Simon Willison’s Weblog

Does Y Combinator accept purely app ideas like WhatsApp, Flipboard, etc.?

24th February 2014

My answer to Does Y Combinator accept purely app ideas like WhatsApp, Flipboard, etc.? on Quora

Yes they do, but you’ll need to demonstrate that your team also has the ability to execute on the idea.

Posted 24th February 2014 at 10:16 am · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025
LLM 0.27, the annotated release notes: GPT-5 and improved tool calling - 11th August 2025

This is Does Y Combinator accept purely app ideas like WhatsApp, Flipboard, etc.? by Simon Willison, posted on 24th February 2014.

startups 189 y-combinator 52 quora 1005

Next: What are good event venues to have a 100 person weekend hackathon in San Francisco?

Previous: Should I use Django forms or pure HTML in order to do not establish borders for the growth of my app?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe