Who Is Scribd and Parse Cofounder Tikhon Bernstam?

Craig Cannon introduced Tikhon Bernstam on the Y Combinator podcast as a founder who did YC twice: summer 2006 with Scribd, and summer 2011 with Parse. Bernstam found YC on Reddit during a theoretical-physics doctorate, when a top post might have ten points and the site had no comments. Paul Graham's essays were the first path he had seen to a company after the dot-com crash. He applied as a long shot, interviewed in Palo Alto, and got in while the program was still in Cambridge, so he dropped out. He had studied computer science and economics as an undergraduate. He and cofounder Jared worked on Scribd for about a year and a half before it had real traction.