Jessica Livingston

Jessica Livingston. An essay by Paul Graham, November 2015.

Not a one-man show

An article once called early Y Combinator a one-man show. Graham says that’s not just unfair. It gets YC wrong.

Much of what was genuinely new about YC came from Jessica Livingston. To see how YC works, start with her.

YC had four founders. Jessica and Graham decided to start it one night, recruited Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell the next day, and ran it day to day.

A family, not an office

Jessica and Graham were already a couple. They hid it at first, to look professional, but soon dropped the act.

It helped make YC feel like a family: young founders, weekly dinners cooked at first by Graham, a first building that had been a home.

Nothing like a Sand Hill Road venture office. Visitors felt it was genuine, and YC prizes that in founders: it helps set the best startups apart.

Culture as the product

Graham calls Jessica the mom of that family. And the culture she set was one of the biggest things YC invented.

Elsewhere, culture is how people behave while building the product. At YC, culture wasn’t the backdrop to the product. It was the product.

And like a mom, she had the final say. Funding, hiring, public statements, dealings with other companies: it all went through her first.

Judging people

Before kids, YC was basically their life, and they liked it. Some puzzles never end, like: how do you recognize a good founder?

That’s Jessica’s great strength. She has x-ray vision for character and spots fakers almost at once. Her nickname: the Social Radar.

That matters because YC invests so early there’s often no product or numbers yet. Later investors have both. Early on, you’re judging people.

Others credited YC with special insight into technology’s future. Its real skill was picking founders. Airbnb looked like a bad idea; they backed it for the founders.

The Social Radar at work

In interviews, Graham, Robert and Trevor fired technical questions. Jessica mostly watched, so founders probably took her for a secretary.

That suited her: people are easier to watch when they don’t notice you. She asked little, but her questions tended to be the important ones.

And when the founders had gone, the other three would turn to her: “What does the Social Radar say?”

Good people, for life

The Radar also picked good people. If you can see character, bad people are hard to bear, so doubtful characters got a no, even likely winners.

That paid off. Those founders became YC’s alumni network, for life, and its unusual trust and helpfulness are mostly Jessica’s doing.

It probably cost little, too. Character and success are linked: bad founders who succeed tend to sell early, and the biggest successes are nearly all good people.

Why she goes unseen

Why isn’t she better known? Partly because writers draw outsized attention. YC’s early brand was Graham’s, and its applicants were his readers.

And she hates attention: reporters, talks, even being the bride at her own wedding. It’s not just shyness. Under all those eyes, the Social Radar jams.

She has a near-phobic horror of showing off, and can’t fight; she just shuts down. Yet an organization’s public face has to do a lot of fighting.

Written out of the story

The very traits that let her shape YC keep her out of its history. The usual story: Graham started it, and his wife sort of helped.

When YC was attacked over how many women founders it funded, critics treated YC as Graham alone. Jessica was furious, but said nothing in public.

She wrote three essays on the subject and published none. To her, fighting with dishonest people isn’t just frightening. It’s disgusting.

One interview

Still, her example could inspire more women to start companies. So she hired a PR firm for interviews, a first for YC.

But one early reporter skipped her startup insights for a sensational story about a man who’d tried to flirt with her as she waited outside the bar.

She was mortified. He’d done nothing wrong, and she was cast as a victim, not as one of the Valley’s most knowledgeable investors. She told the firm to stop.

What she built

The press won’t tell you what she achieved. Like a university, YC is defined by its people, and Jessica, more than anyone, chose and nurtured them.

No one has ever known more about founders: she pairs a huge data set with x-ray vision. And founders’ qualities predict a startup’s fate better than anything.

Startups, in turn, are the biggest engine of growth in mature economies. So she knows the most about what drives that growth. Shouldn’t she be better known?

In short

Early YC was no one-man show: much of what was new came from Jessica.

She made it a family, and its culture was the product.

Her Social Radar picked founders who were also good people.

She shuns attention and fights, so she’s written out of the story. She should be better known.

The original is short, and better than this. Read it: paulgraham.com/jessica.html