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Y Combinator pitch deck — what they look for.

Twice-yearly accelerator that’s funded Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, OpenAI.

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What Y Combinator actually looks for

  • Clarity of what the company does in 5 seconds. If a YC partner can’t articulate it back to you on slide 1, the rest doesn’t matter.

  • Demonstrated user love or revenue traction — even pre-product, evidence the founders can find users and ship.

  • Founder grit signals: how have they unblocked themselves so far?

How to format the deck for Y Combinator

  1. 1

    YC’s recommended seed deck is 10 slides, no fluff: Title, Problem, Solution, Why Now, Market Size, Competition, Business Model, Team, Traction, Ask.

  2. 2

    Cover slide gets a single sentence: "<Company> is <one-line description>." No taglines, no metaphors.

  3. 3

    The traction slide is non-negotiable for Demo Day; show numbers on a chart with axes labeled.

Source: www.ycombinator.com/library

Build a Y Combinator-ready deck in 3 minutes

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