I found out about Y Combinator through HN in 2007. The big thing I learned from PG's essays and the links on HN were that I could start a company myself, and th

I found out about Y Combinator through HN in 2007. The big thing I learned from PG's essays and the links on HN were that I could start a company myself, and that there were lots of smart people like me who had done it and were going to do it. It gave me the confidence to quit and start working on something. The next year I applied and got in with my startup Posterous. We built that to a Top 250 Quantcast site, and Twitter ended up buying it. In 2011 I joined Y Combinator as a designer in residence, then investing partner through 2015. In 2015, I started a $125M Seed VC fund (Initialized Capital) with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who interviewed me in 2008 to get into YC. So I literally wouldn't have done any of those things and probably would have stayed on at Palantir as a software engineer in 2007 if I had never seen Hacker News.