The Exchanges

Q And then compounded with the agents who then are sort of the oracle telling you what the best tool is. And we are actually seeing some of those trends with the growth of YC companies, dev tool companies. That are doing really well because of this, of all these trends. Maybe we should talk about those, and why is that?

A I mean, one that springs to mind, it's like a, a stat, actually, a friend of ours, Yuri Sagalov, had mentioned to me a while ago. It's just like, then, if you look at, like, the number of databases being created over, like, simple database, Postgres databases over, like, the last 12 months, and the numbers just exploded, um, and that's because it's all people vibe coding and building apps, and the agents going out choosing, like, A database tool and like a knock on effect for that for YC company is Superbase has just seen like an explosion at the demand for databases, right? And the age was interesting is the agents are choosing Superbase as a default tool to like set up and host their Postgres database. Like, because if you like go out and read the documentation online, like Superbase has the best documentation is reasonable for the agents to assume that that's like the best tool to use.

AI assessment note: “a knock on effect for that for YC company is Superbase”

Q I have a question for you, which is that, you know, you've talked to a lot of companies, I assume, through the interview process that are doing crypto. What are the, the crypto companies that have stood out to you as, like, exciting for YC, and what are their characteristics?

A Yeah, you know, I mentioned a couple of them, like, Dollar App, um, Aspora, um, Sort of both in sort of like the, I would say like neobank built around building a new experience for their users with stablecoins in particular, but just more generally a better experience for users in those countries. I think a really interesting one that I've personally been involved with that I'm excited about is called Courtyard. And they started out as a sort of a collectibles marketplace. And what they, I think they were doing was, um, interesting and innovative is that they wanted to like actually verify that the collectibles were like, um, authentic. And so they would, they would actually manually verify That, like, you, the, the baseball card was what I said it was, or the collectible toy was what it said it was, and then put that onto sort of like the, the blockchain is just like, you know, immutable proof of the authenticity, and then sell that on the marketplace.

AI assessment note: “Dollar App, um, Aspora... I'm excited about is called Courtyard.”

Q to you and what encompasses the role can be quite impactful. And the only other advice I'd have is that oftentimes kind of goes back to the selling thing. People forget to sell the company in the job description. And so that should be at least 30%, maybe more of the job description is why is this a great place to work and, um, what would that involve for you?

A Often companies when they're describing themselves in their job description or even on their website, it's almost like they want to cast as wide of a net as possible. They want to be attractive to everyone. And as a result, it becomes across as very bland. It's like just the same set of values on every single job description. Um, I wish companies would actually be more opinionated at times, like, say what they will trade off. Like, hey, we value collaboration, which means you might not, like, we value that more than just autonomy, which is like one example. Um, what do you think? Is it, is it better to cast a wide net or, or should you try and be opinionated in how much?

AI assessment note: “I wish companies would actually be more opinionated at times, like, say what they will trade off.”

Q than they were on engineers. And you know, if you're coming into YC and you're interviewing and you're like, Hey, we're going to be spending more money on lawyers than engineers. Like my gut is that the YC partners are going to say, okay, like maybe you're not building in the right business here. Like really, are you as a three person team going to be able to be successful?

A Yeah, this was actually really what happened for us. A lot of those application cycles in 20, 21, 20, 22, like, We will look at it and feel like, okay, like what's the domain expertise you need to build something really good here? And it was actually like, if you're building a hardware company, you're building robots, you kind of need to have like some experience building hardware and robots. And we felt that with crypto, it was actually like, you needed to really be paying attention to the regulatory aspects of it and understand securities law. And I know if you're putting like real estate on the blockchain, you need to understand what all of the legal implications of that were. And a lot of the time we'd be in interviews and we just feel like the teams had no understanding of it all. And it was unclear how you would

AI assessment note: “Yeah, this was actually really what happened for us. A lot of those application cycles”

Q one is like how you kind of dig yourself out of The whole, let's say you've launched your app that you've been out there for a little bit of time and you still just don't have users or growth. Like, how do you know when it's time to keep tweaking and how do you know when it's time to just like call it a day and pivot into something else?

A I think that's a good question. It's one of these things that I think is more art than science. The way that I would prompt a founder that was in that situation is something isn't working, right? You're out there, you've been trying, you're pulling every lever you can think of to pull. And just nobody's biting, nobody's using your product. Which one of your assumptions was wrong, right? And that like, it doesn't mean that this is a bad idea. It doesn't mean that you need to pivot to something else necessarily, but it does mean that you've made a bad assumption and you need to figure out what that is and develop a new hypothesis about the world.

AI assessment note: “It doesn't mean that you need to pivot to something else necessarily, but”

Q finally have the tools, and now it's about entrepreneurs coming in and saying, how do we use these tools to make 10 X impact for businesses or to build new consumer experiences that were previously completely impossible because we couldn't program things on a Global stage. We couldn't move money at the speed of light, but are now possible. And how do we actually use that to create this value?

A I want to talk about stablecoins more. So like you mentioned, though, is that so far it seems to be outside of trading, like the killer use case, um, specifically within the Y Combinator community in our portfolio of companies. Obviously looking at this, some of our fastest growing companies at the moment, the AI companies definitely get lots of attention, but we have companies like Dollar App in Latin, Aspora in India. These are essentially neobank Services that are really built around stable coins and their growth rates are incredible. I'm sure you guys have seen this at Coinbase too. Let's start with this. Why have stable coins taken off in this way? And actually I'm curious as someone who's been around crypto for so long, has it surprised you? Did you think it was going to be stable coins all along?

AI assessment note: “I want to talk about stablecoins more.”