Bookface for Raycast

Search Bookface and chat with the YC Agent within Raycast.

An unofficial Raycast extension for the YC CLI. This is not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator.

You need a Bookface account to use the CLI and this extension.

What can it do?

• Ask YC Agent — ask the YC agent questions about the network, investors, fundraising, and more. Each answer shows what the agent searched to ground its response.
• Search YC — search Bookface for people, YC and non-YC companies, posts, deals, schools, employers, Startup Library articles, and Knowledge Base entries. Filter by type, toggle a sidebar preview, or export a type's full result set as CSV.
• YC Account — show the currently logged-in Bookface user.
• Log out of YC — clear your stored YC CLI credentials (with a confirmation).

Who can use it?

This extension is for YC alumni and founders with active Bookface access. It wraps the official yc CLI and uses the credentials stored at ~/.yc/credentials.json after you sign in. You will not be able to authenticate without an existing YC account.

A note on data use

Please respect the YC founder ethics policy. Scraping the alumni database and spamming YC alums is a violation of the founder ethics policy and can get you removed from YC. This extension is intended for the same use cases as Bookface itself — finding people and companies you have a legitimate reason to reach.

Setup

1. Install the yc CLI

curl -fsSL https://bookface.ycombinator.com/cli/install.sh | bash

The installer symlinks yc into ~/.local/bin/yc. If you already have a yc on your PATH it falls back to installing as ycp.

2. Log in once

yc login

This opens your browser for OAuth (with a --device flag for headless/remote shells). Tokens are stored at ~/.yc/credentials.json and refreshed automatically — the extension never touches them directly. To sign out, run yc logout.

3. Open Raycast

Run Search YC, Ask YC Agent, or YC Account. If the extension can't find the binary or you're not logged in, every command surfaces a clear empty state with the right command to copy and paste.

Preferences

Preference	Description
yc CLI Path	Optional absolute path to the yc binary. If empty, the extension searches $PATH for yc or ycp, then falls back to ~/.local/bin, /opt/homebrew/bin, and /usr/local/bin.
Verbose Logging	Logs each yc invocation, output size, and parse results to the Raycast console for diagnostics. Sensitive values are redacted. Off by default.

Set it from Raycast → Extensions → Bookface if you've installed the binary somewhere unusual.

Tips

• ⌘⇧⏎ toggles a Markdown sidebar with type-specific details for the selected result.
• ⌘D pushes a full-screen Markdown view of post bodies, company descriptions, and Startup Library articles.
• ⌘⇧. copies the Bookface URL; ⌘⇧M copies it as a Markdown link.
• With a type filter selected in Search, ⌘⇧E exports that type's full result set as CSV (⌘⇧C copies it) — useful for pulling every matching company, founder, or deal, not just the first page.
• The "Search YC" command remembers your recent searches; "Ask YC Agent" remembers your recent questions.

Troubleshooting

• "yc CLI Not Found" — install the CLI (see above), or set the yc CLI Path preference if it lives in a non-standard location.
• "Not Logged In" — run yc login (or yc login --device on remote shells), then re-run the command.
• Search errors — every failure toast includes a "Copy Error" action; paste the message into a yc issue if it persists.

Credits

Built around the YC CLI. Issues with data freshness or auth flows are best reported upstream to YC; issues with the Raycast Extension belong here.