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What does Y Combinator actually look for in founders?
In this conversation, Jared Friedman — Managing Partner at Y Combinator — shares why YC is bullish on India, how AI is changing software engineering, and what students need to do to become world-class builders.
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Questions asked in this interview
9
0:00What have you generally seen great in Indian founders?
0:35What are some common things that you've seen in like great applications and how should a student founder actually think about applying?
1:57And what have you generally seen great in Indian founders?
3:03And how should a founder, student founder actually think about applying to Y Combinator?
4:20And then we'll go to what can we learn from the West?
5:53... to any student, any Indian student who wants to be a computer science programmer or a developer or a product builder on a global stage tomorrow, what would those three things be which they are probably not doing as much in India today?
9:34I know that your schedule is packed like anything, but what is one thing that we like if we want to treat you to some Indian experience, what can we treat you to?
10:13Just one last thing and how is the schedule you had in Bangalore today and now what do you want to do after this?
The level of talent there is phenomenal. I mean, the students here are... India's been very important to Y Combinator for the last 10 years. Over the last 10 years, we've been fortunate enough to fund four companies that are multi-billion dollar companies now.
I'm pretty sure as the world of AI is changing, hiring standards are also changing and what companies look for in the computer science engineers of tomorrow.
One, I would become really good at using the AI coding tools. Figure out how you can get enough tokens. Second is to become an expert in the cutting edge AI stuff. And the third thing is to build your own project.
Hello and today we are with Jared. He's a partner at Y Combinator and I think Y Combinator is any student's favorite favorite program to apply in the world. Any student founder who ever starts up, Y Combinator is one of their first dream list. So, we thought that we'll have Jared on the chat with us. Welcome to India, Jared, and welcome to Polaris.
Yeah, absolutely. We'll talk about you, like we since we talk about Y Combinator, like what do you think about student founders and what kind of founders do you really like and yeah, we'll we'll start with that.
Yeah, sure. So, we're here in India. This is Y Combinator's first official trip to India, which is crazy because we funded a number of really big companies in India, but this is our first time going here specifically to recruit founders. And I just got back from a four-day trip across India where I went to several of the IITs and I got to meet with students there.
Yes. Which is an awesome event that you should talk about.
Yeah. And then tomorrow we're doing Startup School India where we're going to have 2,500 people in Bangalore. We've done Startup School all over the world and this is our first time bringing it to India.
Looks like you really love India and I think you have some sort of fascination for India and does Y Combinator really think a lot about India? Is India one of the focus geographies? And what have you generally seen great in Indian founders?
Yeah, absolutely. India's been very important to Y Combinator for the last 10 years. Over the last 10 years we've been fortunate enough to fund four companies that are multi-billion dollar companies now. Groww and Meesho recently went public and Razorpay and Zepto are not far far behind. And so we've seen unbelievable talent from India. We also have a number of like newer companies that are not as well known as those companies yet but we think are going to be the next billion-dollar YC companies to come out of India including a merchant which is here running Viacom with you. And so we are very very bullish on India. That's why we flew 10,000 miles and are running this 2,500 person event tomorrow.
No, thank you. Thank you for coming to Polaris. In fact, I as a kid, as I as a young entrepreneur 10 years back I tried to apply to YC a couple of times. Unfortunately, we could not make it.
16 more exchanges in this transcript
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Friedman, J. (2026, May 19). Advice for Young Founders from Y Combinator’s Managing Partner | Jared Friedman [Interview transcript]. Polaris School of Technology. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3011940/
MLA
Jared Friedman. "Advice for Young Founders from Y Combinator’s Managing Partner | Jared Friedman." Polaris School of Technology, 19 May. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3011940/.
BibTeX
@misc{friedman2026_3011940,
author = {Jared Friedman},
title = {Advice for Young Founders from Y Combinator’s Managing Partner | Jared Friedman},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Polaris School of Technology. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3011940/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
