The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 635 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Altman: Open network access is among the top secrets of YC's success
“This idea that we're available and we're open I think this was in the two or three most important secrets of YC. This was something that we did that was really different. Other people hadn't done it before.”
Altman: Overstretched VCs no longer mentor founders one-on-one on culture
“The model used to be that you would go through YC, And then you get a board member who would only take, you know, eight boards and would spend a couple days a month with you and do things like help you build the culture as the company scales, but just the dyna…”
Altman: YC faced zero competition investing in early hard tech startups
“We were able to just go pick out in the world the best quantum computing company, the best self-driving company, Which recently got acquired by GM. The best nuclear fusion company, the best synthetic biology company, just all the way down the list. And no one …”
Altman: YC prevented founders from making Silicon Valley's biggest premature scaling errors
“We try to beat that idea out of people during YC and thus, most of the people, mistakes in Silicon Valley of that sort in the last decade have not been ours.”
Altman: YC's top-performing startups consistently grant heavy employee equity
“But we've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies, and the ones where the investors do the best, end up giving a lot of stock out to employees year after year after year.”
Livingston: YC proved funding top MIT and Harvard hackers does not guarantee success
“Remember when we started Y Combinator, our hypothesis was, oh, we'll just fund all the best hackers from MIT and Harvard, and they'll turn out to be great startup founders. That is not true. That is absolutely not true.”
Livingston: Determination matters more than intelligence or school success for founders
“If I had to say the most important traits of the most successful founders, I've already mentioned determination. That is by far the most important quality. More than intelligence. More than previous success, you know, in school.”
Paul Graham: Long corporate tenure is a negative signal on founder applications
“If we've, if we were looking at someone, someone's application, and they worked for a long time for a large company, That's actually bad to us, because like, the best startup founders probably could not stand that.”
Koomen: YC runs a nightly AI agent to review employee interactions
“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.”
Hu: Google Gemini adoption in YC batch rose to around 23%
“I think last year was probably single digit percent, or even like two, three percent, and, ah, now for winter 26 is about 23%.”
Friedman: Vast majority of founder AI use cases are not coding
“The vast majority of the use cases people are using it for though is not coding.”
Extreme technical difficulty makes startup ideas better by deterring competitors
“If something is really hard,
On the technical side, I mean, I think that's an even better idea.
Like nobody else is going to try, right?
If it's hard, like the bar is so high, nobody tries, and nobody does it.
If you have the courage to actually do it, if you …”
McGrew: The FDE model is doing things that don't scale, at scale
“Well, that's the advice that you give to an early stage founder, and the FDE model effectively is doing things that don't scale at scale.”
Tan: 5-to-10-person AI startups are hitting $10M–$12M in net revenue
“The really big difference today is that the very best companies that we get to see day to day, they're like, I don't know, five people, 10 people I think, you know, each of us on stage and all of the YC partners are sort of collecting incredible startups that …”
Koomen: Writing prompts will become part of daily workflow for many
“Some of the work that we've done at YC, building agents to automate some of the repetitive work that we and our teammates do on a regular basis, actually suggests to me that writing prompts is going to be part of the day-to-day flow for a lot of people.”
Koomen: Gemini is incredible, but Gmail's UI makes it frustrating to use
“Gemini is amazing. The model itself is absolutely incredible. We've been using it a lot at YC to automate our own work. I'm so impressed with what they built. But a lot of that power I think is hidden behind a UI that makes it really frustrating to use.”
Tom Blomfield says AI coding in YC startups surged to 25%
“Last batch, that number was 25% of companies. So they use these tools for most of their code. Two batches ago, it was approximately zero percent.”
Dave Lieb says up to half of YC startups primarily use AI
“I would say maybe like a third to a half of the companies would say that they pretty much primarily write code in this style.”
Palicha: Radical candor is rare in the Indian startup ecosystem
“The push basically came from a lot of just like radical candor, right? And I think that you don't really find a lot of that, you know, candidly in, in India so far, which is why obviously YC was as valuable as it was”
Tan: Vibe coding is not a fad; it is here to stay
“I mean, I think our sense right now is this isn't a fad. This isn't going away. This is actually the dominant way to code. And if you're not doing it, like you might just be left behind. This is just here to stay. And, you know, vibe coding is not a fad.”
Friedman: 25% of YC founders report over 95% AI-generated codebases
“One quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated”
Koomen: Moving Startups Post-YC to Cheaper Cities Is a Mistake
“I'll give one example of a mistake that I see founders making today, where I think they're being penny wise and found foolish, is moving their startup after YC to a city where it's much cheaper to live and much cheaper to hire.”
74% of YC dev tool startups have exclusively technical co-founders
“74% of YC DevTool companies had only tech co-founders, and that's compared to 45% for all of the other companies.”
Taggar: 15% of the YC batch adopted OpenAI's o1 before public release
“It seems like, or, 15% of the batch are already using O-one, even though it's not, like, fully available yet.”
Friedman: 50% of YC startups use Cursor while only 12% use GitHub Copilot
“Yeah, we surveyed the summer 24 founders, and half the batch is using Cursor, compared to only 12% that's using GitHub Copilot.”
