Y Combinator

“Now we're at the point where like every company seems reasonable. Because it's all passed through 87 AIs at this point before you see it. And so it's not like the deck, it's like all this stuff seems reasonable.”

“For most of the Canadian startups that go to places like Y Combinator, they come from the University of Waterloo.”

“Rents in the mediocre apartments just in dogpatch are 10,000 dollars a month now. Mediocre apartments down the street from YC, the Avalon.”

“So we did go through YC and we raised about a million and change, but that's all the primary capital we've ever taken.”

“YC measured By like traditional metrics and market cap created or whatever is one of the hand, would be one of the handful of most valuable tech companies.”

“So if we, you know, ran the clock back to 2000 four and then projected technology forward to 2016 but not anything else about the shape of Startup ecosystem, what it meant to be an entrepreneur, how capital flowed, all of the, you know, who got to run companie…”

“When rippling is hoovered up 30, and owners hoovered up 20, and Revolut's hoovered up 10, you just, that strategy worked three years ago. Like, it's too late. Like, everyone is just sitting there hitting refresh, hoping these smart YC companies fail so they ca…”

“If you look at the YC splits right now when I was working with YC when I was at AWS compared to now, the ratio of B to B versus B to C has skyrocketed. Like there's just not as many B to C companies in these incubators getting built.”

“Listening to what YC is asking for, assume that they are already thinking, 18 months out.”

“And then you shouldn't follow what the crowd is saying, right? Like, at that moment, people said the web was dead, but that was sort of the perfect time to work on web and social and things like that and, you know, I didn't do it.”

“And then I actually had to go into Claude and I said, reduce this by 90%. Reduce the strength and intensity of this prompt by 90%. And then I open sourced that. Cause some of it's like, you gotta come and, you know, do YC.”

“And so the whole world, like all business, all things that people rely on, government especially is basically still built on a world that is predicated by human beings, limited human beings that can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head.”

“Like you could release something in a day or two that would have taken like six months. And if you could like multiply that out across, like the thing is like probably an org like Microsoft can't. But, like, a startup can. And every startup must.”

“There's a, API company that we funded called Clawvisor, and they released a bug report endpoint that is not for humans to use. It's for agents who use their software to use”

“Y Combinator, I think is, is really like a national treasure. It's an international treasure because there's so many international founders that come to build their companies in the US. Whether a company gets in or not, it's a great forcing function to tighten…”

“He got accepted into Y Combinator when he was 17 years old. And 1718, he raised a seven million round while being a single employee in his company.”

“We wanted to build like, an AI agent, funnily enough, for doc, for, to help people, like, get medical care. And it was, like, the writing, it was a great example of an idea that I think will ultimately exist. Like, I think we're even seeing it now. Like, AI ag…”

“What took three months to build at the time that we, each company built over the whole YC startup, could now be done with, like, in, like, seven minutes by a coding agent”

“One of the things we're seeing at YC now is that number was, you know, maybe five or 10% for many years, and then now we're getting to 15, 20, 25%”

“Yes, we applied. We got an interview. I've got I've got a rejection email from Paul Graham still, you know.”

“Their bio fund did our seed round right out of YC, and I don't think they did the TAM calculation. They were like, oh, this sounds interesting, and then they did the round. It was a small round, it was like, 1.65 million.”

“I tried to copy Y Combinator and start our own version in India. It's called Foundry. We give about 20, 25 kids half a million dollars each every, ah, every like six months, and they live in a house and try to build consumer companies together.”

“The carry premiums that they charge are incredible too. People don't know or discuss that enough. Unprecedented. 40, 50% in cases.”

“I think some of them have PhDs you know, in whatever sector they are pursuing, but a lot of them, I would say actually for us, they are more operators from the industry and fewer PhDs. They have a lived experience in that sector right? And from there, they're …”

“So, 60% of YC companies now choose Supabase.”

“You probably don't have a whole lot of consumer companies coming through right now.”

“I thought at the time, again, to de-risk things, I thought, I'm going to build a, the most Y Combinator friendly team and apply for YC and that will help from a DevTool point of view. I think that's the pitch that actually convinced him he really wanted to go …”

“If you can keep the best people it was at YC yesterday and so on was saying, should I take someone who's high agency or should I take someone who's high performance? And like, it's very clear to me. It's both. Like, you just don't compromise on, on any of thos…”

“They really want you to come to SAF and be based here and built here, and that is the right approach, I think, for 99.9% of the companies.”

“It wasn't obvious who was great. It was obvious who was terrible, though, and I think if you can eliminate the bottom half, like, you're doing pretty well inside of a YC batch.”

