Y Combinator Extractor

An Apify actor for scraping structured data from Y Combinator's platforms, including job listings, company profiles, and news.

Overview

This actor extracts data from several sections of Y Combinator's ecosystem: Hacker News, company directories, founder profiles, launch announcements, job boards, and the resource library. It's designed for lead generation, market research, and job searching.

Note: Accessing job listings requires an authenticated session cookie.

Key Features

• Multi-Source Scraping: Extracts data from:
  • News (Hacker News)
  • Companies
  • Founders
  • Launches
  • Jobs (requires authentication)
  • Library (resources and posts)
• Structured Output: Returns clean, parsed data in JSON format.
• Configurable Search: Allows filtering and targeting specific search queries or listing types.

How to Use

Run the actor on Apify with the required input configuration. For most searches (News, Companies, etc.), no authentication is needed.

Authentication for Job Search

To scrape Jobs, you must provide a session cookie from a logged-in browser session on workatastartup.com or ycombinator.com.

Steps to obtain the cookie (Google Chrome):

1. Log in to www.workatastartup.com.
2. Open Developer Tools (Ctrl+Shift+I or Cmd+Opt+I).
3. Go to the Application tab.
4. In the left panel, navigate to: Storage → Cookies → https://www.workatastartup.com.
5. Find the cookie named _sso.key.
6. Copy its Value and paste it into the actor's input field for the cookie.

Input / Output

Input Configuration

Configure the actor run via a JSON input object. Key parameters include:

• searchType: The category to scrape (e.g., "jobs", "companies", "news").
• searchQuery: (Optional) Keywords to filter results.
• maxItems: (Optional) Limit the number of results.
• cookie: The _sso.key cookie value required for job searches.

Example Input (for Jobs):

{
  "searchType": "jobs",
  "searchQuery": "software engineer",
  "maxItems": 50,
  "cookie": "your_copied_sso.key_value_here"
}

Output

The actor outputs a dataset of items, each representing a scraped entity (e.g., a job posting, company profile). The data structure varies by searchType but typically includes titles, URLs, descriptions, metadata, and timestamps.

Example Output Item (Job):

{
  "title": "Senior Backend Engineer",
  "company": "Example Startup",
  "url": "https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/12345",
  "description": "Job description text...",
  "location": "Remote",
  "postedDate": "2023-10-26"
}

Support

For issues or feature suggestions, you can reach out via the Apify actor issue page.