because they all read Paul's essays.

And there was actually 1 female in this batch, but she wasn't there for the photo, unfortunately.

She actually, I don't think, ever did YC.

She was still working in Seattle at the time.

But she was still a founder of the company we funded.

That summer's program was actually how we discovered what turned out to be the most important thing about YC.

It was that funding startups in batches is very powerful.

It's very helpful for the founders, even now, to have a bunch of peers going through the same thing at the same time.

But it was even more important back then, because there was very little information out there about how to start a startup.

They all helped each other and shared the same experiences.

In the beginning, I had to do practically everything.

I don't actually know what I was doing on it, but I love the photo.

In startups, if you're the non-technical founder, your job is basically everything that's non-technical.

I attempted to get reporters to write about us.

And please note that I say attempted rather than got.

I even delivered air conditioners to all the startups that summer.

And if any of you have ever tried to lift an air conditioner, you know how heavy those damn things are.

When we first started YC, we used to alternate between Cambridge in the summer and Silicon Valley in the winter.

And the decision to make the first winter batch in Silicon Valley was so last minute that we told people on the application, like, we don't know where we're going to be, either Cambridge or Silicon Valley.

And we did manage to get our West Coast office together in time.

But it was so down to the wire that at the first dinner, we had to warn the founders not to touch the paint on the walls because they were still wet.

I mentioned before that I tried to get press.

But it turned out we didn't really need it, because we already had a connection to the early adopters for an idea like Y Combinator, which were the programmers who read Paul's essays.

When a startup has the kind of connection to early adopters, you can expand pretty easily from there.

We funded a few more startups every batch.

We grew our investor network every demo day.

And simultaneously, by the way, our startups became better known.

So we were becoming better known and our startups were too.

All of the most successful startups we funded grew the same way we did, out of an initial group of fanatical early adopters.

This photo here is Brian, Joe, and Nate when they did YC back in 2009.

And they made something that a few people really loved and just expanded from that core.

And incidentally, the Airbnbs were our most fanatical users.

When they were doing YC, they were the first to every event we ever did and the last ones to leave.

So fast forward to today, and Y Combinator has funded 632 startups that now have a combined valuation of over $20 billion, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly and Stripe.

We have 12 partners, 8 part-time partners and a community of about 1,500 founders who really help out 1 another a lot.

So we have a lot more people and do a lot more stuff than we used to, but our goals are exactly the same as when we first started.

We want to help founders get started and grow, provide a community of supportive people, and help startups raise money quickly on good terms.

So now I'm gonna switch from talking about my own story to give you my general advice for founders.

The most important quality you can have is determination.

I've seen so many smart and talented founders fail because they just couldn't stick with it when things got tough.

You can't even imagine what you're going to have to go through if you're on your way to becoming super successful.

You need to be able to withstand rejection.

People will think your idea is crazy or they'll think it's lame.

You need to be able to talk to your users and really care about their experience.

That's why it's best if you yourself are a target user of your product.

Then you can have a conversation with your users just by thinking.

4, you need to make something people want a lot.

It's not enough if they just want it a little bit.

They have to want it enough to actually sign up and to keep coming back and to tell their friends about it, even when you're just like this crappy little startup.

At the beginning, number 5 is live cheaply.

At the beginning, if you don't have a lot of money, you have to live in a way that buys you more runway.

It often takes startups a while to figure out exactly what they should be doing.

And if you spend too much money, you won't have enough time for the necessary evolution to happen.

I constantly see startups that I think they've almost got it figured out and then they run out of money and they die.

It's easy to waste time on the wrong things, because in a startup there's always 100 things you could be doing, right?

And if you spend time on those other 99 instead of the 1 optimal thing, you aren't doing the right thing.

So that was just like my super brief distilled advice for general, for founders.

But now I'm gonna give you some advice specifically for women.

And I thought about what advice I'd give to my own sister if she were starting a startup.

And so I wrote a draft and then I read what I said and after that I thought, oh my God, I should just toss this part out.

I was terrified to say anything because things can get pretty heated out there on the Internet on the topic of women in tech.

