Tim Brady

Tim Brady was Yahoo!'s first employee, joining the two founders Jerry Yang and David Filo in February 1995. He wrote the business plan that attracted Yahoo's first venture financing from Sequoia Capital and served as the company's Chief Product Officer for roughly eight years, helping build Yahoo! into one of the internet's most recognizable brands before departing around 2003. He earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University — where he met Jerry Yang — and attended Harvard Business School, leaving during his second year (in late 1995) at the urging of Sequoia's Mike Moritz to join Yahoo full-time. Earlier in his career he also spent three years at Motorola in Tokyo.

After Yahoo, Brady moved into education and social impact. He served as CEO of QuestBridge, a nonprofit dedicated to helping high-achieving, low-income students attend the nation's most selective colleges. In 2011 he co-founded Imagine K12 with Geoff Ralston, an accelerator focused exclusively on education-technology startups, where he spent about six years as Managing Partner. Imagine K12 was eventually folded into Y Combinator.

Brady joined Y Combinator as a partner (Group Partner) in 2016 and spent roughly six years there working directly with founders across YC batches, leaving in April 2022. During and after his YC tenure he has remained an active angel investor. In 2024, SBP (formerly the St. Bernard Project), a national disaster-resilience and recovery nonprofit where he and his family had long been volunteers and where he sat on the board, appointed him Interim CEO following the transition of its co-founders into Founder Emeritus roles. He also serves or has served on the boards of ClassDojo, QuestBridge, and SBP.

• Invests primarily at pre-seed and seed, with typical checks around $150K, often alongside other YC partners and investors such as Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell, and Harj Taggar.
• Bets on teams over ideas: "People's initial ideas are not 100% right. It's going to change" — what matters is whether founders can adapt and learn.
• Prizes founder cohesion: "Founding a company is as hard, if not harder, than getting married." Teams without a strong prior relationship tend to break under stress.
• Deep EdTech conviction rooted in Imagine K12 and QuestBridge, but invests as a generalist across software, fintech, and consumer.
• Values capital discipline: "Don't raise more money than you need because then you'll be pushed to go faster than you'll be able to" — he sees frugality as a driver of innovation.
• Open to backing others' ideas without needing credit: "That's a great idea. It's just getting started. Count me in."