Michael Seibel is CEO and a partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He has been a partner at Y Combinator since 2013, advised hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.
Biography
Seibel was born in Brooklyn and calls New York City his favorite city. At Yale, he majored in political science and became friends with Justin Kan. He graduated in 2005. After graduation, he worked as finance director for Kweisi Mfume's unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 2006. He then moved to Silicon Valley to co-found Justin.tv, and became CEO at the company. He then became CEO of Socialcam, a social video-sharing app that launched in March 2011 and sold to Autodesk for $60 million in 2012. He became a part-time partner at Y Combinator on January 2013, and joined Y Combinator as its first African-American partner in October 2014. In 2014 Justin.tv was renamed Twitch Interactive and later that year sold to Amazon for over $1 billion. Some of his investments include Cruise, Luxe, Walker and Company, Locol, Bluesmart, Scentbird, Lugg, Jopwell, Triplebyte and Bellabeat. He blogs on the Y Combinator and maintains a list of his blog entries on his personal website. In 2016, he mentioned the need for more startups serving parents with young kids. He mentioned Clever and Panorama Education - both Y Combinator graduates, as promising examples. He became CEO of the Y Combinator Core unit in 2016, where he will help execute Y Combinator's plan to wind down fellowships and to start a MOOC that serves as an open-to-anyone, lightweight version of YC. Before joining YC, Michael Seibel was a key mentor to the co-founders of Airbnb and recommended them to Y Combinator. On June 10, 2020, it was announced that Seibel was named a Reddit board member, replacing Alexis Ohanian, who resigned on June 5, 2020, in response to the death of George Floyd. In his resignation announcement, Alexis Ohanian had urged Reddit's board of directors to fill his vacant board seat with a black candidate. Reddit later named Seibel as the "first black board member in the company's history".
