Roaring Twenties: This is the fourth in a series on people in their 20′s whose impact has been felt in fields ranging from medicine to finance to the non-profit world. What makes them tick, what gets them through rough times and what are their dreams for the future?
Y Combinator – Making Startups Grow
The world knows of Dropbox, which is estimated to be a $ 5 billion company but few know that its genesis happened at Y Combinator, an incubator of start-ups which also nurtured the $1. 3 billion Airbnb. “Y Combinator has become the central place to see where the next huge companies will be born and this makes it tremendously exciting to be a part of,” says Harj Taggar, 29, who is part of the core team at Y Combinator.
Since 2005 Y combinator has funded over 380 startups, including Reddit, Scribd, Disqus, Dropbox, ZumoDrive, Justin.tv, Posterous, Airbnb, Heyzap, Cloudkick, DailyBooth, WePay, Bump, Stripe, AeroFS, and Hipmunk.
Harj, who was among the 30 under 30 Rising Stars of Tomorrow in the Forbes list, proves that new ideas will get you everywhere, for Y Combinator has the distinction of being the largest provider of funds to new startups. It has been called the most prestigious program for budding entrepreneurs and has created an entirely new method of funding early stage startups.
“We’ll often invest before the company has even been incorporated or the founders have figured out an idea yet,” says Harj. “Rather than doing a small number of large deals each year like most venture capitalists, we invest small amounts of money – typically $17,000 to $20,000 in a large number of companies.”
What makes Y Combinator special is that while most investors are happy if they invest in one huge $1 billion + company, Y Combinator is producing multiple such companies. “Originally, when Y Combinator started, and was investing at such early stages, people doubted whether it could produce any interesting companies at all,” says Harj whose talent is in sniffing out the startups which will succeed and then nurturing them.
From Punjab to the UK to America
Harj, whose family migrated to the UK from rural Punjab, had little idea he’d be one day conjuring up these great relationships between startups and investors. His parents worked as machine operators in a factory in Stoke Poges, a gritty suburb of London and essentially worked at the same job all their lives. Education was Harj’s way out and after Burnham Grammar School, he went on to Oxford University.
“When growing up we didn’t have a whole load of money and no one in my family had been particularly educated so my parents always drilled into me – since I was doing well in school – that I had to get a job at a big corporate firm,” recalls Harj. “That’s all I thought about growing up and I studied law at university because I thought being a lawyer would be lucrative.
The mistake I made was not following my passion for technology and building those technical skills – instead I chased after what I thought would be a prestigious career.”
Ever since he was young, he loved technology and during high school had even started a business downloading MP3’s and selling music CDs to students. Since he was constantly coming up with novel ideas, he started his first company with his cousin Kulveer to help students buy and sell things from each other on campus. Harj eventually dropped out of law school to grow that company and he and his cousin moved to Silicon Valley, where Y Combinator invested in their nascent company. And now it’s come full circle where he himself is helping startups find their full potential.
There must be a great sense of power – playing God essentially – in selecting the would be start-ups. How did he develop the eye for selecting the right companies to fund? “I really just focus on the people and what my gut feeling is about them,” he says.
Needed: A Slice of Luck
What is the most challenging part of discovering promising startups – and the most rewarding? “Startups are such a unique challenge, unlike anything you’d face in a regular job, that’s it’s almost impossible to tell for sure how some will react to the pressures and stress of a startup,” he says. “You can definitely discover talented people who you would back but even then, they need a slice of luck in order to grow as big as Google or Facebook.”
The most rewarding aspect of what he does is the excitement of enabling new companies to reach their potential and making a tangible difference to a team he enjoys working with and respects: ” Once you see your efforts turning into something that could one day make a massive impact on the world – that’s pretty rewarding!” he says.
Any thoughts of taking Y Combinator to India? “Not yet, we’re still just trying to cope with the demands of scaling our operation in Silicon Valley,” says Harj Taggar. ” We have funded a few companies from India though and I’m sure they’d agree the experience of moving to Silicon Valley for three months was valuable for them!”
Harj is also an innovator who is always creating new web applications to make life easier. “I don’t do these things with any goal in mind, I do them because it’s fun to make things and also every time you make something you become a better programmer,” he explains. ” So the next thing you want to make takes less time. There’s a tremendous amount of satisfaction and enjoyment you can get from building tools to use for yourself.”
Ask Harj Taggar what keeps him going through good times and bad, and he says simply: “A belief that everything is a solvable problem and it’s just a matter of time before I figure out the solution!”
(C) Lavina Melwani
(This article first appeared in Hi Blitz)
