Vivian Midha Shen and Raphael Schaad Join YC as General Partners
Y Combinator Garry Tan
Y Combinator named Vivian Midha Shen and Raphael Schaad as new General Partners. Both have already worked with founders at YC, and both know how to turn early ideas into products people want.
Based on reporting by Y Combinator, Garry Tan — read the original for the full story.
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Y Combinator has brought in Vivian Midha Shen and Raphael Schaad as its newest General Partners. The two have spent the last two batches as Visiting Partners, working closely with founders before getting the full-time title.
YC is selling this as a bet on taste as much as experience. Vivian and Raphael are described as people who combine technical depth with product judgment, which is the useful mix when a startup is still more sketch than company.
Vivian comes in with two founder stories behind her. She co-founded Juni Learning, a YC W18 company for kids’ coding and math, and later started Acely, an AI tutor for college readiness. Across those businesses, she built more than $50 million in revenue and reached millions of users. Acely, YC says, went from zero to $10 million in run rate with a lean team.
Her background is unusually broad for a new partner. She has worked as an engineer, in product, in design and in marketing. Before founding companies, she was a software engineer at Google, a consultant at McKinsey and a Director of Product at Operator. She studied computer science and creative writing at Stanford.
Raphael brings a different but equally strong mix. He founded Cron, the calendar app YC calls a next-generation product, and Notion acquired it in 2022. After that, he helped grow Notion Calendar to millions of users and later served as Head of Design for Growth and new products. Before Cron, he worked on Flipboard and iA Writer, and he studied at Bern University of Applied Sciences and MIT. YC is putting them both into the role founders tend to care about most: the people who can help from the first weeks in a batch all the way through the long grind after that.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of hire YC should keep making: builders who have shipped real products, not just talked about them. The startup world has enough platform people with polished slides and not enough taste for what users actually keep opening. More firms should admit that craft is a competitive advantage, even if it sounds annoyingly unscalable.
Read more about this at: Y Combinator
