Y Combinator held its first ever Female Founders Conference Saturday afternoon at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. In opening remarks, Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston said that the sold-out gathering is “the most over-subscribed event” in the famed startup accelerator’s history.
For an organization whose biannual Demo Days have become known as one of the hottest tickets in Silicon Valley, that is no small feat — and it could signal a sea change in the entrepreneurial landscape.
“Because YC invests so early and is so focused on funding outliers, we tend to see trends first. So when we see that 25 percent of startups in the current Y Combinator batch have female founders, I’m certain something is going on here,” Livingston said. “In any big change there’s always a moment when people think it is a tipping point. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, we feel like 2014 was the tipping point for female founders.”
Livingston kicked off the event by sharing basic advice that she likes to share with all startup founders, such as the importance of having determination, empathy, focus, and thriftiness (the bullet points are in the image above, via an image shared by Twitter user Becky Cruze.) She then entered into more personal territory, sharing more targeted advice specifically for female founders.
“I thought about what advice I’d give to my sister if she were starting a startup,” Livingston said, adding that she had had second thoughts about sharing gender-specific advice in a public forum. “Things can get pretty heated out there on the Internet on the topic of women and tech, and I really agonized about what to do…. but I’m going to risk it and speak candidly.”
Here are the three key pieces of advice Livingston shared for female founders:
Having children and starting a business is hard — but possible.“Based on my own experience, I’d say it’s easier to start a startup before you have kids,” Livingston, who has two sons aged five and two, said. “In the first few years of YC
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