Latest Interviews
Showing 1741–1755 of 1,990 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator28 min
Grace Garey Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015
Watsi CEO Rachel founded the world's first global crowdfunding platform to connect individual donors directly with patients in need, overcoming systemic inefficiencies in traditional aid by ensuring 100% of donations fund care without administrative fees. Since launching in August 2010, the organization has grown from a $10,000 crisis intervention into a Y Combinator-backed entity that has raised over $3.5 million to treat 4,000 patients across 20 countries. By prioritizing transparency and removing donor restrictions, Watsi facilitates rapid, life-saving interventions for cases such as the siblings in Guatemala and Getu in Kenya while pioneering a universal monthly giving model.
- Y Combinator23 min
Jessica Livingston Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015
The event details Y Combinator's evaluation criteria, which prioritize founder determination and character over demographics, resulting in an acceptance rate for female founders that mirrors the applicant pool. It outlines the organization's origin as a non-profit experiment that evolved into a profitable model supported by a familial alumni network designed to mitigate critical issues like co-founder disputes. Key figures emphasize their unique "social radar" interview process and the ongoing commitment to open-source investment tools and founder education to sustain the community's integrity.
- Y Combinator27 min
Tracy Young Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015
Founded in 2010 by Tracy Young and Ryan Sutton Gee, PlanGrid evolved from a Y Combinator-backed concept into a construction software platform serving over 10,000 customers and processing 200,000 projects. The San Francisco-based team, currently expanding its 92-person workforce, attributes its resilience and market dominance to a culture of deep mutual support and strategic pivots that turned early hardware limitations into a global digital blueprint repository. Young's leadership narrative also underscores the legacy of late co-founder Antoine Hersen and advocates for increased female representation in engineering sectors through the company's rapid structural scaling from a flat hierarchy to a formalized organization.
- Y Combinator22 min
Kimberly Bryant Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015
Founded in 2011 by an accidental social entrepreneur, Black Girls Code launched in the Bay Area to shift girls of color from technology consumers to creators while addressing a sharp decline in their computer science degree attainment. The organization has since expanded to eight chapters across the U.S. and South Africa, training approximately 3,000 students and raising over $125,000 through aggressive fundraising targets to reach its 2040 vision of educating one million girls. By prioritizing culturally sensitive mentorship and hiring teams more skilled than the founder, the nonprofit aims to level the playing field and ensure technology reflects the nation's shifting demographic majority.
- Y Combinator22 min
Ruchi Sanghvi Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015
The speaker contrasts the successful, first-principles-driven launch of Facebook's News Feed against the strategic missteps taken during her tenure at the startup Go, where she admits to applying inappropriate growth patterns. Upon joining Dropbox, she pivoted from a "move fast and break things" mentality to a quality-focused approach, leading a massive engineering recruitment drive that prioritized cultural fit and reliability. Now launching a new venture, she advocates for strict adherence to fundamental truths and persistent execution despite the psychological toll of entrepreneurship.
- Goldman Sachs23 min
Ray Kelly, Former NYPD Commissioner: Talks at GS Session Highlights
Former NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the first officer to rise from a cadet to the agency's top leadership, details his tenure's establishment of the first municipal counterterrorism bureau and the surveillance of major events like the 2010 Times Square bombing attempt. Kelly critiques a 2011 ruling on racial profiling as evidentiary flawed and warns that current oversight measures and the refusal to appeal could shift policing from proactive crime prevention to reactive responses, a strategy he links to a reduction of 9,300 murders over two decades. With ISIS cited as an escalating global threat, Kelly advocates for the continued use of data-driven security initiatives like the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative while balancing privacy concerns through automatic data deletion protocols.
- Bank of America31 min
Exploring Generational Differences among Small Businesses Owners
Carol Roth, Robb Hilson, Dan Schawbel, Steve Strauss
Hosted by Carol Roth for Bank of America's Small Business Social Series, this panel featured experts Rob Hilsen, Steve Strauss, and Dan Schaubel to analyze intergenerational dynamics in entrepreneurship. The discussion highlighted how Millennials and Boomers can leverage co-mentorship to combine technological innovation with risk-avoidance strategies, while addressing critical financial barriers like credit gaps and diverse funding sources such as crowdfunding versus traditional lending. Ultimately, the speakers urged business owners to build mixed-generational advisory boards and cultivate early banking relationships to navigate an unpredictable market and secure long-term stability.
