Raphael Schaad Joins YC as General Partner

Raphael Schaad, who founded the calendar startup Cron, is now a General Partner at Y Combinator (ycombinator.com), the accelerator said in a blog post. He joins the general partnership at the same time as Vivian Midha Shen, founder of Juni Learning and Acely.

Schaad went through YC in the Winter 2020 batch as founder and CEO of Cron (cron.com), a calendar app known among designers and power users for its polish. Notion bought the company in 2022. Afterward, Schaad scaled the product, renamed Notion Calendar, to millions of users and led design for Notion's growth and new product work.

Before Cron, he worked on the early versions of Flipboard and the writing app iA Writer. YC describes him as a Swiss designer and an engineer trained at MIT, and both sides of that background shaped Cron's reputation as a product built with unusual attention to detail.

The general partner role follows a stint as a Visiting Partner. Schaad was one of nine YC alumni the accelerator brought on in that role last year. During that time he also appeared in YC's public design reviews, including a session with General Partner Aaron Epstein that critiqued AI agents, adaptive interfaces, and voice products.

Shen, the other new General Partner, co-founded Juni Learning in YC's Winter 2018 batch to teach kids coding and math. She later started Acely, an AI tutor for college prep. Like every current YC partner, both came to the firm as founders first.