November 20th: Paul Graham & Jessica Livingston on What Makes Startups Succeed

Our speakers for November will be Paul Graham & Jessica Livingston, of Y Combinator and Startup School.  Paul will be speaking on what makes startups succeed.  Jessica will also speak about her book Founders at Work and offer her thoughts on successful startup founders.

Paul Graham, Y Combinator

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer.  In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 and later became Yahoo! Stores.  In 2002 he described a simple statistical spam filter that inspired most current filters.  He’s currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.

Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O’Reilly, 2004).

Paul has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work

Jessica Livingston is a founding partner at Y Combinator, a seed-stage venture firm based in Cambridge, MA, and Mountain View, CA. She is also the author of Founders at Work, a book about startup entrepreneurs.

Jessica was previously VP Marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness. In addition to her work with startups at Y Combinator, she organizes Startup School.

Jessica has a BA in English from Bucknell.