r/ycombinator
Y Combinator
Founded April 2011 · Public — anyone can post
News and discussion around startups and applying to Y Combinator. In 2005, Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. We invest $500,000 in every startup and work intensively with the founders for three months. For the life of their company, founders have access to the most powerful community in the world, essential advice, later-stage funding and programs, recruiting resources, and exclusive deals.
Members
203,679
204K
Online now
—
not captured in the last snapshot
Posts per day
—
no sample yet
Comments per post
—
no sample yet
Growth · 7d
—
not enough history yet
Growth · 30d
+2.6%
+5.1K members · ≈32d
Published rules
10
2 mention promotion — quoted below
Last post
—
no sample yet
Distinct posters
—
no sample yet
Tracking since Aug 7 · growth spans are the real distance between snapshots, not rounded windows. Posts/day is measured from the community’s own newest posts on Reddit, not from what Prowlo happens to crawl.
Member growth
What r/ycombinator's rules say about promotion
2 of 10 published rules mention promotion, advertising or spam. Quoted from the community's own rules page, not summarised.
No self promotion.
rule 5 of 10
No solicitation of surveys, DMs, external groups, etc
rule 8 of 10
Posts in this sub should be applicable to other members of this community, or promote discussion. Not requests that only apply to the poster.
Removal reason shown to posters: No solicitation of surveys or DMs.
The other 8
- Read the stickied post at the top of the sub.
- Don't be a jerk.
- Use the search before making a new post.
- Use the megathreads for feedback and application discussions.
- No hiring or co-founder search posts.
- No memes, politics, or shitposts.
- No unplanned AMAs.
- No discussions about VCs or other accelerators.
Read from r/ycombinator’s published rules on Mar 29. Communities change their rules without notice and enforce requirements (karma, account age, flair) that may live in the sidebar or automod rather than here — the source page is the authority.
Similar by content
Communities that discuss what r/ycombinator discusses.
Sharing everything YC related, from what has helped you get in, to Start-Up School and interesting reads from YC Partners / alumni.
Welcome to /r/startups, the place to discuss startup problems and solutions. Startups are companies that are designed to grow and scale rapidly. Be sure to read and follow all of our rules--we have specific places for common content and requests.
###r/Founder is a support network for budding and established Founders. We are in need of active mods! Please PM if you are serious about moderating and are excited about /r/founder! Remember, r/Founder is a restricted community. If you want to be a part of r/Founders simply message a mod! --- ##Please follow the r/Founder rules! 1. Restricted to **actual** founders (PM a mod to be approved) 2. Please list your company in your flair. 3. Focus on personal startup conversations: possible p
Venture capital news and articles, for the VC industry, and related early-stage investors.
A community for founders, builders, and tech enthusiasts to share startup ideas, discuss new technologies, and learn from each other. Whether you’re coding your MVP, managing a business, or exploring new tech trends, you’re welcome here. Let’s build the future together.
See the full lists on similar subreddits.
r/ycombinator — frequently asked
How many members does r/ycombinator have?
r/ycombinator has 203,679 members as of our most recent crawl on Sep 8. Prowlo re-checks tracked communities on a rolling schedule, so this figure moves rather than sitting frozen at whatever it was when a scraper last ran.
Is r/ycombinator growing?
Over the last ≈32 days r/ycombinator changed by +2.6% — a gain of 5.1K members. We compare against the nearest snapshot we actually hold and state the real span rather than rounding it to a clean "30 days".
How active is r/ycombinator?
We don't have a reliable posting-rate sample for r/ycombinator yet. Subscriber count alone is a poor guide to whether a community is active, so treat this one as unverified until the next sample lands.
When was r/ycombinator created?
r/ycombinator was founded in April 2011 and is a public — anyone can post community. Age matters: an older community with steady growth has survived Reddit's moderation churn; a young one with a spike may not.
Can I promote my product in r/ycombinator?
r/ycombinator publishes 10 rules and 2 of them address promotion. The first, “No self promotion.” Read the full rule text on this page and the community's rules page before posting — moderator enforcement is the thing that actually decides.
How do I monitor r/ycombinator for mentions?
Hit Watch on this page. Prowlo starts crawling r/ycombinator into your Dataset — every new post indexed and embedded, searchable semantically, queryable by your AI agent over MCP, and able to trigger keyword alerts in Slack. Prowlo is read-only; it never posts on your behalf.
Can my AI agent read r/ycombinator's stats?
Yes. Everything on this page is one MCP tool call away: catalog_get_subreddit returns r/ycombinator's members, growth, promo tolerance and similar communities as typed JSON — free, no credits. Connect your agent to api.prowlo.com/mcp and it can vet the community and start watching it in the same conversation.
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