Tan: $50M ARR YC company automated 60% of support to reach profitability
“They knew that they needed to raise more money, but in the year since, they automated about 60% of their customer support tickets. And they went from something that needed to raise another round imminently to something that was totally cash flow break even whi…”
Taggar: Claude jumped from 5% to 25% market share in YC startups
“And some of the stuff that really stood out is Claude has, even just in six months, from the winter batch to the summer batch, has gone from, like, five percent developer market share to, like, 25%.”
Taggar: Failed co-founder relationships are YC's top cause of startup failure
“Failed co-founder relationships is really the number one reason we see startups fail here at Y Combinator.”
Taggar: YC is skeptical of co-founder pairings lacking common ground
“The kinds of teams we don't get so excited about are where the co-founders would never have met each other in sort of any conceivable universe. It's where there's a huge age difference, or they don't have any sort of mutual interest, or they just doesn't seem …”
Taggar: Co-founders should default to an equal equity split
“You will have to decide on what the equity split will be, and my default advice here would be you should split the equity equally between yourselves, and the reason is if this startup is successful, you will end up working on it for the next 10 years or more, …”
Seibel: Many Founders Pitch Contrived Views That Sound Like Investors
“You start having conversation with the founder, and you'll actually feel like you're talking to an investor, to a VC. And you're like, but what about your passion? Like, what, what's your opinion? Like, what do you care about? And it's all kind of like, contri…”
Seibel: Over-Analyzing Markets and Comps Causes Early-Stage Investment Mistakes
“Well, and I think what's interesting is that when we try to be smarter, we make mistakes. When we try to be smart about markets, or when we try to be smart about comps, We make mistakes because, one, we haven't studied those markets closely, and two, because s…”
Caldwell: Market Trend Forecasting Is Flawed for Decade-Long Startup Horizons
“When we make an investment, often it does not become a big company for at least 10 years. And so, if you're trying to do market analysis and market trends for an investment that won't become big for a decade later, it's kind of flawed analysis versus if you're…”
Caldwell: Later-stage VC is about finding traction, not predicting unproven winners
“What do I think great investors do, especially later stage than what Y Combinator is, it's they find companies that have product market fit that are taking off, that have incredible traction, and they try to find them and invest in them, and that's the job.”
Caldwell: Startup classes teach investor analysis instead of zero-to-one execution
“Startup classes. And they tend to be taught by non-founders. They tend to be taught by investors. And a lot of what you learn is about how to pitch, how to do market analysis, how to identify ideas via market trends.”
Founders with average skills but high conviction often succeed
“Eh, not the best programmer, not the best salesperson, not the best fundraiser, but very high conviction and able to focus their energy one direction in a superhuman way. Those people tend to succeed.”
Taggar: 'ChatGPT wrapper' meme benefited YC by filtering out trend-chasing founders
“Going back to like the chat GBT rapper meme again, I actually think that was great for YC. Because it meant we only got the people who are like tune, who could tune that out. And we're just like, hey, like either I'm just so interested in this technology, I do…”
Seibel: Aspiring non-technical founders should work at a startup first
“Sometimes the number one thing to do if you're in this position is to not start the company right now. Is to go get a job at a startup. Is to go change the people you know. And What's so interesting is that, like, sometimes taking that step sideways is the eas…”
Seibel: Non-technical founders assessing engineers causes compounding team degradation
“And I think the even scarier thing about this is that, like, when you start with a team of business people assessing engineers, and they are naturally gonna start by hiring worse engineers, all of your future engineers are high negative effects.”
Caldwell: DoorDash and Airbnb would have failed using outsourced dev shops
“But I think if you just look at the facts of the companies we funded, like literally DoorDash or literally Airbnb or any of these folks, they lived and died by their speed of shipping software. And if they, what they did was buy white label software or have so…”
Caldwell warns having equal equity means sharing blame when startups fail.
“If you have equal equity with someone and you have a seat at the table in decision making, just because it's not working doesn't mean you get the right to blame other people.”
Caldwell: Most founders in recent YC batches are repeat applicants
“And the fact is, most of the folks in the most recent YC batches are not first-time applicants. There's some folks that applied five times, six times, seven times.”
Caldwell: YC is designed to fund strangers without warm intros or decks
“The entire YC model was built to not require networking. We don't want warm intros. We don't want pitch decks. We don't want to hop on a quick call. That is not how YC works in our funding decisions. We built a system that is optimized for funding complete str…”
Caldwell: Technical founding teams have 5x higher odds of a YC interview
“So if there is a team that's applying where at least one of the founders is at a skill set level to be hired into a technical role at a top YC company, they have five X better odds than teams that don't.”
Caldwell: YC accepts startups with $500K ARR or $1M+ raised
“We have folks that get into YC that have, I don't know, half a million dollars in annual recurring revenue. Also a common one here these days is, oh, I'm too far along because I've already raised some money. We have folks that apply and get accepted to YC that…”
Hiring engineers at the MVP stage slows launches and blocks insights
“It's gonna actually slow you down in terms of launching quickly, because if you're hiring from a pool of people and engineers that you don't know, it takes over a month or more to find someone good, and it's hard to find people at this stage where it's very ne…”
Flora: Founders using SAFEs retain more control than ever in history
“Founders have had more, have more control over their companies today than ever in the history of startups. And why is this? It's because when you raise with safes, you don't give up any board seats. All right. There's no board seat nonsense in safes. After you…”