I’m delighted to announce a promotion and three additions to the YC team.

Kat Manalac has been our director of outreach since 2013.  She’s done an incredible job, and we’re making her a partner.  In addition to regular partner responsibilities, she’ll continue to be responsible for outreach to prospective founders and for our PR.  Before she joined YC, she was Alexis Ohanian’s chief of staff.

Yuri Sagalov joined us as a part-time partner last September, but we never got around to announcing it. Yuri is the cofounder and CEO of AeroFS, which he started in 2010.  Yuri will be especially helpful to enterprise companies we fund, which is not an area we’ve historically had much expertise in.  Several founders from the most recent batch went out of their way to tell me how much they’ve liked working with him.

Patrick Collison is joining us as part-time partner.  Patrick is the cofounder and CEO of Stripe.  He knows a lot about every part of running a startup, but he thinks about hiring and company culture better than anyone else I know.  Previously, he cofounded Auctomatic.

Elizabeth Iorns is also joining us as a part-time partner.  She’s the cofounder and CEO of Science Exchange.  She has a Ph.D. in cancer biology and knows a great deal about life sciences, which is very helpful given that we’re starting to get a lot of interesting biotechnology companies applying that we’re currently unqualified to judge.  She’s been an informal advisor to a number of Y Combinator companies, and they all praise her startup expertise.