So I was really, like, agonizing over what I should do.

Like do I keep my life simple and avoid controversial stuff?

Or should I really try to help and risk getting flamed on the internet, which is my nightmare?

And then, literally in the middle of this crisis, I got this email from a woman named Bushra, who I've never met.

And I don't know if you can read it back there, but she thanks me for this blog post that I wrote about what stops female founders.

And She's like, thank you for being the finger pointing to the moon.

So in the spirit of sharing practical information at this conference, I'm going to risk it and speak candidly.

So, Paul took this picture in 2009 and he jokingly refers to it as combining work and life, which it was.

And based on my own experience, I'd say it's easier to start a startup before you have kids.

I didn't have kids when we first started YC, and I'm honestly not sure if I would have done it if I had.

In the first few years of YC, when I was doing everything, I was working really long hours, 7 days a week, it was all consuming, And I just don't know if I could have worked that many hours with kids.

Even now when there's a great team and there are more people to do things at YC, I struggle to manage the balance.

I mean, I love doing both, but I struggle.

In fact, just yesterday I was writing this talk and I got so into it that I almost forgot to pick up George from school.

I was like, oh, my God, and I rushed there.

It's definitely possible to combine having kids and doing a startup.

Diane Green and Julia Hartz have done it.

And I hope they'll come out here and give you good advice on how to do it.

I'm just telling you, if you have a choice, it would be a lot easier to do before kids.

Because I found that After I had kids, I didn't want to work 12 hours a day.

Kids pull you in a different direction than a startup does.

And these 2 competing forces are very, very powerful.

So YC has funded women and men with children of all ages, including newborns, and we'll continue to do so.

But for your sake, if you have an option, I suggest doing it before kids.

If you already have kids, Start the startup, but know what you're up against.

And try to outsource things that aren't directly related to your kids.

I mean, I use Instacart for groceries all week long.

Okay, let me give you another personal example, just in case it resonates with some of you.

I don't like the idea of being a public figure.

I like get super nervous giving talks, that's why this is probably so bad.

I loathe talking to trolls or dealing with them.

I am reticent talking to the press, the list goes on.

I never needed public acknowledgment of my contribution to YC.

And I've usually, like for the most part, chosen to be kind of behind the scenes.

But while I may be quiet publicly, I'm quietly determined.

Okay, there's room for quiet co-founders.

You don't have to feel like you have to change who you are as long as you get stuff done, which I do.

So you can remain true to your nature, but be prepared because although your startup will be fine if you're quiet, there's a side effect that might surprise you.

Which is that you will be ignored by people who can only hear loud voices.

I'm working on trying to make my voice a little louder, actually, so I can try to be more of a role model for women.

But I'm really just not an aggressive person.

And I kind of feel like girls aren't trained to be aggressive in the same way that boys are.

So if you're like me at all and you prefer to be behind the scenes, just prepare to be ignored sometimes.

So I'm not saying that you have to be this big public figure if you're going to be a startup founder.

I just want to warn you that you might have this trade-off.

So let me give you an example from just a few weeks ago.

I spent all morning working on announcing this conference, and here's my blog post right here announcing the Female Founders conference.

And so what turned up later that day in the press?

Paul Graham announces conference for women founders.

All joking aside, I always chose to be in the background.

And so I'd like to Just stand up for being in the background.

Quietly determined people, by the way, often beat out the people who talk loudly but do nothing but talk.

Like, I call these people scenesters, and there are a lot of them in the startup world, but Quietly determined people tend to win because the scenesters usually can't build anything.

So lastly, here's my advice to anyone like me who is not a programmer.

Most non-programmers aren't going to luck out like I did and have Paul, Robert, and Trevor as friends.

These are my YC co-founders back when they did their startup in the mid-90s.

As a non-programmer, you will have a harder time finding a co-founder who is technical, especially the older you get and the further away from school you are.

Not only is it hard to meet technical people, but meeting them at a time when they're free to work on a new project is even harder.

And if you do meet a technical person who you get along with, if you're not technical, how are you going to be able to judge their ability?

