come back</a> to YC to also encourage founders to think big.</p><p><strong>Hear more about how Dave transformed his app into one of the biggest photo services in the world on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Jb-david-lieb-creator-of-google-photos/">The Social Radars</a>.</strong></p>","comment_id":"66204a7beba13d0001fb31b7","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/04/dave-3.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-04-17T15:17:31.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-04-18T09:00:00.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-04-18T09:00:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Today Google Photos has more than a billion users. Most of those users probably don’t know that Google Photos' story begins at a startup called Bump.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d2","name":"Garry Tan","slug":"garry","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/03/Instagram-Image-Template--Square---21-.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Garry is the President & CEO of Y Combinator. Previously, he was the co-founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital. Before that, he co-founded Posterous (YC S08) which was acquired by Twitter.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":"@garrytan","meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/garry/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71160","name":"Partners","slug":"partners","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/partners/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d2","name":"Garry Tan","slug":"garry","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/03/Instagram-Image-Template--Square---21-.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Garry is the President & CEO of Y Combinator. Previously, he was the co-founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital. Before that, he co-founded Posterous (YC S08) which was acquired by Twitter.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":"@garrytan","meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/garry/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71160","name":"Partners","slug":"partners","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/partners/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/david-lieb-group-partner/","excerpt":"Today Google Photos has more than a billion users. Most of those users probably don’t know that Google Photos' story begins at a startup called Bump.","reading_time":2,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":"David Lieb speaks on a stage with Dalton Caldwell and Garry Tan","feature_image_caption":null},"mentions":[],"related_posts":[{"id":"661fe89feba13d0001fb316d","uuid":"cf16b3b3-a752-48ec-9044-29026eaba4fc","title":"Meet YC’s newest Visiting Group Partners","slug":"meet-ycs-newest-visiting-group-partners","html":"<p>I am excited to announce we have three new Visiting Group Partners joining us for the S24 YC batch: Andrew Miklas, Ooshma Garg, and Jon Xu. </p><p>Visiting Group Partners help advise founders during the batch by sharing their own experiences and lessons learned building companies. All three of our new Visiting Group Partners have lots to share on that front, as do our two returning Visiting Group Partners — <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-ycs-newest-group-partner-and-visiting-group-partners/">Tyler Bosmeny and Nate Smith</a>.</p><p><strong>Andrew Miklas</strong></p><p>Andrew is the co-founder and former CTO of PagerDuty (S10), a digital operations platform used by thousands of businesses to coordinate their responses to mission-critical issues. PagerDuty was the second YC company to go public after their <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/04/11/pagerdutys-ipo-values-it-at-18-billion--heres-why-it-had-doubters-early-on/?sh=63403fec32b3\%22>IPO on the NYSE in 2019</a>. </p><p>As PagerDuty's founding CTO, he scaled the product & engineering team to 70+ individuals and led the team that designed the initial product and its high availability architecture. He has also been an investor in startups including Retool and CaptivateIQ. He has a BSE (Software Engineering) from the University of Waterloo and an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.</p><p><strong>Ooshma Garg</strong></p><p>Ooshma is the founder and former CEO of Gobble (W14), the easiest and fastest way to make home-cooked meals. Ooshma scaled the business from inception to $300M+ in subscription sales and ultimately to <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.forbes.com/sites/yolarobert1/2022/12/07/intelligent-foods-acquires-gobble-in-a-nine-figure-deal-naming-ooshma-garg-ceo/?sh=3fd73c285e2d\%22>a profitable acquisition by Intelligent Brands in 2022</a>. </p><p>Ooshma was named CEO of Intelligent Foods and managed 750+ employees working across multiple nationwide D2C food brands, including Gobble and Sunbasket. Ooshma has founded and built three businesses. She sold her first B2B SaaS startup in 2010, just one year after graduating with a B.S. in BioMechanical Engineering from Stanford University.</p><p><strong>Jon Xu</strong></p><p>Jon is the co-founder and former CTO of FutureAdvisor (S10), one of the first robo investment advisors that made high-quality investment management available to everyone. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/26/blackrock-acquires-sequoia-backed-futureadvisor//">FutureAdvisor was acquired by BlackRock in 2015</a> where Jon continued to lead Product and Engineering as Managing Director in Aladdin Wealth Tech. FutureAdvisor powered robo investment services for the largest banks and broker dealers in the US and managed over $2B in client assets. </p><p>Prior to starting FutureAdvisor, Jon graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and worked on mobile data synchronization protocols at Microsoft. </p><hr><p>We’re all looking forward to Andrew, Ooshma, and Jon getting started. As YC alumni themselves, they know how special our community is and how important it is to pay it forward by guiding the next generation of YC founders.</p>","comment_id":"661fe89feba13d0001fb316d","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/04/Our-newest-VGPs.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-04-17T08:19:59.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-04-17T09:00:00.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-04-17T09:00:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"We're excited to announce we have three new Visiting Group Partners joining us for the S24 YC batch.