Airbnb, Twitch, Dropbox and DoorDash have more in common than household names. These and countless other industry-disrupting startups – including U Irvine (UCI) startup Docbot – are graduates of Y Combinator (YC), a seed accelerator launched in 2005 to help entrepreneurs develop ambitious ideas.
As part of their YC Bio Tour in which they visit select universities, Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman and visiting partner Dr. Uri Lopatin recently came to UCI Beall Applied Innovation @ the Cove to talk about what they’ve learned from working with hundreds of biotech and healthcare startups.
Friedman – co-founder of Scribd, a digital library, e-book and audiobook subscription service – shared his own startup story before fielding questions from the audience and sharing advice along with Lopatin.
While in college, Friedman attended a talk by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham. According to Friedman, Graham told the audience that the way to achieve Google-like success was not to work for Google, but to start a company. Friedman, who had an internship at Google that coming summer, emailed his recruiter to say he would no longer be attending because he was going to start a company.
Lopatin, who co-founded the biotech company Assembly Biosciences, provided the best advice for budding biotech startups based on his own experience. Colleagues and others in the industry originally doubted the science that would eventually become Assembly Biosciences … until Lopatin had it tested.
“It turns out that we weren’t so stupid. … Sometimes just because other people don’t agree with your idea is a really good reason to go down that path,” said Lopatin.
Additionally, Lopatin urged biotech founders to conduct their startup’s game-changing experiment as early as possible. By taking that risk and proving the idea’s validity early on, according to Lopatin, it will be easier to find investors willing to back the venture.
Interested in attending an event at the Cove? Visit upcoming events to see what’s on the calendar.
See more photos from the Y Combinator visit:
