Y Combinator: Partners

Partners

Trevor Blackwell is a roboticist who in 2007 built the first dynamically balancing biped robot. He has published papers on congestion control in high speed wide area networks, signalling protocol architecture, and file system performance. He has a BEng from Carleton, and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Paul Buchheit is the creator of GMail. While at Google he also built the prototype for AdSense, and came up with Google's now famous slogan "Don't be evil." In 2007 he was one of the founders of Friendfeed, which in 2009 became Facebook's largest acquisition to date. He has a BS and MS in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.

Paul Graham is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first SaaS company, which in 1998 became Yahoo Store. In 2002 he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm that inspired the current generation of filters. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Carolynn Levy was previously at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, where she helped hundreds of startup with legal questions. She has a BA in political science from UCLA and JD from the USF School of Law, and is a member of the State Bar of California.

Jessica Livingston was previously VP of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness, where she managed an award-winning rebranding of the company. She is the author of Founders at Work (2007), a book of interviews with startup founders. She has a BA in English from Bucknell.

Robert Morris is a professor of computer science at MIT, where he is a member of the PDOS group. He has published extensively on wireless networks, distributed operating systems, and peer-to-peer applications. In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public. He has an AB and PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Kirsty Nathoo was previously an audit manager at PwC based in Cambridge UK, where she audited tech and biotech companies ranging from startups to public companies. She has an MEng in electrical and information sciences from Cambridge, and qualified as a Chartered Accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

Geoff Ralston was a founder of Four11, where he built RocketMail, one of the first web mail services, which in 1997 became Yahoo Mail. At Yahoo Geoff worked in engineering, then ran a business unit, then became Chief Product Officer. After Yahoo he was CEO of Lala, which was acquired in 2009 by Apple. He has an AB in Computer Science from Dartmouth, an MS in Computer Science from Stanford, and an MBA from INSEAD.

Harj Taggar was cofounder of Auctomatic, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2007 and acquired by Live Current Media in 2008. He has a BA from Oxford, where he studied law.

Garry Tan was cofounder of Posterous, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2008 and acquired by Twitter in 2012. Before that he was employee #10 at Palantir, where he was a founding member of the engineering team for Palantir Finance, and also designed Palantir's logo. He has a BS in computer systems engineering from Stanford.