Facebook announced its first acquisition today.

Congratulations Blake and Joe!

Robert Morris with Loopt founder and CEO Sam Altman (summer '05) that summer.

Sprint will soon offer Loopt’s social mapping service on its phones. Loopt's mobile application uses the GPS capabilities on phones to let users keep in touch with their friends. A user's private network of friends is displayed as dots (yes, they move) on a map on the phone.

Loopt had till now been available only through Boost, so even though Loopt has been very successful, the average Web 2.0 fan may not have known about them. I think that’s about to change.

Congratulations!

Working with the founders is probably my favorite part of Y Combinator. So when “alumni” come to visit, I get especially excited. I’m spoiled when we’re in Silicon Valley, since so many YCers live in the Bay area. Many will crash dinners or else I’ll stop by the Y Scraper when I’m in the city to say hello.

Besides the 19 new startups participating in this summer’s funding cycle, I think there’s only one active alumni startup in Boston (more on this in a future post). So I was delighted when a few of our alumni visited Cambridge last week.   

Zenter: Victory lap

Wayne and Robby of Zenter flew out to meet the new founders and talk about what they wished they’d known in the first month of YC. This was the first time we’d seen them since the Google acquisition and it was nice to see for myself how happy they seemed. Their main advice for the founders: channel all your hacking ability into making something users want. Especially in the months leading up to Demo Day.

Wufoo: Getting it right

Kevin Hale of Wufoo also visited and spent hours giving the founders design feedback. (He’s extremely talented in this area.) Kevin founded Wufoo with brothers Chris and Ryan Campbell. They moved from Tampa to Mountain View in January ’06 and, like the Zenters a year later, took advantage of the next 3 months to work nonstop on their product. They rewarded themselves occasionally by watching LOST, but other than that, they were programming animals.

They raised some angel funding before returning to Tampa in April ’06. We worried the Wufoos would be hosing themselves with this move (do you know any software startups from Tampa?) but it seems to have worked out OK. In the 15 months since, the founders have accomplished a lot. They launched a year ago and have consistently added new features. They also care a lot about customer service. Apparently their average response time to emails from users is six and a half minutes-- and it’s only three guys!

They have all sorts of clever tricks to help them stay productive. I can’t say too much about the most amusing one, since I think Kevin plans to write about it on Particle Tree, but the payoff is a trip to the winner’s destination of choice with the loser assuming the role of “trip bitch.”

Kevin’s most exciting news was that Wufoo is now profitable. He showed me a graph with a nice smooth upward curve. Assuming they don’t make some huge mistake, the Wufoos are in a place most “Web 2.0” companies would envy: they’ll never have to ask investors for permission to keep working on their product.

Congrats David, Dan and Chris! Weebly was named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2007 by Time Magazine. Foundersatwork.com is (proud to be) powered by Weebly.

Joe Damato (l) and Matt Humphrey (r) of SlapVid at a YC dinner.

Matt Humphrey, Joe Damato, Bob DiMaggio and Wei An Wang founded SlapVid last winter while students at Carnegie Mellon. They moved to Cambridge last month and were the first startup to launch during YC’s summer funding cycle (a few others were launched at the time we accepted them).

SlapVid is doing some cool new things in the streaming media space—hoping to change the traditional content delivery network (CDN) model. It’s the next-generation Akamai, using peer-to-peer networking to have users share the bandwidth load.

The founders were a bit surprised that the article focused more on SlapVid as an example of young people’s career options than on their actual product, but I told them they should be pleased: this is only the third YC-funded company the Globe has ever covered, despite 39 new startups springing up in their backyard since summer '05!

Applications for Y Combinator's winter funding cycle are due Thursday, October 11. You can start editing your application now.

Good luck!

Checking out the Weebly site with Chris, David (seated) and Dan (Nov '06)

Just when I thought it wasn't possible to like the Weeblys any more than I already did, they went ahead and helped me create this new blog. I admit that Dan, Chris and David gave me access to some features that aren't yet released (one of the perks of being an investor), but even without the VIP treatment, the Weebly software makes it simple for anyone to set up a website. And I know they are working hard on a bunch of new features that will make the user experience even better.

I remember being immediately impressed by the Weebly founders during their Y Combinator interview last November. Their product was really cool and the founders seemed talented and confident. But what struck me most of all was how determined they were.

I worried that, if accepted, they'd have to take a leave from college one semester short of graduation. I may have even suggested waiting until our next funding cycle. But they told us that they were going to leave school to work on Weebly no matter what. With or without our funding, they didn't want to lose any momentum. (They were featured on TechCrunch that very morning in fact).

So I asked the founders a question I think few investors ever do:

"Are your parents okay with this?"

They assured us that their parents approved, and explained that they had talked with their professors and hoped they'd have enough credits to graduate on time.

Y Combinator really worries about this and often discourages people from dropping out of college to start a startup. But for some, there's just no stopping them.

So far, it seems to have been a good call for the Weeblys. David, Dan and Chris moved to the Bay Area and made a lot of progress with their product. They were a big hit at Demo Day, were featured in Newsweek and, though two are a few credits shy of a degree, even managed to walk with their graduating class back at Penn State.

Thank you enormously guys!

Wayne (l) and Robby (r) with Newsweek's Steven Levy

Zenter founders (and new Google employees) Wayne Crosby and Robby Walker moved to Mountain View last January to found Zenter. In the 3 months that followed, they worked around the clock on their web-based presentation software, writing over 40,000 lines of code. At Y Combinator’s Demo Day, they were one of the startups that generated the most interest among investors. They each dropped 15 lbs. in the process (I think unintentionally) because they lived almost exclusively on frozen dinners.

The Zenters created a very impressive product in a short amount of time. This wasn’t too surprising because they seemed promising from the start: they were talented hackers, they were extremely focused, and they were building a product that they themselves would use.

But the pair had another important quality that is sometimes undervalued in cofounders: Wayne and Robby were good friends who had worked together before. And they are extremely upstanding people. Despite its relatively short existence, Zenter (like most startups) had its share of ups and downs. Wayne and Robby’s friendship helped carry them through some stressful moments.

The news is particularly pleasing to us since we were shocked to learn, a few weeks after the founders had moved to Mountain View, that Wayne’s wife was back in Arizona expecting their first child. (Wayne and Christi had a baby boy in May!)

I’m really excited for Wayne and Robby-- congrats guys!