ask-yc

Startup advice grounded in the Y Combinator canon — 203 articles compiled from YC's library and Sam Altman's blog, plus a 428-entry source bibliography — answering with who said it, when, and where. Answers questions, pressure-tests a situation, runs YC-style office hours where it questions the founder instead of answering, grades an artifact against named YC rubrics, and compiles a full briefing on a topic. Covers pricing and B2B pricing, seed and Series A fundraising, term sheets, investor incentives, product-market fit signals, growth rates and retention benchmarks, startup metrics, sales, co-founder selection and breakups, equity splits and vesting, hiring the first engineer, dev shops, runway and shutting down, pivoting, launching, talking to users, company culture, boards, and applying to YC. Use whenever the answer should come from what named practitioners actually said rather than general theory — Paul Graham, Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell, Sam Altman, Garry Tan, Kevin Hale, Tom Blomfield, Harj Tagg