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at YC. He was previously founder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15) and Auctomatic (YC W07), which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71160","name":"Partners","slug":"partners","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/partners/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at YC. He was previously founder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15) and Auctomatic (YC W07), which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/meet-ycs-newest-visiting-group-partners/","excerpt":"I am excited to announce we have three new Visiting Group Partners joining us for the S24 YC batch: Andrew Miklas, Ooshma Garg, and Jon Xu. ","reading_time":2,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":"<em>From left to right: Andrew Miklas, Ooshma Garg, Jon Xu</em>"},{"id":"645bf0808d5a140001e31726","uuid":"144e84b8-5535-4846-8e53-8a0e94513ab9","title":"Welcome back to YC, Emmett Shear and Wayne Crosby","slug":"welcome-back-to-yc-emmett-shear-and-wayne-crosby","html":"<p>Every batch, we invite founders to advise YC companies as Visiting Group Partners. These advisors bring valuable insights and recent operational experience to YC’s early-stage companies. Throughout the batch, they take on a variety of responsibilities, including application reading, interviews, group and individual office hours, Demo Day prep, and more.</p><p>Today, we’re excited to welcome Emmett Shear and Wayne Crosby as our newest Visiting Group Partners — and welcome back to Visiting Group Partners <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/dflieb/">David Lieb</a>, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/koomen/">Pete Koomen</a>, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/RichAberman/">Rich Aberman</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/umurc/">Umur Cubukcu</a>.</p><p><strong>Emmett Shear</strong></p><p>Emmett was co-founder and CEO of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.twitch.tv//">Twitch, where millions of people come together live every day to chat, interact, and make their own entertainment together. For 16 years, he worked on live video for the internet starting with <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/twitch/">Justin.tv (W07), which later became Twitch Inc. </p><p>In 2014, Twitch Inc. became a fully owned subsidiary of Amazon and the platform has grown to more than 8 million streamers a month. Emmett resigned as CEO in February 2023 and now works with Twitch in an advisory role. </p><p>He graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a degree in computer science. Emmett lives with hisfamily in San Francisco and is happiest when he’s learning something new.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">YC has been part of my life since summer of ‘05 when I went through the program for my first startup, Kiko Calendar (“Google is so stupid, can you believe they haven’t made a calendar to go w Gmail?”).</p>— Emmett Shear (@eshear) <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1656812142476288001?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\%22>May 12, 2023</a></blockquote>\n<script async src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js/" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>\n</figure><p><strong>Wayne Crosby</strong></p><p>Wayne is passionate about helping people and teams reach their full potential. He was a co-founder of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/zenter/">Zenter (W07), a collaborative presentation product that was acquired by Google and turned into Google Slides. Wayne spent ten years at Google scaling and leading teams including GSuite, Machine Intelligence, and both successful and ill-fated parts of Google+. GSuite became Google’s fourth product to have more than 1B users and generate more than $1B in revenue. </p><p>Wayne’s professional experience and his desire to help others led him to become an angel investor, and he’s invested in dozens of Y Combinator companies over the years. In 2017, Wayne co-founded his second company, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://humu.com/">Humu, a product that uses behavioral science and machine learning to help teams at large enterprises achieve greater happiness and better performance. Humu raised over $100M to deliver on its mission to make work better for everyone, everywhere. </p><p>Always the consummate builder, Wayne is also the founder of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://orgorg.us/">OrgOrg, a company that is building a suite of small business tools to help organizations run more efficiently. Above all, Wayne knows that none of his success would have been possible without the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288914\%22>support of his family</a>, and he loves spending time with them, their dog, and their hairless cat in the Bay Area. </p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Y Combinator changed the trajectory of my life, and I’m so excited to be back! This time as a visiting partner.<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://t.co/Fa3XsoUtNp/">https://t.co/Fa3XsoUtNp— Wayne (@wcrosby) <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/wcrosby/status/1656812373066530817?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\%22>May 12, 2023</a></blockquote>\n<script async src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js/" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>\n</figure>","comment_id":"645bf0808d5a140001e31726","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/Emmett-Shear-Wayne-Crosby.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2023-05-10T12:29:04.000-07:00","updated_at":"2023-10-06T08:35:15.000-07:00","published_at":"2023-05-11T16:59:59.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Today, we’re excited to welcome Emmett Shear and Wayne Crosby as our newest Visiting Group Partners.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71070","name":"Aaron Epstein","slug":"aaron-epstein","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Aaron-E-2.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Aaron is a Group Partner at YC. 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He was the co-founder and CEO of Creative Market (YC W10), a marketplace for graphic design assets, which was acquired by Autodesk in 2014.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/aaron-epstein/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/welcome-back-to-yc-emmett-shear-and-wayne-crosby/","excerpt":"Every batch, we invite founders to advise YC companies as Visiting Group Partners. 