We’re thrilled to announce that Vivian Midha Shen and Raphael Schaad are joining Y Combinator as our newest General Partners.
Vivian and Raphael have spent the last two batches working closely with YC founders as Visiting Partners. We’ve seen firsthand what makes each of them exceptional: they combine deep technical experience with strong product judgment, and they know how to help ambitious founders turn an early idea into something users love.
Vivian co-founded Juni Learning (YC W18), an online academy for kids’ coding and math, and later founded Acely, an AI tutor for college readiness. Across the two companies, she built businesses with more than $50 million in revenue and millions of users. Acely alone grew from zero to $10 million in run rate with a lean team, showing what small, AI-native companies can accomplish.
Vivian has done nearly every job inside a startup: engineering, product, design, marketing, and whatever else needed to get done. Before becoming a founder, she worked as a software engineer at Google, a consultant at McKinsey, and Director of Product at Operator. She studied computer science and creative writing at Stanford. That range helps her judge both how well a product works and how much it matters to users.
Raphael founded Cron (YC W20), a next-generation calendar beloved for its craft, speed, and attention to detail. Notion acquired Cron in 2022, and Raphael went on to grow Notion Calendar to millions of users. He then served as Head of Design for Growth and new products.
Raphael moves fluently between design and engineering. Before Cron, he worked on the popular news reader Flipboard and the award-winning Markdown editor iA Writer. With his Swiss eye for design, he has spent his career making complex software simple. Raphael holds a BS in Computer Science from Bern University of Applied Sciences and an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Founders building new products benefit from his instinct for what matters and his insistence on craft.
Vivian and Raphael have built companies from the ground up, and they’ve already shown how much they can help other founders do the same. As General Partners, they’ll work with companies from their first weeks in the batch through the years of building that follow.
We couldn’t be more excited to have them on the team. Welcome, Vivian and Raphael!