Education[edit]

Altman studied computer science at Stanford University, and dropped out in 2005.[2]

Career[edit] Y Combinator[edit]

In 2014, Altman was named president of Y Combinator, regarded as the best seed-

stage accelerator in the world by its founders[3] as well as the most commercially

successful.[4]Altman announced in a 2014 blog post that the total valuation of all Y

Combinator companies had surpassed $30 billion, including well-known companies

like Airbnb, Dropbox,Zenefits and Stripe.[5]

Altman has stated that he hopes to grow Y Combinator so that it eventually funds 1,000

new companies per year. He has also increased the types of companies funded by YC,

especially on so-called "hard technology" companies. [6]

In July of 2015, Altman announced the YC Fellowship, a new program to give grants of

$12,000 and advice to very early-stage startups. [7]

Altman was named the top investor under 30 by Forbes in 2015,[8] one of the "Best

Young Entrepreneurs in Technology" by BusinessWeek in 2008[9] and listed as one of

the five most interesting startup founders between 1979 and 2009 by his colleague Paul

Graham.[10]

Pre-YC angel investing[edit]

He is an investor in many companies,

including Stripe, Shoptiques, Teespring, Zenefits, reddit,

FarmLogs, Instacart, Pinterest, Optimizely, Airbnb, Verbling, Soylent, Vicarious, Clever,

Notable PDF[11][12] and Change.org.

He was the CEO of reddit for 8 days in 2014 after the then-CEO Yishan

Wong resigned.[13] As part of his investment, he developed a new way for the community

to own part of the company. He announced the return of Steve Huffman as CEO on July

10, 2015.[14]

Nuclear Energy[edit]

He is Chairman of the Board for Helion and uPower, two nuclear energy companies. He

has stated a belief that nuclear energy is one of the most important technological

developments for the future.[15]

Loopt[edit]

He was previously a co-founder and CEO of Loopt,[16] a location-based social

networking mobile application, which was acquired by Green Dot Corporation [17]