Joe Hruska . com

I’ve had a few of my friends ask me what Y Combinator was all about and what I’ve been up to.

Y Combinator (YC) provides mentorship and seed funding for early stage tech startups.  Twice a year, they accept applications from thousands of prospective startups.  Out of those thousands of applications, they interview a smaller group of potentials and out of the interviews they accept 20 to 27 companies to take part in the YC “experience”.

Tony Wright, Brian Fioca and I applied to YC in Oct. 2007 and received notice on October 19th, 2007 that we were being invited to introduce RescueTime to the YC partners.  We were all really excited about the opportunity to even interview and we spent a large amount of time researching and preparing.

Long story short (I’ll do another post on the details of my YC experience) – we were accepted into YC and Tony, Brian and I moved down to Silicon Valley on January 4th to get RescueTime, Inc. kicked off.

We spent 3 months in Silicon Valley, going through the Y Combinator program.  This essentially entailed spending an insane amount of time and being hugely productive building and refining RescueTime.com. YC holds weekly dinners for the group where they bring in guest speakers to present and do Q/A sessions.  Most of the speakers where themselves founders of startup companies.  We got the opportunity to sit down and talk with people like Marc Andreessen, Chris Sacca, Evan Williams, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway and a ton of other really cool people.

On April 1 2008, the three of us moved back to Seattle to continue building RescueTime, Inc as a business.  In September 2008, we closed a round of financing for $875,000, from True Ventures in Silicon Valley and a number of really cool Angel investors, including former Googlers and Microsofties and Tim Ferriss the author of “The 4-hour Workweek“.

Since we raised our funding, we’ve added two awesome guys to our team (Montana Low and Mark Wolgemuth), and we’ve been pretty much focused on trying to improve the RescueTime.com offering.