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Jessica Livingston

Co-founder of Y Combinator, Y Combinator

Search every verified Jessica Livingston interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator, conducted an interview with Airbnb founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia around 2010 as part of a planned series of conversations with Y Combinator founders. During the interview, Livingston discussed her motivation for the series, stating that she wanted to extract "information trapped in the heads of founders" and share it with future startup founders. She noted that Y Combinator had funded 172 startups at the time and that its founders were generous with advice and stories for incoming groups. In the interview, Livingston and the Airbnb founders discussed early startup lessons. Chesky and Gebbia emphasized the importance of solving a personal problem, with Gebbia advising founders to "solve something personal to you so that you actually like really care about it." Chesky cautioned against focusing on market size projections before acquiring users, saying, "You should probably not open an Excel spreadsheet before you have users." Livingston also offered her own perspective, stating, "The most important thing you will ever pick is not your idea. The most important thing you will ever pick is your founder," comparing the founder relationship to marriage.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“The VC industry is broken. They want to give $5-10 million to a company when really all you need to do is pay the rent. It was getting much cheaper to start a startup.”

“We rejected them because at that point we did not realize that when you fund an early stage startup it's more about the founders than the idea.”

“You got to meet with someone and decide then if you want to invest because the longer an investor can drag out the process, the more information that they have on that startup. So, they're always motivated to drag out that process.”

“We rejected them because at that point we did not realize that when you fund an early stage startup it's more about the founders than the idea. But I distinctly remember how much I just enjoyed talking to them.”

“One of the most important things is that Y Combinator always started to be founder friendly. We were not doing this to make money — our terms and our investment paperwork are very founder friendly.”

“We went into interviews saying, "We're only going to choose companies that we think could make it to profitability really quickly on their own and then they can like live as a cockroach because you just weren't sure they'd be able to raise any money at all."”

Other executives at Y Combinator

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