From the CEO: Secret to Getting Into YC - Michael Seibel + Charles Hudson

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Michael is currently a full-time partner at Y Combinator. Previously, he was a co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv from 2007 - 2011 and the co-founder and CEO of Socialcam in 2012. During 2012, Socialcam participated in Y Combinator, raised angel financing from a group of amazing investors, and sold to Autodesk Inc. for $60m (link). Needless to say - it was a busy year. In 2014 Justin.tv became Twitch Interactive and under the leadership of Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin sold to Amazon for $970m. Before getting into tech, Michael spent a year as the finance director for a US Senate campaign and before that he graduated from Yale University with a bachelors degree in political science. Today he spends a large majority of his free time cooking, reading, traveling and going for long drives.
Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner and Founder of Precursor Ventures, an early­stage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of investment for the most promising software and hardware companies. Prior to founding Precursor Ventures, Charles was a Partner at SoftTech VC. In this role, he focused on identifying investment opportunities in mobile infrastructure, mobile applications, and marketplaces. In addition to his investment activities, he supports SoftTech portfolio companies on business and corporate development matters. He was also the Co­Founder and CEO of Bionic Panda Games, an Android­focused mobile games startup based in San Francisco, CA. Prior to joining SoftTech VC and co­founding Bionic Panda Games, Charles Hudson was the VP of Business Development for Serious Business until the company was acquired by Zynga in February 2010. Prior to Serious Business, he was the Sr. Director for Business Development at Gaia Interactive, an online hangout and virtual world for teens. Prior to Gaia, Charles worked in New Business Development at Google and focused on new partnership opportunities for early­stage products in the advertising, mobile, and e­commerce markets. Prior to joining Google, he was a Product Manager for IronPort Systems, a leading provider of anti­spam hardware appliances that was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million in 2007. Charles was also the founder of the Virtual Goods Summit and Social Gaming Summit, two of the leading conferences in the free­to­play games space. Charles spent several years working at In­Q­Tel, the strategic venture capital group for the Central Intelligence Agency. While at In­Q­Tel, he focused on identifying investment opportunities that could deliver significant value to the CIA and the commercial market in both the short and long term. He holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in Economics and Spanish from Stanford University.
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[@gaurav7047]

Application talk starts at 21:00

[@sdm.loading]

Watching this in 2021. YC is now remote. Who would have thought that 4 years ago.

[@kefamutuma7402]

thanks guys for improving diversity in the startup world

[@yu-we1]

This is very inspiring and I will be applying in the Fall and then again in the Spring probably haha. Thank you for this resource! It's a bit disheartening to hear that a lot of startups do get referrals to YC, and sometimes more than one at that. Being at an East Coast college, I haven't run into many YC alum but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.

[@troooooper100]

yea that sucks, i didnt know about referrals, until this week when i read interviews.

[@jinettew.3192]

Lovely interviewer style.