YC adds the founders of Acely and Cron to its General Partner roster
Vivian Shen and Raphael Schaad previously advised YC founders as Visiting Partners; Garry Tan says the partnership now numbers 19, a count the public roster does not neatly reconcile.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Primary source: X
Why it matters
Shen and Schaad's promotions deepen YC's founder-led advising bench and show how the accelerator is converting batch-level alumni advisers into General Partners involved in selecting and supporting companies.
Y Combinator has welcomed Vivian Midha Shen and Raphael Schaad into its partnership, with both listed as General Partners on YC's current roster. President and CEO Garry Tan announced the appointments in a post on X on October 1st, 2026, saying the partnership had reached 19 people including himself and that every member was a YC alum and founder.
That headcount is not readily reconciled with YC's own public pages: its Partners page lists 19 General Partners, while its People page identifies Tan separately as President and CEO. Tan's description of 19 members, including himself, is therefore best treated as his count of the partnership, rather than a figure independently confirmed by the roster. His characterization of it as the largest partnership in YC's history is also his claim.
The two appointments extend a path YC has been using to bring former founders into its core partner group. Shen and Schaad were among nine alumni YC named as Visiting Partners on October 14th, 2025. YC described that role as batch-level advising alongside General Partners. The organization's subsequent announcements show other Visiting Partners moving into General Partner roles: Harshita Arora in April 2026, and Christopher Golda and Grey Baker in June. YC said General Partners help select, advise and support the companies it backs.
Shen brings experience in education and AI tutoring. She co-founded Juni Learning, an online coding and math academy for children, and later founded Acely, an AI tutoring company focused on test preparation. YC's profile says her companies reached millions of users and $50 million in total revenue; those figures are YC's account, not independently audited results. Before founding companies, Shen worked as a software engineer at Google and studied computer science at Stanford. Her move from Visiting Partner to General Partner puts that operating experience inside the group choosing and advising YC-backed startups.
Schaad founded Cron, a calendar product from YC's Winter 2020 batch that Notion acquired in 2022. At Notion, he worked on Calendar and product growth. Before Cron, he helped build Flipboard and iA Writer. The combination gives the partner group experience in product design and consumer software, as well as the education and AI products Shen built.
The pattern is a deliberate founder-to-adviser pipeline, with YC first bringing alumni into batch work and later promoting some into roles with a broader remit. YC's October 2025 announcement said Visiting Partners advise founders during a batch; its June 2026 announcement about Golda and Baker described General Partners as taking a role in selecting and supporting companies. The change expands the circle of former operators participating in that work, while preserving YC's stated preference for partners who have built companies themselves.
Tan's announcement emphasizes alumni status as the shared credential across the group. That matters for YC's model: advice comes from people who have been through its own accelerator and built companies afterward. The roster is growing through both outside hires and internal promotions from its visiting cohort. Shen's and Schaad's paths show how the temporary advising role can become a longer-term position in YC's investment and founder-support structure.