recursion

In 2009, I was part of a Y Combinator-funded startup that crashed and burned. The startup didn’t work out, but the experience was memorable, and years later I ended up at Swiftype (another YC-funded startup) through the YC network, so it’s not all bad.

One of the weird things about my YC experience is that I’m featured in the photo used on Wikipedia to illustrate the Y Combinator entry. Since the photo is in Creative Commons licensed, it gets used in tons of articles about Y Combinator. It was taken by Kevin Hale, who was then running Wufoo, and is now a YC partner.

This is from Prototype Day, which is about half-way through the 3 month session. Everyone presents what they’ve been working on. I’m the blurry one getting up to demo our software. Most people gave what was more-or-less a pitch of their company, but I tried to do a live demo. People didn’t really get it – which should have been a wake up call – and the demo flopped because we had some DNS setting configured incorrectly. So at least I was able to fix that problem! More clearly, you can see Patrick Collison sitting next to me, working on what would become Stripe.