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Question for dpg. I heard that as a founder you get access to a mailing list read by every other YC founder. Out of curiosity, how many founders read it nowad

Question for dpg. I heard that as a founder you get access to a mailing list read by every other YC founder. Out of curiosity, how many founders read it nowadays? Most of them? YC's funded 440 companies, so there've been around ~1k founders. I was just wondering how many of them still use it. It's quite cool to see the alumni network growing so large.

drusenko 13y ago
there are usually a couple dozen emails per week, but easy to skim through. i read most of them, as i'm sure many do.
- rdl 13y ago
  It isn't really a discussion list so much as people sending important announcements or sometimes sending posts asking a question, soliciting private answers, then compiling and potentially anonymizing the results before posting a consolidated response a few days later -- super efficient. Per batch email, group discussion (FB mostly, for us), group chat, etc usually involves a subset, or direct asks of other groups. I personally know nothing about consumer stuff, so no one ever asks me for CSS advice, but plenty of times hosting, security, etc questions come up. Plus the purely social stuff is usually with a self selected subset; YC is diverse in interests. There is even basically a YC gun club, and a bunch of YC anti-gun activists, coexisting peacefully :)
  - kumarski 13y ago
    Wait, where's the YC gun club?
ericabiz 13y ago
To add another data point, I'm not on the YC list but I am part of the Techstars and 500 Startups lists, which are similar (I have several friends who went through YC and we've compared notes.) Surprisingly, the lists have similar threads--lots of threads like "Who should I use for health insurance in NYC" or "Do you have an experience with X company/VC/investor" or "Looking for an intro to an X person at [huge company]." Both 500 and Techstars have brought on in-house devs to change from a standard email list to a dashboard where you can subscribe to topics you're interested in to cut down on noise. Both are pretty active and the founders and leaders participate. Techstars in particular gets some great responses--Brad Feld often responds to emails asking for a VC perspective on an issue, for instance.

drusenko 13y ago

there are usually a couple dozen emails per week, but easy to skim through. i read most of them, as i'm sure many do.

rdl 13y ago
It isn't really a discussion list so much as people sending important announcements or sometimes sending posts asking a question, soliciting private answers, then compiling and potentially anonymizing the results before posting a consolidated response a few days later -- super efficient. Per batch email, group discussion (FB mostly, for us), group chat, etc usually involves a subset, or direct asks of other groups. I personally know nothing about consumer stuff, so no one ever asks me for CSS advice, but plenty of times hosting, security, etc questions come up. Plus the purely social stuff is usually with a self selected subset; YC is diverse in interests. There is even basically a YC gun club, and a bunch of YC anti-gun activists, coexisting peacefully :)
- kumarski 13y ago
  Wait, where's the YC gun club?

ericabiz 13y ago

To add another data point, I'm not on the YC list but I am part of the Techstars and 500 Startups lists, which are similar (I have several friends who went through YC and we've compared notes.) Surprisingly, the lists have similar threads--lots of threads like "Who should I use for health insurance in NYC" or "Do you have an experience with X company/VC/investor" or "Looking for an intro to an X person at [huge company]." Both 500 and Techstars have brought on in-house devs to change from a standard email list to a dashboard where you can subscribe to topics you're interested in to cut down on noise. Both are pretty active and the founders and leaders participate. Techstars in particular gets some great responses--Brad Feld often responds to emails asking for a VC perspective on an issue, for instance.