“We've got about like, 12% of the YC batch using Ploy”

“Interestingly, like we're sort of entering this other moment where, because ploy exists, you know, you might have someone who's like, 200 IQ you know, nearly nonverbal, like, codexes. They're able to make some sort of hardware, software that literally no one e…”

“I think the best companies that I've met in YC, they are on the right side of model development. And what these models need is with a little bit of steering, with a lot of data, there's just so much alpha that you can derive.”

“Brex has gone deeper on AI than almost any enterprise company we know.”

“If we found a way to experiment with these things, and granted, we don't do the most aggressive things with this stuff yet. We don't use it on like, you know, customer data to the degree that we want one day to do. And there's boundaries to how we do it. I don…”

“There's so many other examples of being over here of like meeting our series A investor while we're doing YC at like an Irish meetup event in San Francisco.”

“When we graduated from Y Combinator on the last day, they just put up, like, all the data behind, like, companies who stay in SF and companies that leave SF. Even if you go to New York, like, it just, like, the chances of success are just so much higher if you…”

“The night before demo day at YC. That would have been March, 25.”

“I think that people blaming like, you know, YC or whatever for some of their companies being frauds is probably not like directionally correct because like internally it's not like any venture fund really wants to like invest in a fraud and people that are lik…”

“It was probably Jared Friedman from YC. Yeah. There's been times where he was our only believer, you know, everyone else is a doubter, is a naysayer. But Jared, Jared's always been there for us.”

“For the last few years since ChatGPT, YC has been funding mainly AI companies”

“We run on our own software and all of that software sits on one Postgres database that has everything that's important to YC's world in it.”

“It didn't just make it easier to answer questions. It dramatically increased the number of questions that we would ask and dramatically increased the scale and complexity of the questions that we would dare to ask.”

“I think one of the big problems that I don't think has been solved well yet by anybody is the multiplayer harness, right? It's enabling that kind of superpower, but on a team or an organizational level.”

“And we had like 20 tools at the beginning, including this magical ability to query our SQL database. But over time, Teams have added more and more tools. Every time we kind of come upon some piece of work at YC that we think could be improved with an agent, we…”

“We have this general agent that every night will go, And read through all of the agent conversations that employees have had, and look for things that could have done better, and pieces of context that if it had, up front, it would have done more efficiently.”

“One of the cool things that happened in the last month or two was that a couple of the other partners took a meeting that they had with a group office hours they had with a bunch of the companies in the spring batch and just went through and had every founder …”

“How do you build super intelligence inside a company? You do that on everything you do. And it's not more complicated than that. Like, you literally just compose everything that you do, and any given thing that any given person can do, you combine that in aggr…”

“By default, the agent conversation is actually globally view viewable by any full-time employee at YC.”

“The best AI software that I've used, whether it's inside of YC or tools that others have built, tend to be very small, and just add kind of the smallest amount of code ahead of time that you need in order to let the model shine. And you can build an awful lot …”

“Sam Altman just offered two million dollars In open AI tokens to every YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity.”

“I did a talk at Y Combinator, you know, the startup incubator yesterday, and I asked people to raise their hands, you know, everyone, everyone's using QuadCode, and I asked them, You know, raise your hand if a hundred percent of your code is written using quad…”

“The problem with any accelerator, not speaking specifically about YC, is you're competing for attention with all the other companies in the accelerator. If you're the top of the accelerator, Then that's incredible. You're the king made or queen made company. B…”

“YC now has a lot of data about this, and the startups that go home after YC don't do as well as the ones that stay. Startups that go home back, startups that go back home after YC are only about half as likely to become unicorns”

“It was 13 years of not coding and then suddenly, boom, I'm doing about 400 X the amount of work that I was that year. The last time I was even sort of like two thirds of the time writing code.”

“One of the key maxims for YC is You know, how do you find good startup ideas, live in the future and build what's missing? Right. And so this is a profound version of that where all you have to do is commit your brain to look at, you know, spending 500 dollars…”

“And then if you can token max, it's like, I mean, you can buy millions of years of consciousness of machine consciousness. Now I can be a time billionaire. It's not, you know, my own time. It's the time of a machine, like doing work for me and like the human e…”

“What Marty from Pylon had in his blurb was he had founders reach out to VCs and say something like, hey, have you met Pylon yet? I know Marty. He's a great founder. They're in YC now. If you haven't met them yet, let me know and I can try to get you in.”

“Paul Graham made an exception to let me in early YCometer. He believed in me. I was an engineer, and he almost never funded non-engineers. He thought the idea was not a good idea, actually. He said, people are actually doing this? I go, yes. He goes, what's wr…”

“I predict if it sticks, the shorthand version of the seed stages will be, does this conform to the Y Combinator revenue guidelines, right?”