FounderTrace

Hey Product Hunt! 👋 This started with a tweet from Paul Graham. Last month, PG posted: "I met a startup today whose founders had previously worked at Coinbase and Scale. And Brian Armstrong of Coinbase had himself worked at Airbnb. I bet 3 'generations' is not the record though. Anyone know of a longer chain?" The tweet got 268K views. Everyone was curious. So I vibe coded the answer in a weekend using https://crustdata.com. FounderTrace maps the entire YC founder genealogy — who worked where, who founded what, and how these chains connect across 6,000+ YC companies. What PG's AI found: The longest chain is 4 generations: Auctomatic (W07) → GoCardless (S11) → Duffel (S18) → Vizzly (S22) What FounderTrace shows you: - Visual family trees for every major YC company - Which startups are "founder factories" (Stripe alone has spawned 50+ YC companies) - The hidden connections between the companies you use every day Why you might care: - Founders: See who came before you in your "lineage" - Hiring: Find talent from companies that produce founders - Investors: Spot patterns in successful founder backgrounds - Curious minds: It's honestly just fun to explore Crustdata gave me access to enriched LinkedIn data for millions of profiles — work history, company connections, the works. Without that, this would've taken months instead of a weekend. The entire site is free. No signup. PG's original tweet is right there on the landing page as a reminder of how this started.

such a great product