Y Combinator
- This article is about the venture capital firm. For the mathematical logic technique, see Fixed point combinator and Combinatory logic.
Y Combinator is a venture capital firm started by Trevor Blackwell, Paul Graham, and Robert Morris. In March of 2005, they initiated the Summer Founders Program to support very early stage startups.
The firm is named after a mathematical logic technique (see Fixed point combinator) familiar to many devotees of functional languages such as LISP and Scheme; cofounder Graham is a functional programming expert. The firm explains that the mathematical technique "is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies."