Y Combinator (YC) is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 2,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $300 billion by January 2021.

Hacker News was founded by a libertarian venture capitalist... in a ploy to normalize venture capital among software engineers, and make his venture capital seem more prestigious to them. And it worked.