Cupertino is where Apple is. Palo Alto is where Facebook is. Mountain View is where Google is. Geographically speaking, then, Y Combinator, let's call it YC, is in Googletown, a flat suburban place dotted with low bungalows and bathed almost always in sunlight. On a side street here, more of a service road, really, sits the small building that houses the company. It hardly exists at all, physically. It's just two rooms—the office, where the three full-time employees can sometimes be found, and the main room, which, with its bright plywood picnic tables and orange acoustic tiling, looks like the dining hall at one of the better youth hostels in Denmark. YC is a kind of tech-industry incubator, maybe the most important in the world. It's the place where people are trying to invent the ways we're going to behave, at least as far as the Internet goes, in the future.
Paul, Jessica, Robert, and Trevor couldn't have imagined what Y Combinator would become -- and only 5 years after starting that first summer in Cambridge, MA. I've certainly been incredibly fortunate to have been in that first round of YC startups and today to be representing as the Ambassador to the East.
Let's do our small part to keep this great tech startup scene growing. Makers rejoice. Fakers need not apply.