Y Combinator  

From the official Y Combinator blog:

We also have five new part-time partners: Michael Seibel, Steve Huffman, Dalton Caldwell, and Andrew Mason. As the name suggests, part-time partners advise startups like regular partners, but part-time. Michael was cofounder of Socialcam (YC W12) and now works at Autodesk, which acquired it last year. Steve is cofounder of Hipmunk (YC S10) and before that was cofounder of Reddit (YC S05). Dalton is cofounder of App.net and before that was cofounder of Imeem. Andrew was cofounder of Groupon and till recently its CEO. We’ve known all these guys for years and we can already tell it will be great to work with them.

I’m proud to say that I have accepted a “part-time partner” role at Y Combinator. I have known PG & Jessica for years, and have tremendous respect for them. The upshot of taking this role is that I’m going to be spending a few hours a week helping out YC companies.

Given that running App.net is a full-time job, I had to carefully weigh the pros and cons of taking on an additional time commitment. After consulting with my co-founder and some of my advisors, I came to the conclusion that spending this time with early-stage startups will make me better at my job at App.net.

Specifically, the #1 thing we can do at App.net right now is ensure that we’re building the best social platform for developers creating the next big thing. As PG has put it, understand your users. I like to think that being exposed to this many startups will help keep me honest.

I look forward to getting to know more of the YC community, learning as much as possible, and (hopefully) offering some useful advice and perspective.