The Social Radars

In this episode we catch up with Tony Xu, founder and CEO of the food delivery service, DoorDash. Tony and his cofounders were students at Stanford when they first launched DoorDash as a class project. Y Combinator funded them as part of its summer batch in 2013. In this episode, Tony takes us through version 1 of their idea to what is now a public company (DASH) operating in 27 countries across the globe.

In this episode we’re talking to David Lieb, creator of Google Photos. Back in 2009, YC funded his startup, Bump Technologies, which had a cool technology where you transferred your contact info from one person to another by literally bumping phones. He’ll share Bump’s ups and downs as they went from business school side hustle to hot new iOS app. He’ll talk about getting acquired by Google and ultimately transforming Bump into the wildly popular Google Photos. David recently came back to Y Combinator as a visiting group partner.

In the premiere episode, Jessica & Carolynn sit down with Paul Buchheit. Paul created Gmail in 2004 while he was employee #23 at Google. They do a deep dive into the history of Gmail, including the fact that it might never have launched if it weren’t for a leak to the New York Times. After Google, PB went on to found a startup called FriendFeed, which was a social media aggregator, and where the first “like” button was created. It was acquired by Facebook in 2009. After that, he joined Y Combinator as a partner and also became one of the most successful angel investors in Silicon Valley.