yc-reader

This skill is a read-only research helper for Y Combinator company and ecosystem data, backed by the unofficial open-source yc-oss API (a static JSON dataset sourced from YC's Algolia index and refreshed daily via GitHub Actions). It solves the problem of quickly researching YC-backed startups, batches, industries, tags, hiring status, and diversity data without any authentication or write access, since the API only serves static JSON files.

The workflow is straightforward and safe: verify that curl and jq are available (with install hints if jq is missing), match the user's request to the right endpoint (meta.json for stats, companies/all.json, top.json, hiring.json, nonprofit.json, diversity files, per-batch and per-company files, industry and tag files), then fetch and filter with curl and jq. It documents batch and industry naming conventions, a set of common jq filter recipes, guidance to avoid the large all-companies endpoint when a narrower one exists, presentation tips for research output, and a diagnostics table for 404s, empty arrays, and network errors. All operations are simple HTTP GETs against a public GitHub Pages host followed by local JSON filtering.

Target users are founders, investors, analysts, and researchers doing startup and venture research, market intelligence, or portfolio analysis. Typical use cases include finding companies in a batch or industry, identifying which YC companies are hiring, exploring top companies, searching by tag such as AI or developer-tools, and computing aggregate statistics across the dataset.