Jared Friedman

About

Jared Friedman is a Managing Director, Software, and Group Partner at Y Combinator, the world's premier startup accelerator, where he mentors founders, invests in early-stage companies, and has directly advised over 20 unicorns—contributing to YC-backed ventures collectively valued at more than $100 billion while championing expansions into biotech, hard tech, and AI-driven innovation. A Harvard computer science dropout inspired by maximizing impact (famously leaving the year after Mark Zuckerberg), Friedman co-founded Scribd in 2006—one of YC's earliest batches—as CTO, pioneering the shift from Flash to HTML5 document rendering and growing it into a top-100 global website with millions of users before transitioning to full-time partnering at YC in 2015. An early angel investor in successes like Cruise (autonomous vehicles), advocate for mobilizing tech against crises like COVID-19, and thought leader on spinning university research into startups, he embodies YC's ethos of bold experimentation to empower the next generation of transformative founders.