There are no other startup launchpads with a track record that can compare to Y Combinator. If you've ever booked an Airbnb, posted a comment on Reddit, ordered food from DoorDash or bought some cryptocurrency on Coinbase, you've interacted with a company that got early funding and support from Y Combinator .
The "accelerator" program was born in the summer of 2005 in Cambridge — OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman was part of the first group of entrepreneurs to go through it — but in 2009, the founders decided to focus exclusively on coaching entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
Now, it seems that the current chief executive, Garry Tan, is considering a reboot in Cambridge.
Here's what I've been able to find out so far:
Last year, Y Combinator hired Ankit Gupta , a Harvard alum who had sold a startup to Ginkgo Bioworks and spent about a year working at the cutting-edge biotech company in Boston. Now, Gupta is the first Y Combinator employee to have been based locally since the program pulled up stakes in 2009. Gupta didn't respond to an email request for an interview.
On a podcast last month, Tan — who was part of the last cohort of entrepreneurs who went through Y Combinator in Cambridge — said "we're sort of thinking about opening an office in Cambridge" because California has become "more and more hostile to tech."
Tan was referring specifically to a California ballot initiative that, if passed, would impose a one-time 5% tax on the total net worth of all billionaires living in California. Just the proposal has already caused some wealthy entrepreneurs to move out of the state . Tan didn't respond to an email request for an interview.
Brian Halligan, co-founder of the Cambridge marketing software maker HubSpot, wrote via email that he is "working with Ankit (Gupta) on creating the conditions" for Y Combinator to identify "great batches" of startups that it can fund in Massachusetts.
Halligan tried to engage Tan on the social platform X earlier this year, with no response . But the co-creator of the Android operating system, Rich Miner, who lives in Cambridge, chimed in, saying, "Let's do this."
Also working to persuade Y Combinator to return to the Bay State is Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. That company, with five founders all linked to MIT, participated in the Y Combinator program in Silicon Valley in 2014 — the first biotech company to be accepted into the accelerator program. While Ginkgo is not yet profitable, the company went public in 2021, and despite some ups and downs, it employs nearly 500 people today.
"I don't think there's a green light" to reboot the Cambridge program yet, Kelly said, but "it's definitely possible." Kelly said he is "very publicly an advocate" for the program's return.
For now, he notes that Gupta, his former colleague, is scouting startups from MIT and Harvard to participate in the West Coast program.
Kelly said that Y Combinator having a second base of operations on the East Coast would signal to California politicians that the potential billionaire tax may dissuade investors and fledgling entrepreneurs from wanting to be there.
He envisions a resuscitated Cambridge program that could focus on robotics, hardware startups and biotech, rather than software. If it happens, Kelly said, "it would be huge. They're like Harvard, MIT and Stanford all rolled into one. Nothing is even close to them," in terms of the program's appeal to young entrepreneurs.
Y Combinator was likely the first "accelerator" program — a hybrid of an investment firm and finishing school for startup founders. It provides three months of intense mentorship to entrepreneurs, and gives them an opportunity to pitch to an audience of investors at its regular "demo days."
It also provides $500,000 in capital in exchange for a 7% stake in each participating company. The firm's stake increases if a startup raises additional capital, and Y Combinator says it has invested millions of dollars in additional funding rounds for its most promising startups. The program's motto: "Make something people want."
Incidentally, when Y Combinator shut down its summer program in Cambridge and focused exclusively on Silicon Valley, it wasn't intended as a knock against the startup scene here. Rather, it was a personal decision made by Y Combinator co-founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, who got married in 2008. When their first child was on the way, Graham told me in an email in 2015, they felt they couldn't keep ping-ponging between the coasts.
They "had to pick one place," Graham wrote, "and the reason we picked California was that it seemed a better place to raise kids. ... If we'd thought Massachusetts was better for kids, YC would have been there full-time."
Still, in a post announcing the decision in 2009, Graham wrote that "Boston just doesn't have the startup culture that the Valley does. It has more startup culture than anywhere else, but the gap between number 1 and number 2 is huge."
That comment reverberated locally for quite a while.
"Y Combinator returning to Massachusetts would be a huge win-win for YC and for the commonwealth," wrote Eric Paley, the state's Secretary of Economic Development, in an email.
Paley has known Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, for about 15 years. Before entering state government, Paley co-founded the venture capital firm Founder Collective, which invested in Posterous — the company Tan started after he went through Y Combinator in Cambridge.
But Paley didn't want to address whether he is directly lobbying Tan to try to bring the program back to the state.
"We would welcome the chance to work together to support a next generation of world-class startups," Paley wrote.
The return of YC won't be a perfect panacea for the Boston startup scene. Very few of the companies that participated in the program in Cambridge wound up putting down roots and growing here. At the final YC demo day in Cambridge, one of the companies I saw present was a cloud data storage company founded by two MIT alums — Dropbox. It didn't attract much interest from local investors. Today, it's based in San Francisco.
But Kelly, who went west to participate in YC but then returned to build Ginkgo in Massachusetts, thinks that dynamic could change — if there is, in fact, a second coming of Y Combinator.
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