The Social Radars Jessica Livingston

David Rusenko was a college student when he applied, at the last minute, to Y Combinator in 2006. His startup, Weebly, made a web site builder. At one point they came within days of running out of money, but they survived to be acquired by Square in 2018 for $365 million. Now David runs a fund, Leap Forward Ventures, focused on climate change. He has spent his whole career in startups, and has seen close to everything that can happen.

In today's episode, we talk with Yin Wu, founder and CEO of Pulley, a cap table management system that YC funded in 2020. Yin has been founding startups since 2011 and she talks about her experiences testing startup ideas, what she's learned about persistence and determination, and why she loves having startup founders as users.

Ron Conway has been close to the center of things for longer than anyone else in Silicon Valley, from the point when he started his career at National Semiconductor in the early 70s to the AI conference he organized last month. He's the embodiment and the transmitter of Silicon Valley culture. He knows all the stories, usually because he was personally involved in them. In this episode we talk about what Silicon Valley was like when it was all about silicon, and how his career at Nat Semi led to working at and then running tech companies, and finally to angel investing.

Today we catch up with Kyle Vogt, whose self-driving car company, Cruise, was funded by Y Combinator in 2014 and acquired by GM in 2016. Before that he was a co-founder of Twitch and its predecessor, Justin.tv. Learn how his love of building hard things started at a young age, and why he’s nowhere near done building yet.

Today we are talking to Yuri Sagalov. His company AeroFS, which did enterprise file syncing and sharing, was funded by Y Combinator in summer 2010. Yuri went on to work at Y Combinator before starting his own fund, Wayfinder Ventures.

Announcing Season 3 of The Social Radars!