At YC, we've seen a lot of female non-technical founders whose biggest problem is the inability to get a programmer on their team.

Since a smaller percentage of women are programmers and most people are likely to be close friends with people of their same gender, That means a woman who wants to start a startup is less likely than a man to have a close friend who's a programmer.

You could actively try to make friends with more programmers.

Better yet, you could learn to program yourself.

And in fact, that's probably the best advice I could give to anyone non-technical.

Empirically, a good suggestion is to do what I and Diane Green and Julia Hartz and a few of the other speakers here today did, which is to start a startup with your significant other or spouse.

Now, I'm not suggesting you should marry a programmer.

I'm just saying that if you are married to 1, don't be afraid to start a startup together.

And I did like a really quick informal study of the YC startups prior to the current batch.

And in 34 and 1 half percent of the startups that had female founders, they had started the company with their significant other.

And by the way, the 34 and 1 half percent is a lower bound, since we never explicitly ask people if they're a couple.

The point is, don't feel like there's anything weird about starting a startup with your significant other, because it's pretty common.

I also went back and looked at the number of female founders by batch in Y Combinator's history.

Notice for the past several years here, well, let me just first point out, at the beginning there's a little bit of noise there because we had such small numbers, and if there was 1 female in the batch, it just kicked the number up really high.

But you'll notice that we've been consistently funding more startups per batch with female founders.

And I think part of the reason is that there are more women starting startups, which is awesome, which is why we're here today, right?

And because Y Combinator invests so early and is so focused on funding outliers, we tend to see trends first.

So when we see that 25% of the startups in this current batch have female founders, like, I'm certain that this means there's something probably going on here.

And in any big change, there's always a moment that feels to people like it's the tipping point.

And I wouldn't be surprised if we look back in 5 years and feel like 2014 was the tipping point for female founders.

And if anyone can make that happen, it's the people in this room.


Speaker 0: I'm Jessica Livingston. I'm 1 of the founders of Y Combinator and I'm so happy you're all here today. I've been reading, like some of you have come from so far away. It's just thrilling. I've been in the startup world for 9 years now and this is the first conference I've ever been to that's all women.

Crazy! Except for Lawrence who's our honorary male guest who's here with Julia Hartz today. Okay here I'm back. The reason I decided to make this an exclusively female event is that we can. We now have enough female partners at Y Combinator and enough successful female alumni that we can do this with all women.

Actually, the conference started out as something we planned to do for like 150 people in our office with just alumni speaking, And then we were flooded with applications. So we switched it to the Computer History Museum. But even so, with extra space, we still had to reject a lot of great applications. I'm really bummed about that. This is the most oversubscribed event we've ever hosted.

And there are a lot of female YC alumni in the audience. Female YC alumni, Would you please stand up? I just want to see how many of you are here. All stand up. Yeah.

And all the alumni have orange name tags that say YC alumni, so please, I encourage you, if you're interested, go up to any of them and ask them about their experience with YC. Okay, so I thought I'd start out by sharing my own story. Y Combinator is basically a startup investment firm. And the way things worked was much more like a startup than an investment firm. Here's a photo of when we first started.

These are the 4 founders, and it was during our first interview weekend. We launched in March 2005. I hadn't quit my job at the investment bank where I worked. I didn't actually quit my job until after this weekend. We had agreed to fund 8 startups, so I sort of had to quit then.

I had a book deal at the time for founders at work, but I remember that when I resigned, I told people it was to work on my book. YC is a big deal now, but In those days, it seemed so crazy and so inconsequential that I was embarrassed to tell people that that was really what I was going to do. In fact, the hardest part for me for starting YC was telling my dad that I had quit my job, that I no longer had medical coverage, and that I was starting this new kind of investment firm with my boyfriend. But luckily my dad was supportive, so that was good. Okay, so here we are at dinner during the first summer.

That was the summer of 2005. And that 1 table is the entire batch. In fact, the 2 older guys sort of toward the front were the guest speakers. In those days, we had absolutely no idea how big we'd become. And I had no experience with startups at all.

