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Number of teams that applied to Y Combinator�s summer 2011 batch: 2,089 Teams interviewed: 170 Minutes per interview: 10 Teams accepted and funded: 64 Months to build a viable startup: 3 Possibilities: BOUNDLESS Investment firm Y Combinator is the most sought-after home for startups in Silicon Valley. Twice a year, it funds dozens of just-founded startups and provides three months of guid�ance from Paul Graham, YC�s impresario, and his partners, also entrepreneurs and mostly YC alumni. The list of YC-funded success stories includes Dropbox (now valued at $5 billion) and Airbnb ($1.3 billion). Receiving an offer from YC creates the oppor�tunity of a lifetime � it�s like American Idol for budding entrepreneurs. Acclaimed journalist Randall Stross was granted unprecedented access to Y Combinator�s summer 2011 batch of young companies, offering a unique inside tour of the world of software startups. Most of the founders were male programmers in their mid-twenties or younger. Over the course of the summer, they scrambled to heed Graham�s seemingly simple advice: make something people want. We watch the founders work round-the-clock, developing and retooling products as diverse as a Web site that can teach anyone program�ming, to a Wikipedia-like site for rap lyrics, to software written by a pair of attorneys who seek to �make attorneys obsolete.� Founders are guided by Graham�s notoriously direct form of tough-love feedback. �Here, we don�t fire you,� he says. �The market fires you. If you�re sucking, I�m not going to run along behind you, saying, �You�re sucking, you�re suck�ing, c�mon, stop sucking.�� Some teams would even abandon their initial idea midsummer and scramble to begin anew. The program culminated in �Demo Day,� when founders pitched their startup to sev�eral hundred top angel investors and venture capitalists. A lucky few attracted capital that gave their startup a valuation of multiple millions of dollars. Others went back to the drawing board. This is the definitive story of a seismic shift that�s occurred in the business world, in which coding skill trumps employment experience, pairs of undergraduates confidently take on Goliaths, tiny startups working out of an apart�ment scale fast, and investors fall in love. (less)

Number of teams that applied to Y Combinator�s summer 2011 batch: 2,089 Teams interviewed: 170 Minutes per interview: 10 Teams accepted and funded: 64 Months to build a viable startup: 3 Possibilities: BOUNDLESS Investment firm Y Combinator (…more)