Jessica Livingston
American businesswoman and writer
Jessica Livingston (born 1971) is an American investor, writer, and podcaster. She is best known for being a founding partner of the seed stage venture firm Y Combinator.
Early life and education
Livingston was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and later relocated to the Boston area, raised in large part by her father and grandmother. In 1989, she graduated from Phillips Academy. Later, she received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in English from Bucknell University.
Career
After college, Livingston pursued an array of jobs, including work at Fidelity, the Food & Wine magazine, an automotive consulting firm, and a wedding planning service. Later, she served as vice president of marketing at Adams Harkness Financial Group, an investment bank.
Livingston met Paul Graham, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell (the co-founders of dot-com company Viaweb) at a party in Cambridge. They discussed creating a startup incubator, and in 2005 the four co-founded Y Combinator (YC). In the early days of YC, Livingston and Graham hosted weekly meals for their founders at their home near Cambridge.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jessica Livingston” as american businesswoman and writer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american businesswoman and writer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4261025. VIAF identifies the subject as 265265888. The Library of Congress control number is no2007015773. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 1989 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jessica Livingston” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.