Yes, I was writing founders at work, but other than that, I had 0 credentials. So if you're worried that you might not be qualified to work on the idea you want to work on, I can tell you that you cannot be less qualified than I was. But I did have what I have since observed many times is the most important qualification in a founder, which is a real interest in the problem you're solving. I did have that. We didn't start YC to make money.

Back then, we would have been happy to know that YSC would even break even. I started it for the same reason that I was doing founders at work, which is because I was really interested in startups and I wanted to help founders, as I still do today. By the way, this is often how startups get started. You don't know what you're doing, but you test a hypothesis to see how it works. The hypothesis we were testing was that it had become so much cheaper to start a startup that a lot more people would do it if we made it easier for them.

Everyone takes this for granted now, but this was news back then. In 2005, it was a lot cheaper to start a startup than it had been a few years earlier. Servers and bandwidth were cheaper, there was more open source software, and the internet had become a really good vehicle for getting attention, so you were no longer dependent on press and expensive PR firms. But these changes were happening in the aftermath of the internet bubble. So startups were so unfashionable then that no 1 was really paying attention.

When we started YC, none of us knew anything about angel investing. So we decided the fastest way to learn would be to fund a whole bunch of startups at once, and we'd do it over a summer. When the summer was over, we were just planning to fund startups asynchronously, as all investors did. So we created this summer program for undergraduates, actually, and put a website up and an application, and we could reach this initial group of applicants because they all read Paul's essays. So this is the first batch.

You can see Sam Altman right there. Look how young he looks back then. And there was actually 1 female in this batch, but she wasn't there for the photo, unfortunately. She actually, I don't think, ever did YC. She was still working in Seattle at the time.

But she was still a founder of the company we funded. That summer's program was actually how we discovered what turned out to be the most important thing about YC. And it surprised us. It was that funding startups in batches is very powerful. So we kept this.

It's very helpful for the founders, even now, to have a bunch of peers going through the same thing at the same time. But it was even more important back then, because there was very little information out there about how to start a startup. They all helped each other and shared the same experiences. It was great. In the beginning, I had to do practically everything.

Here's me on a reverse engineered segue. I don't actually know what I was doing on it, but I love the photo. This is in our West Coast office. In startups, if you're the non-technical founder, your job is basically everything that's non-technical. I learned how to incorporate startups.

I attempted to get reporters to write about us. And please note that I say attempted rather than got. I bought groceries. I ran our events. I even delivered air conditioners to all the startups that summer.

And if any of you have ever tried to lift an air conditioner, you know how heavy those damn things are. Full service. When we first started YC, we used to alternate between Cambridge in the summer and Silicon Valley in the winter. And the decision to make the first winter batch in Silicon Valley was so last minute that we told people on the application, like, we don't know where we're going to be, either Cambridge or Silicon Valley. Still apply, though.

And we did manage to get our West Coast office together in time. But it was so down to the wire that at the first dinner, we had to warn the founders not to touch the paint on the walls because they were still wet. I mentioned before that I tried to get press. I actually didn't get any. But it turned out we didn't really need it, because we already had a connection to the early adopters for an idea like Y Combinator, which were the programmers who read Paul's essays.

When a startup has the kind of connection to early adopters, you can expand pretty easily from there. And that's exactly what we did. We funded a few more startups every batch. We grew our investor network every demo day. And simultaneously, by the way, our startups became better known.

So we were becoming better known and our startups were too. All of the most successful startups we funded grew the same way we did, out of an initial group of fanatical early adopters. Airbnb, for example. This photo here is Brian, Joe, and Nate when they did YC back in 2009. And they made something that a few people really loved and just expanded from that core.

And incidentally, the Airbnbs were our most fanatical users. When they were doing YC, they were the first to every event we ever did and the last ones to leave. So fast forward to today, and Y Combinator has funded 632 startups that now have a combined valuation of over $20 billion, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly and Stripe. We have 12 partners, 8 part-time partners and a community of about 1,500 founders who really help out 1 another a lot. So we have a lot more people and do a lot more stuff than we used to, but our goals are exactly the same as when we first started.

