warner-wvez/yc-knowledge-base

This repository is a personal knowledge base built from the entire Y Combinator Startup Library, the large collection of startup talks, podcasts, and essays that YC has published over the years. Instead of leaving that advice scattered across hundreds of videos and articles, the author turned each one into a single linked note, so the whole library becomes one searchable, connected set of notes. The repo itself does not include the full video transcripts or full essay text. What it does include is the structure: one Markdown file per entry, with fields like author, series, date, and a short summary, plus links connecting each entry to the person who made it and the series it belongs to. There are 466 entries in total, 366 videos and 100 articles, covering 110 different authors and speakers across 24 series or shows, adding up to 604 linked notes. The notes are meant to be opened in Obsidian, a free note-taking app that reads plain Markdown files and can display them as a visual graph. Cloning the repo and opening its vault folder in Obsidian turns the notes into a graph you can search and click through, moving from any talk to its author or to other entries in the same series. The author explains two ways to use the repo. Someone building a company can start with the how-i-use-it guide to see how the notes help answer real decisions, like fundraising or pricing, by pointing straight to the relevant sources instead of requiring a search through hours of video. Someone more interested in the technical side can read the how-it-was-built and anatomy-of-a-note guides, which describe the plain file and metadata structure behind the whole system, built with no database or custom app, just Markdown files and links. Every note links back to the original source in the Y Combinator Startup Library, and the author is explicit that the real value is in watching or reading the originals there, not in this repo.