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Frame from Mr. Startup: Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, and his "no asshole" rule Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Mr. Startup: Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, and his "no asshole" rule

Robert Scoble
Interviews
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this interview1 month2010–2022 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Linked as a source for Paul Graham's no-assholes rule and his comments on early YC funding.

Robert Scoble interviews Paul Graham at Y Combinator's Mountain View headquarters as 36 new startups debut. They discuss what YC is, and Graham's no-assholes rule.

“It's about Paul Graham's no asshole rule.” (HN, 2010)

1 recommendations · 3 citations · Interviews · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@Hitchhiker Oct 2011 Cites it
on HN thread Why female entrepreneurs should apply to YC
This low rate may also have to do with biases extant in engineering / sciences etc. Couple that with YC's preference for hard-core tech founders ( a perfectly reasonable delimiter ), these results are not surprising. You can see similar composition in YC leadership where Jessica is the only female partner ( [link] ) and from my limited understanding, she brings in a much needed balance to their approach. A system that produces great results should perhaps focus on ".. but by the content of their character " - Martin Luther King, Jr. This I think, pg emphasizes via [this video]
@harryf Jul 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Assholes: A Probing Examination
Read more
> Sorting people into bins: assholes and victims, is problematic. This is true of anything subjective. There are people (intentional assholes in this article) who absolutely _are_ assholes because it gives them pleasure - their ego or otherwise gains something from hurting others. Everyone in a company knows who they without needing to go through a labelling process. Ultimately it's a problem for leaders in a company, those that should be caring about the culture, to remove such people. Paul Graham described this long ago here - [this video] (starts at 4m20s) - a leader in YCombinator he makes the judgement calls.
Paul Graham on removing assholes from a company
@O__________O Oct 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Ask HN: What Happened to YC?
Related links: PG 12 years ago saying average was $17,500 per startup [this video] Last batch count was 240: [link] FAQ saying current standard offer is $500,000 [link]
Paul Graham on average funding per startup

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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