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Kyle Corbitt
Director of Startup School at Y Combinator
Kyle Corbitt is a technology entrepreneur and software engineer with a diverse background in the tech industry. He served as the Director of Startup School at Y Combinator, where he led the team responsible for building and developing Startup School (startupschool.org), the largest community of startup founders worldwide.12 During his tenure, he implemented major features like co-founder matching, local meetups in 23 cities, and a continuously-available online curriculum, serving over 100,000 founders globally.1
Career Highlights
Y Combinator Experience:: Kyle worked at Y Combinator for nearly 4.5 years, starting as a Senior Software Engineer in August 2017 before being promoted to Director in March 2020.1 He was instrumental in improving and developing various products across YC's portfolio.
Entrepreneurial Ventures::
- Currently, Kyle is the co-founder and CEO of OpenPipe, a platform that helps turn expensive prompts into cost-effective fine-tuned models.3
- Previously, he co-founded Emberall, where he served as CTO from May 2014 to September 2016.1
Corporate Experience::
- Worked as a Software Engineer at Google for 10 months, focusing on data analysis and mobile development for YouTube Music.1
- Completed a software engineering internship at Facebook in 2010, where he created a beta extension for Google Chrome users to interact with Facebook notifications.1
Education and Skills
Kyle graduated from Brigham Young University, studying from 2009 to 2014.1 He is proficient in Spanish, with native or bilingual proficiency.1
Recent Endeavors
After his time at Y Combinator, Kyle has been focusing on his new venture, OpenPipe. The company provides an SDK that allows developers to fine-tune custom AI models, making them faster, cheaper, and often more accurate than original models.3 His experience with fine-tuning models dates back to 2021, and he has been actively involved in the development of AI technologies.3
Kyle Corbitt's career trajectory showcases his expertise in software engineering, entrepreneurship, and his significant contributions to the startup ecosystem through his work at Y Combinator and beyond.
Highlights
It's clear in retrospect why OpenAI sat on strawberry/o1 for so long without publishing. Now that everyone has seen the trick, replications are coming fast.
Qwen, AllenAI, academic work like PRIME and now Microsoft are all getting impressive results.
When I worked at @ycombinator I'd make a point of chatting with very successful founders and getting the "real" backstory, not the polished PR one. There were always big mistakes, self-doubt, long periods lost in the wilderness. Success is only inevitable in retrospect.