We want to help founders get started and grow, provide a community of supportive people, and help startups raise money quickly on good terms. So now I'm gonna switch from talking about my own story to give you my general advice for founders. This is very sort of quick advice. The most important quality you can have is determination. I've seen so many smart and talented founders fail because they just couldn't stick with it when things got tough.

You can't even imagine what you're going to have to go through if you're on your way to becoming super successful. You need to be able to withstand rejection. People will think your idea is crazy or they'll think it's lame. Investors will say no. Reporters won't care, and so on.

3 is empathy. You need to be able to talk to your users and really care about their experience. That's why it's best if you yourself are a target user of your product. Then you can have a conversation with your users just by thinking. It's true, it's true.

4, you need to make something people want a lot. It's not enough if they just want it a little bit. They have to want it enough to actually sign up and to keep coming back and to tell their friends about it, even when you're just like this crappy little startup. At the beginning, number 5 is live cheaply. At the beginning, if you don't have a lot of money, you have to live in a way that buys you more runway.

It often takes startups a while to figure out exactly what they should be doing. And if you spend too much money, you won't have enough time for the necessary evolution to happen. I constantly see startups that I think they've almost got it figured out and then they run out of money and they die. Lastly is just focus. I can't stress this 1 enough.

It's easy to waste time on the wrong things, because in a startup there's always 100 things you could be doing, right? And if you spend time on those other 99 instead of the 1 optimal thing, you aren't doing the right thing. So that was just like my super brief distilled advice for general, for founders. But now I'm gonna give you some advice specifically for women. And I thought about what advice I'd give to my own sister if she were starting a startup.

And so I wrote a draft and then I read what I said and after that I thought, oh my God, I should just toss this part out. I was terrified to say anything because things can get pretty heated out there on the Internet on the topic of women in tech. And I was nervous. So I was really, like, agonizing over what I should do. Like do I keep my life simple and avoid controversial stuff?

Or should I really try to help and risk getting flamed on the internet, which is my nightmare? And then, literally in the middle of this crisis, I got this email from a woman named Bushra, who I've never met. And it just like really hit me. I was so appreciative. And I don't know if you can read it back there, but she thanks me for this blog post that I wrote about what stops female founders.

And She's like, thank you for being the finger pointing to the moon. And I think I teared up. I was very touched. And so I knew what I had to do. So in the spirit of sharing practical information at this conference, I'm going to risk it and speak candidly.

OK. That's my baby. He's 5 now. So, Paul took this picture in 2009 and he jokingly refers to it as combining work and life, which it was. And I have 2 sons now.

They're 5 and 2. And based on my own experience, I'd say it's easier to start a startup before you have kids. Okay, shocker. I didn't have kids when we first started YC, and I'm honestly not sure if I would have done it if I had. In the first few years of YC, when I was doing everything, I was working really long hours, 7 days a week, it was all consuming, And I just don't know if I could have worked that many hours with kids.

Even now when there's a great team and there are more people to do things at YC, I struggle to manage the balance. I mean, I love doing both, but I struggle. In fact, just yesterday I was writing this talk and I got so into it that I almost forgot to pick up George from school. Like, I let something hit me. I was like, oh, my God, and I rushed there.

It's definitely possible to combine having kids and doing a startup. Diane Green and Julia Hartz have done it. And I hope they'll come out here and give you good advice on how to do it. I'm just telling you, if you have a choice, it would be a lot easier to do before kids. Because I found that After I had kids, I didn't want to work 12 hours a day.

I wanted to be with them. Kids pull you in a different direction than a startup does. And these 2 competing forces are very, very powerful. So YC has funded women and men with children of all ages, including newborns, and we'll continue to do so. But for your sake, if you have an option, I suggest doing it before kids.

If you already have kids, Start the startup, but know what you're up against. And try to outsource things that aren't directly related to your kids. I mean, I use Instacart for groceries all week long. So that's my bid on kids. Okay, let me give you another personal example, just in case it resonates with some of you.

So I'm by nature a bit shy. I don't like the idea of being a public figure. I like get super nervous giving talks, that's why this is probably so bad. I loathe talking to trolls or dealing with them. I am reticent talking to the press, the list goes on.

