
The Launch Pad
By Randall Stross
NSFW alert. This is a fucking good book.
Any title inciting curiosity is instantly one for retaining for future reference. Like your favourite films where you want to later dip back in to hunt for hidden easter eggs, books that grip you from the get-go often have deeper messages than the superficial subtext that bites you on first reading.
The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive School for Startups was a selection box of ideas and success stories that you know will age well. Because fundamentally all startups are based on a single concept: providing rapture to the customer through an indecently good app.
Y Combinator is what’s known in the world of startups as an accelerator. Hungry teams of developers take part in a beauty pageant where staffers apply a renowned recipe of rigour and diligence to weed out any but the most likely to attain unicorn status and generate billions of dollars through acquisition by major names in tech.
The success rate of Y Combinator is phenomenal. Chiefly because the team knows better than anyone what consumers want, and therefore is in pole position to deduce from founders’ pitches which are most likely to hit paydirt. The advice that founders receive is legendary and changes course depending on how the market moves and consumers change their preferences.
It’s odd that Y Combinator has been at the summit of accelerators for so long. Why can others not compete?
The premise is relatively straightforward. Y Combinator started out life as a business incubator but is now perhaps better known as a seed fund for the startups it coaches.
Y Combinator buys into the startup with an equity stake valued at around $20,000.
It’s a gamble, but an educated one. AirBnB and Dropbox are among its cherished alumni and there are many more rising stars.
It would be hard to quantify the immense contribution not only to the advancement of Silicon Valley but the world of technology by creators of Y Combinator.
The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive School for Startups is a great guide by Randall Stross to how we got here and a fascinating insight into how smart minds and startups mix.

