
Geoff Ralston
President Emeritus of Y Combinator
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Biography
Geoff was the president of Y Combinator from early 2019 until the end of 2022. He had been a YC partner since 2011. Geoff has worked with hundreds of YC companies like Stripe, Gingko, Clever, Helion and Boom and has personally angel invested in over 100 companies.
In the early days of the web, Geoff and his team created one of the very first web-based email products, Rocketmail. Rocketmail eventually became Yahoo! Mail when it was acquired by Yahoo! In 1997. At Yahoo! Geoff was a VP of engineering, ran a division for several years as an SVP/GM and completed his career there as Chief Product Officer.
Subsequently Geoff was CEO of Lala Media, which Apple purchased in 2010. When Geoff joined Y Combinator in 2011, he also co-founded and ran Imagine K12, the first educational technology accelerator which funded several well-known edtech startups including ClassDojo, Remind, and Panorama Education. Imagine K12 merged with YC in 2016.
Geoff graduated from Dartmouth College in 1982 with a degree in Computer Science, went out to California to work at Hewlett Packard and eventually returned to school at Stanford to complete his masters in Computer Science. Later, while living abroad in France, he earned his MBA at INSEAD.
Geoff still loves programming, has written software in every job he’s ever had (including as YC’s president) and is the proud author of Angelcalc, which is a popular free cap table / convertible modeling tool. Geoff is married with 3 (mostly grown) children and lives in Atherton, CA.