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 seedstage 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]