Lanyrd announces YC funding!

Some of the more observant amongst you may have noticed that we have been based in Mountain View, California for a few weeks now rather than working on Lanyrd 'on the road' through Morocco, Egypt and South Africa as we were before. Well, the cat is out of the bag, we are here for the three month Y Combinator class of Winter 2011.

For those of you who haven't heard about Y Combinator, getting accepted is quite a coup and we are very happy about it! Paul Graham wrote an article about what exactly happens at YC. It was this article that convinced us to apply back at the end of October last year.

YC gives us a small amount of investment in return for a small stake in our company, but its not really about that. The great thing about YC is the support, help and advice available. They know that doing a startup is hard and they have seen hundreds of young companies like us go through their doors so they really understand the patterns and the pitfalls.

As of last Friday the YC experience just got even more exciting! We were called into the YC Headquarters for a 'Mystery Event' that started at 9pm, with much wild ideas and speculation as to what it would be. The announcement was that SV Angel and Yuri Milner would be investing an extra $150,000 into every YC company in our batch! Naturally we are very excited about this. We now afford to eat chicken with our ramen noodles.

There have been four of the ten YC Dinners so far, a chance for the founders in the same batch to get together to share and learn from each other over some food and lemonade. Doing a startup can be a bit of an isolating experience (even if you aren't trying to travel the world at the same time) and its really reassuring to talk to the people who sit next to you on the same emotional roller-coaster.

Since we are focusing on the site full time now you can expect more exciting Lanyrd-y goodness to come, we are only just getting started!