Why Did Y Combinator Stretch the Batch to 13 Weeks?

Garry Tan says Y Combinator just extended the program to 13 weeks. The team talks to people about how things went and what can be done better. Moving from two batches to four made each batch a little shorter, down to maybe 11 or 12 weeks. People needed a little more time, so Y Combinator added about two more weeks and set the program at 13.

The first nine to ten weeks are for finding product-market fit. The work is to get into the market, nail the messaging, figure out who the product is for, build it, and land a set of real customers. Sometimes the buyer is an enterprise. The first three to five customers matter a lot, and early sales set the tone for the whole company.

Developer tools behave like a consumer startup, with a total addressable market of about 20 million people. Garry Tan says CodeGen might push the figure to 200. AI infrastructure is growing really fast and keeps changing. Y Combinator is totally insane for infrastructure and cloud startups: look left and right at about 800 companies funded the prior year. All of them will reply to an email and at least give a fair shot. A reply is not a guarantee they will sign on.