A complementary discovery path for startup job-seekers: pull a public VC portfolio company list and probe each company's ATS for openings, feeding results into the same pipeline as tracked companies in portals.yml.

What this does

scan-ats-full.mjs normally discovers companies by walking public ATS directories (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday). The seeds/ layer adds a high-signal starting point for startup roles: rather than waiting for companies to appear in ATS directories, we seed the universe from well-known VC portfolios — giving you instant coverage of hundreds of YC/a16z-backed companies.

Flow:

VC portfolio API/page
    ↓ seeds/vc-portfolios.mjs
SeedCompany[]
    ↓ toPortalEntry()
PortalEntry (careers_url set to best-guess ATS URL)
    ↓ provider.detect() (same as portals.yml companies)
ATS provider fetches jobs
    ↓ title_filter / location_filter / dedup
data/pipeline.md

Usage

Via scan-ats-full.mjs (recommended)

# Seed from Y Combinator portfolio, last 7 days
node scan-ats-full.mjs --seeds yc --since 7

# Seed from both YC and a16z, dry-run preview
node scan-ats-full.mjs --seeds yc,a16z --dry-run

# Combine seeds + regular ATS sources
node scan-ats-full.mjs --seeds yc --ats greenhouse,lever --since 5

# npm shortcuts
npm run scan:seeds   # yc + a16z
npm run scan:yc      # YC only

Programmatic

import { fetchYCCompanies, fetchA16zCompanies, toPortalEntry, SEED_SOURCES } from './seeds/vc-portfolios.mjs';

// Fetch YC companies
const companies = await fetchYCCompanies();
console.log(companies[0]);
// → { name: 'Stripe', slug: 'stripe', url: 'https://stripe.com', source: 'yc', batch: 'W11' }

// Convert to a PortalEntry for ATS provider.detect()
const entry = toPortalEntry(companies[0]);
// → { name: 'Stripe', careers_url: 'https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/stripe', source: 'yc' }

// Using the registry
for (const [id, source] of Object.entries(SEED_SOURCES)) {
  const companies = await source.fetch();
  console.log(`${source.label}: ${companies.length} companies`);
}

Data sources

Source	URL	Format	Auth
Y Combinator	`https://api.ycombinator.com/v0.1/companies`	JSON API	None
a16z	`https://a16z.com/portfolio/`	Public HTML page	None

YC: Fetches up to 3 pages × 1000 companies. Covers all public YC batches.
a16z: Parses the public portfolio page. Falls back gracefully if the page structure changes.

Security

All slugs are validated against SLUG_RE = /^[A-Za-z0-9._-]+$/ before any URL interpolation — consistent with the guard in scan-ats-full.mjs.
Constructed ATS URLs go through the existing entryOnHost() SSRF guard before reaching any provider.
No authentication tokens, no headless browser, no LLM API calls.

Adding more VC portfolios

Add a parseXyzPayload(payload) pure function (no network — testable with inline fixtures).
Add a fetchXyzCompanies(opts?) async function that calls the public endpoint and returns SeedCompany[].
Register it in SEED_SOURCES:

export const SEED_SOURCES = {
  yc: { fetch: fetchYCCompanies, label: 'Y Combinator Portfolio' },
  a16z: { fetch: fetchA16zCompanies, label: 'Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Portfolio' },
  // Add yours:
  sequoia: { fetch: fetchSequoiaCompanies, label: 'Sequoia Portfolio' },
};

Add test cases in test-all.mjs covering your parseXyzPayload() function.

Prior art

The VC-portfolio seeding approach is inspired by adityachaudhary99/job-hunt (02-seeds/fetch_yc.py, fetch_a16z.py), which was the original companion reference cited in issue #1370.

README.md Unescape Escape

seeds/ — VC Portfolio Seed Fetchers