I never needed public acknowledgment of my contribution to YC. And I've usually, like for the most part, chosen to be kind of behind the scenes. But while I may be quiet publicly, I'm quietly determined. And it's okay to be like that. Okay, there's room for quiet co-founders.

You don't have to feel like you have to change who you are as long as you get stuff done, which I do. So you can remain true to your nature, but be prepared because although your startup will be fine if you're quiet, there's a side effect that might surprise you. Which is that you will be ignored by people who can only hear loud voices. I'm working on trying to make my voice a little louder, actually, so I can try to be more of a role model for women. But I'm really just not an aggressive person.

And I kind of feel like girls aren't trained to be aggressive in the same way that boys are. So if you're like me at all and you prefer to be behind the scenes, just prepare to be ignored sometimes. So I'm not saying that you have to be this big public figure if you're going to be a startup founder. I just want to warn you that you might have this trade-off. So let me give you an example from just a few weeks ago.

I spent all morning working on announcing this conference, and here's my blog post right here announcing the Female Founders conference. And so what turned up later that day in the press? Paul Graham announces conference for women founders. I mean, I was so indignant. I was so mad.

It's like I didn't even exist. But I do feel badly for him on this. All joking aside, I always chose to be in the background. And so I'd like to Just stand up for being in the background. Quietly determined people, by the way, often beat out the people who talk loudly but do nothing but talk.

Like, I call these people scenesters, and there are a lot of them in the startup world, but Quietly determined people tend to win because the scenesters usually can't build anything. Okay. So lastly, here's my advice to anyone like me who is not a programmer. Most non-programmers aren't going to luck out like I did and have Paul, Robert, and Trevor as friends. These are my YC co-founders back when they did their startup in the mid-90s.

As a non-programmer, you will have a harder time finding a co-founder who is technical, especially the older you get and the further away from school you are. Not only is it hard to meet technical people, but meeting them at a time when they're free to work on a new project is even harder. And if you do meet a technical person who you get along with, if you're not technical, how are you going to be able to judge their ability? It's really hard. At YC, we've seen a lot of female non-technical founders whose biggest problem is the inability to get a programmer on their team.

Since a smaller percentage of women are programmers and most people are likely to be close friends with people of their same gender, That means a woman who wants to start a startup is less likely than a man to have a close friend who's a programmer. So what should you do? There are a few options. You could actively try to make friends with more programmers. Better yet, you could learn to program yourself.

And in fact, that's probably the best advice I could give to anyone non-technical. Empirically, a good suggestion is to do what I and Diane Green and Julia Hartz and a few of the other speakers here today did, which is to start a startup with your significant other or spouse. Now, I'm not suggesting you should marry a programmer. I'm just saying that if you are married to 1, don't be afraid to start a startup together. We have a lot of evidence that it works.

And it certainly worked for Paul and me. And I did like a really quick informal study of the YC startups prior to the current batch. And in 34 and 1 half percent of the startups that had female founders, they had started the company with their significant other. And by the way, the 34 and 1 half percent is a lower bound, since we never explicitly ask people if they're a couple. This is just from my knowledge.

But it gives you a feeling. The point is, don't feel like there's anything weird about starting a startup with your significant other, because it's pretty common. I also went back and looked at the number of female founders by batch in Y Combinator's history. Notice for the past several years here, well, let me just first point out, at the beginning there's a little bit of noise there because we had such small numbers, and if there was 1 female in the batch, it just kicked the number up really high. But you'll notice that we've been consistently funding more startups per batch with female founders.

And I think part of the reason is that there are more women starting startups, which is awesome, which is why we're here today, right? And because Y Combinator invests so early and is so focused on funding outliers, we tend to see trends first. So when we see that 25% of the startups in this current batch have female founders, like, I'm certain that this means there's something probably going on here. And in any big change, there's always a moment that feels to people like it's the tipping point. And I wouldn't be surprised if we look back in 5 years and feel like 2014 was the tipping point for female founders.

And if anyone can make that happen, it's the people in this room. So thank you. Thank you.

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Jessica Livingston at Female Founders Conference 2014