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Of course, Tim was there. In fact, he was Yahoo!’s first employee and ran a group called “production” until he eventually became Chief Product Officer. Tim was, in many ways, the conscience of Yahoo! He kept us focused on the customer experience in an era when it was too easy to toss that aside in a search for revenue. My connection to Tim and what he meant to Yahoo! grew when I succeeded him as CPO in 2002, as he left in search of new adventures.</p><p>And what adventures! Tim first studied history with an eye to perhaps earning a PhD and then teaching. Subsequently, he became an excellent chef by taking an intense course from San Francisco’s Tante Marie's cooking school, and then returned to his operator roots and took on the CEO role at QuestBridge, an educational non-profit helping connect low-income students with elite colleges around the country.</p><p>We stayed in contact over the years and when I began thinking of starting something in the educational technology space in 2010, it was natural for us to begin batting ideas around. When we started toying with the idea of an edtech version of Y Combinator we naturally checked in with our former Yahoo! colleague Paul Graham and he not only thought it was a great idea, he offered to help! That launched Tim and me on our amazing Imagine K12 adventure together where we funded over 80 great edtech companies over five years. </p><p>PG, in his seminal essay “<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html/">How to Start a Startup</a>”, said you should always look to find “animals” as your co-founders, and Tim is an animal in the best of all possible ways. He is the kind of guy who solves problems and gets things done. When we realized that the two of us were going to need to write a whole bunch of infrastructure software in order to support our new accelerator, Tim didn’t hesitate. He leapt in with PHP and MySQL and in short order, we were up and running. Together we ran Imagine K12, funded all the companies, and wrote all the code we needed to accept applications, create a community, and run Imagine K12. He never let a problem go unsolved, was always kind, optimistic, and super thoughtful. He was the best possible choice as a cofounder. Our time together at IK12 ranks as one of the highlights of my career, with memories of amazing companies, epic IK12 poker tournaments - which became a much-anticipated annual event - and memorable end-of-batch events where Tim would often cook up an amazing paella.</p><p>In 2016, when we merged with YC, Tim joined me as a YC Group Partner and scarcely missed a beat in helping many hundreds more companies grow and thrive. He has remained passionate about making the world a better place, by helping YC companies make things people want, and by being the main person who worked with the non-profits YC occasionally funds. His affability, his integrity, his positivity, and his deep commitment to adding value will be sorely missed. It has been my great, great pleasure to have Tim as a colleague and a friend, and wish him only the best in whatever adventures lie ahead in his, always epic, journey.</p>","comment_id":"625dd04854a948000183a422","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/04/2018-0313-YC-Event_104-1.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-04-18T13:55:36.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-04-19T08:57:38.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-04-19T08:55:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"It has been our pleasure to have Tim as a colleague and a friend, and wish him only the best in whatever adventures lie ahead in his, always epic, journey.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71092","name":"Geoff Ralston","slug":"geoff-ralston","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/geoff.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Geoff Ralston is the former President of Y Combinator and has been with YC since 2011. 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After creating Google Photos and Bump, David Lieb is our newest Group Partner
Today Google Photos has more than a billion users. Most of those users probably don’t know that Google Photos' story begins at a startup called Bump — part of YC’s Summer 2009 batch.
Bump was a mobile app used by more than 150M people to share photos and contact info by bumping their phones together — something that, at the time, was an absolute game changer. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and an unreleased photo sharing app they were building became the foundation of Google Photos.
David Lieb, Bump’s CEO and co-founder, led the product from inception all the way past the billion user mark. And today, after three batches as a Visiting Group Partner at YC, he is our newest full time Group Partner. I’m so proud to welcome him.
Just as mobile unlocked new ideas like Bump, today we’re seeing AI unlock an entirely new wave of consumer companies. Google Photos might be the very first example of this — a mass consumer product built with AI search, face recognition, and editing at its core. Dave is an expert at knowing how to use AI to make something people want. Having him on your side to help navigate this new world is an incredible advantage.
As an advisor, he often reminds me of PG and Jessica, who brought founders back to the basics again and again. He pushes founders to focus on the things that matter. Who are you building this for? Not the imaginary silhouette of a customer — the real people, with names you know, that want this. And when did you last talk to them? As a founder, he admits that he let himself get distracted with big-name investors and app store ranking. Today, he can say with authority that nothing ranks higher than your customers coming back to your product again and again.
When Dave was interviewing for YC back in 2009, PG put his head down in the middle of the interview. He looked up and asked how Bump would be bigger than Google. It was this simple question that honed Dave’s focus and made his ambitions grow. We are so thrilled Dave has come back to YC to also encourage founders to think big.
Hear more about how Dave transformed his app into one of the biggest photo services in the world on The Social Radars.
Garry is the President & CEO of Y Combinator. Previously, he was the co-founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital. Before that, he co-founded Posterous (YC S08) which was acquired by Twitter.