- Goldman Sachs13 min
Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women: Proving the Case for Women Entrepreneurs
In its sixth annual iteration, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative reached its milestone of supporting 10,000 entrepreneurs while demonstrating that 70% of graduates increased revenue and 60% created jobs within 18 months. Building on these results, Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, and the World Bank launched the $600 million Women's Entrepreneur Opportunity Facility to close the global $285 billion credit gap and target 100,000 women-owned SMEs. This strategic capital access aims to leverage the projected 12% per capita income growth from closing gender gaps while signaling the financial sector that women's entrepreneurship represents a high-growth market opportunity.
- Y Combinator29 min
Hosain Rahman at Startup School SV 2014
Founded in 1997 to build mobile voice interaction, the company pivoted to noise cancellation technology after securing DARPA funding to survive the dot-com bust, eventually overcoming early hardware failures and investor rejection. Following a 2006 turnaround that generated $70 million in revenue, the organization launched the UP wearable health tracker, which despite a high-profile 2011 hardware crisis was saved by a transparent customer-first response. Today, the firm operates as an integrated entity combining hardware, software, and data science to solve complex user problems.
- Y Combinator28 min
Danae Ringelmann at Startup School SV 2014
Indiegogo founder Denae Robinson launched the world's largest global crowdfunding platform in 2008 to democratize access to capital after witnessing systemic barriers prevent entrepreneurs and artists from securing funding. Facing a prolonged fundraising drought that forced the team to forgo salaries for four years, Robinson pivoted the company to an open, internet-based model featuring flexible funding options that enabled breakthroughs like uBiome's market validation and the Hour of Code initiative's massive educator mobilization. Guided by a culture of fearlessness and diversity, the organization has established itself as a meaningful tool for solving fundamental problems, earning recognition from figures like Bill Gates and the White House for its societal impact over immediate financial returns.
- Y Combinator27 min
Kevin Systrom at Startup School SV 2014
Stanford student Kevin Systrom leveraged a bias towards action to pivot his failed location app, Burbn, into Instagram after identifying a core user need for photo filtering during a photography course in Florence. This strategic shift to a minimalist mobile photography platform, combined with a community-first hiring philosophy and a global time-zone launch strategy, enabled the service to reach massive scale within days despite early infrastructure limits. Systrom's journey highlights a successful transition from building a generic marketplace to cultivating a defensible creator ecosystem that prioritizes user experience over immediate monetization.
- Y Combinator18 min
Emmett Shear at Startup School SV 2014
Founders of Kiko Calendar leveraged their early failure to raise Y Combinator funding for Justin.tv, where they pivoted from professional reality television to an open live-streaming platform by hiring key leadership to address operational gaps. Following the 2008 market crash, the team reorganized into specialized mobile and gaming units, ultimately launching Twitch in 2011 by prioritizing direct user feedback over business development deals. This eight-year journey of persistence and iteration culminated in an unexpected, unplanned acquisition by Amazon, underscoring that skills and product-market fit are often forged through repeated failure.
- Y Combinator34 min
Ron Conway at Startup School SV 2014
Venture capitalist Ron Conway outlines a portfolio strategy at SV Angel that prioritizes investing in entrepreneurs with innate drive and deep personal conviction over specific product ideas, noting that successful founders often exhibit a "vocation" mindset. The firm screens thousands of candidates for co-founder dynamics and product focus while rejecting those who prioritize networking or lack honesty about traction, accepting a high failure rate to capture major market wins. Through a team-based approach evolving over two decades, SV Angel leverages young deal-makers and senior advisors to guide founders who solve personal problems with relentless persistence.
- Y Combinator29 min
Jim Goetz and Jan Koum at Startup School SV 2014
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and Sequoia Capital's Jim Goetz detailed the company's strategic evolution from a failed status app to a global messaging giant that achieved financial independence through a $1 iOS fee before securing a unique partnership with Facebook. Koum emphasized how his tenure at Yahoo informed critical decisions to maintain an ad-free product, utilize minimal staffing with high-tech efficiency, and preserve operational autonomy following a $19 billion acquisition. The session highlighted a disciplined growth philosophy that prioritized server stability and global connectivity over rapid monetization, ultimately enabling WhatsApp to serve hundreds of millions of users with a lean team and zero marketing spend.
- Y Combinator28 min
Michelle Zatlyn and Matthew Prince at Startup School SV 2014
Michelle Zatlyn, Matthew Prince, Andrew, Lee Holloway
Founded five years ago by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare now serves two million customers with a market capitalization of $250 billion while processing one in every twenty web requests globally. The company achieved its current scale of 120 employees and 3,000 daily new users by leveraging a founder-led culture that rejects traditional titles in favor of distinct technical and operational roles. By prioritizing long-term momentum over immediate valuation and solving complex security challenges, the firm protects critical infrastructure for entities ranging from Y Combinator to the UK government.