In the summer of 2012, I was a first-time founder in Y Combinator’s S12 batch working on Clever. I was a 24-year-old with a few years of work experience but no idea what I was doing. Thirteen years later, in 2025, I’m back in YC (S25) with a new startup, Kernel. I’m older, maybe wiser, and definitely noticing how much YC itself has changed.

Batch Size and Community

My S12 batch felt intimate by today’s standards. It was 84 companies, a fraction of recent batch sizes of 200-300. Despite S12’s relatively small size, I still remember feeling overwhelmed by the thought of trying to get to know 84 companies.¹ Community was formed at weekly Tuesday-night dinners at YC’s HQ in Mountain View. This was the one day a week you got to see and interact with other companies and the partners in person.

S25 is 187 companies, split into three groups (ours is 59 companies). Weekly events are typically held with just your group, so events actually feel a little bit more intimate than S12 in many ways. Each group is assigned a specific set of partners, so it’s also much easier to get to know them and for them to get to know you.

YC has officially embraced Slack as a platform for batch communication, giving you real-time access to the partners and other companies. In addition to Slack you have Bookface, YC’s private online social network, which did not exist in 2012. Bookface, among many other things, provides a very active message board and newsfeed spanning all YC companies.

YC’s main HQ is now in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, and companies are encouraged to relocate as close to this as possible. This makes for a college-like feel (there’s even a “Founder Dining Hall”) with everyone living, working, and socializing in the same area.

Launching and Press

In S12, launching your startup often meant begging a partner to write a nice email about you to a reporter. The gold standard was getting PG to write an email about your company to someone at TechCrunch. Then you hoped and prayed that TechCrunch would actually write about your company and that the story would be good.²

In S25, launching your startup is a formalized playbook involving various YC machinery, with the partners pushing you to launch as soon as possible. The steps are roughly:

• Launch internally on Bookface.
• Go public on the YC directory.
• Do a formal “Launch YC” where YC’s Twitter/X account tweets out your launch video to their 1M+ followers.
• Do a “Show HN” launch on Hacker News.

YC preaches the power of network effects, and coincidentally they have grown to embody this themselves. The YC network is 5000+ companies strong, giving your fledgling startup an immediate set of companies to start selling to and testing your product with. For me this was the primary appeal of doing YC a second time: having a community of early adopters, all with a heavy bias to use a fellow YC company’s product.

Traction and Expectations

In 2012, the bar for traction by Demo Day was much lower. If you had, say, ~$100k ARR or a few thousand users, you were considered exceptional. Many S12 companies were pre-revenue or just starting to monetize, and that was fine. By S25, expectations have skyrocketed. The top-tier startups in a YC batch today often have $300k–$500k ARR by Demo Day, a level of early revenue unheard of a decade ago. As a founder, this means the pressure to execute quickly during the 3-month program is higher than ever.

This is where YC’s appeal as a second-time founder is really strong: YC sets the high-water mark for what you and your company can achieve in 3 months. The summer of 2012 was the fastest we ever moved as a company at Clever, and I spent the next decade trying to maintain that sense of speed and ambition as the company grew (with varying degrees of success). With Kernel, we’ve gone from basically no product three months ago to a product that is best-in-class, and I’m looking forward to seeing how we can continue that pace post-YC.³

Being The Old Guy

I remember someone in our batch in S12 who was in their 30s with kids and thinking, wow, that guy is old. Well, here I am, doing YC at the ripe old age of 37 years old with a wife and four kids.

The biggest benefit of being older and having done this before is perspective. Startups have a lot of highs and lows. The first time around, the low points can feel existential and extremely stressful. The second time around, the lows are still pretty stressful, but you’ve felt it before and you know what it’s like to work through it. There’s a sense of assuredness and being in control that I didn’t have in 2012.

I often hear some form of this question: “You had a great exit with Clever. Why put yourself through it again? Go to the beach, old man!” Other than “I’m not a huge fan of beaches,” I don’t have a great answer to this. I think the primary reason is that the best I ever felt professionally was the early days of Clever, and I want to feel that way again. The company t-shirts will look different (oversized, gen-Z approved), but the feeling of getting something off the ground with a small team will be the same—exhilarating.