James Evans is a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and the co-founder and former CEO of Command AI (YC S20), a user-assistance platform he built with Richard Freling and Vinay Ayyala and sold to Amplitude in October 2024 for north of $45 million. A Princeton CS graduate who detoured through private equity at Bain Capital before going all-in on startups, Evans scaled Command AI to 25 million end-users across hundreds of enterprise clients before the acquisition. Now advising the next wave of YC founders, he brings rare firsthand experience from both sides of the table - founder and investor.
Matt Riley co-founded Swiftype (YC W12) in 2012, built it into a leading search-as-a-service platform, and sold it to Elastic in 2017. He then spent nearly eight years at Elastic as GVP & GM of Search, overseeing product, engineering, design, and developer relations for one of the world's most widely used search platforms. In late 2025, he returned to Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner - advising the next generation of founders using hard-won lessons from the full founder arc: zero to startup, startup to acquisition, acquisition to enterprise scale.