I did Y Combinator in 2016 and 2025. The first time felt more 'family-style.'
· Business Insider
Quang Hoang
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- Quang Hoang went through Y Combinator twice: In 2016 for Birdly and in 2025 for Vybe.
- He told Business Insider that much stayed the same for the accelerator, though his first experience was more "family-style."
- You didn't see any employees, Hoang said, and "some of the partners were cooking sometimes."
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Quang Hoang, the 37-year-old cofounder and CEO of Vybe, who lives in San Francisco. It's been edited for length and clarity.
We started 10 years ago. We were out of college and wanted to solve a problem that we experienced ourselves. When you're a student, you don't have that many problems.
When we were interns, we had a lot of expense reports, but we would lose receipts and lose money. When you're a student, you don't have much money. One of the first problems we wanted to solve was: Let's build a mobile app to save your receipts, a bit like Expensify.
Slack released its first API at the time. Now, we could create a bot. That was our pitch to YC: This is a new thing called a Slack bot. During the interview, they installed the Slack bot, and it pinged everyone in the YC Slack. Everyone started to use it. We got in.
It was 2016. At the time, it was in Mountain View. Sam Altman was still a partner. We had some office hours with him.
The core principle remained the same, but everything felt way less streamlined and processed than it is today. For example, the dinners were way more family-style. There weren't any visible employees. Some of the partners were cooking sometimes. Paul Graham was there.
We still were 100 people total in the batch, which is probably 3x less than it is today. Everything was in-person. We came from France and rented a house. It was a big difference to be in Mountain View when you've never lived in the US, than when you already live in San Francisco, and you do YC for the second time.
Quang Hoang pitched investors on his Slack bot startup at Demo Day in 2015.Quang Hoang
The former company was bought two years ago by Coda, which was acquired by Grammarly. Then, I discovered vibe coding. I decided that Notion, Airtable, Coda, and Retool are going to be the incumbents, and that a new category of vibe-coding platforms are going to emerge.
One of the partners at YC is also a friend, Nicolas Dessaigne. He said, "You should apply to YC." It was a big opportunity cost to leave the company that acquired me, and having something like YC is a bit reassuring.
The fundamentals are still the same. You still have to talk to users, code, and grow. You still have to grow every single week at a steady percentage growth. It was 5-10% at the time; today it's more like 10, 12, 15%.
You have more and more young founders. It's not something that happened in the past 10 years; it probably happened in the past two years. I was one of the old folks. It was also my second company. Many are first-time founders.
I think it was already the case that you want young founders that don't know limits and don't have anything that would prevent them from thinking really big. With AI, it's the same thing.
A constant debate that you have less when you're a first-time founder is: Should I ship this, or should I double-check it? As a younger, first-time founder, you might have less experience with technical depth because you might not have worked with bigger companies before. You say: Let's ship this.
The batch sizes don't feel that different. The interaction you have with your batch is through weekly dinners, group office hours, individual office hours, and Demo Day. You also have some workshops here and there. If you are 300 or 400 people in the batch, it doesn't change that much if you're in subgroups.
Sometimes there are events, like when Sam Altman comes to talk, or the CEO of Perplexity or Cursor, where you need to have the whole batch. But, it's conference style anyway. You have 400 people in a room, sure, but if it's 150 or 400, it's the same.
Quang Hoang's second Demo Day, this time for Vybe.Quang Hoang
The themes changed a lot, obviously. It was a lot of mobile apps and cloud. Today, it's a lot of AI. The brand of YC helps a lot. The brand is probably 10x better today than it was 10 years ago.
Demo Day was way more important at the time than it is today. It feels more like an anchor date. It gives urgency to investors: if you don't invest in the hot startups now, they will meet with thousands of investors two weeks from now, and you might just lose your opportunity.
Good investors all invest before Demo Day. It's just an anchor date to create a timeline for the investor and the startup.
If you ask me: Are you happy that you went back to YC? The answer is super straightforward. It's 100% yes.
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