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Y Combinator

Y Combinator provides seed funding for startups.
blog.ycombinator.com • 8 Stories
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Get advice on your resume and reaching out

Looking for a new gig? Ryan Choi helps YC startups hire great people and he’s offering free advice to job seekers on their resumes and how to reach out. You can email him your resume at ryan@ycombinator.com if you want feedback or pointers.

In this post Ryan says to be sure to cover what, how and impact for each position on your resume.

What did you work on? How did you get your work done? What impact did you have?

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How does your company manage its encryption keys?

This was a great question asked this week on Hacker News – 232 comments and counting…

We just had an interesting data loss at work, that was due to data being encrypted at rest. We somehow managed to delete the encryption keys (still figuring out how), which became an obvious problem once our main database instance was rebooted.

Luckily we were able to restore the data, but now I (we) really want to learn what a proper setup would look like.

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Docker Hub has been hacked

Attention Docker Hub users — Docker Hub has been hacked, so check your email to read the report from Kent Lamb, Director of Docker Support and take appropriate action. Here are the details…

During a brief period of unauthorized access to a Docker Hub database, sensitive data from approximately 190,000 accounts may have been exposed (less than 5% of Hub users). Data includes usernames and hashed passwords for a small percentage of these users, as well as Github and Bitbucket tokens for Docker autobuilds.

From lugg on Hacker News:

If you got an email you should:

Docker Hub has been hacked

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What’s the second job of a startup CEO?

Most startup founders get stuck in their first job as a CEO. The key to getting past developing a good product and achieving product-market-fit is to develop a good company. As noted in this recent episode of Founders Talk with Isaac Schlueter, and this post from Ali Rowghani the CEO of Y Combinator Continuity, getting the company part is hard.

Your first creation is a product, your second creation is a company.

A Phase 1 startup CEO is the Doer-in-Chief. You must be deeply involved in both building the product and acquiring users/customers. A CEO’s first job is to build a great product and find a small group of people who love it and use it enthusiastically.

As a Phase 2 CEO, you need to transition from “Doer-in-Chief” to “Company-Builder-in-Chief.” This is how you scale as a CEO, and CEO scaling is the first step in company-building. For most founders, this is very difficult. When you’ve been a successful Doer-in-Chief, it’s hard to stop.

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Now you can listen to Startup Playbook by Sam Altman (for free)

The book is free in Kindle format on Amazon AND you can listen for free on the web!

We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies.

Then we thought we should just give it to everyone.

This is meant for people new to the world of startups. Most of this will not be new to people who have read a lot of what YC partners have written—the goal is to get it into one place.

Harj Taggar Y Combinator

How to hire your first engineer

How do you convince an engineer to join your start up? Harj Taggar shares this advice on the Y Combinator blog:

This post is advice for early stage startup founders who are hiring their first engineer.

Hiring your first engineer at a startup is incredibly hard. As a founder you’re already stretched dangerously thin on time. There are bugs to fix, customers to close and any number of urgent existential fires that demand your full attention. You know you should be spending more time on hiring but it’s a battle to find it.

This is an exhaustive post going through all the details. If you’re a startup founder or among the first engineers to join a startup, you should check this post out or recommend it to your founder.

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Startup school 2018

Is this really a chance to get $10,000 in equity-free funding just for completing a free online course? Seems there’s also $50,000 in credits to a variety of other services too.

Startup School is a free, 10-week, online course. It’s designed for any startup founder who would like to get help through the earliest, most difficult challenges of starting a company. The course will begin on August 27, 2018 and applications are now open at StartupSchool.org.

Cadran Cowansage Y Combinator

Leap – an online community for women

If you’ve seen how women are treated on Twitter or elsewhere (which I’m sure you have), you can see why projects like this are needed.

I started building Leap because I didn’t have a place on the internet where I felt comfortable talking openly. I’ve found that some conversations online escalate to shouting matches quickly and many people opt out, especially women. I wondered what would happen if I created a community where the core culture was set by women, and the software and product decisions were also made by women. I couldn’t think of a social network defined that way, but I wanted to be part of one.

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