there's a lot to be said about going heads down and just shipping a good product

no blog posts, no interviews, no SF, no dinners

just talk to users, ship and repeat

YC Then & Now ⏳

I did Y Combinator in the summer of 08, in Boston, at Paul Graham's house.

My wife Upeka Bee is wrapping up YC this week, 16 years later, in San Francisco, led by Garry Tan 💥♻️ e/acc.

Watching her go through this, it’s been remarkable to see just how much YC has evolved!

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Here's Y Combinator 's playbook for hard tech companies based on this awesome conversation (highly recommend watching)

Here's the TL;DR:
-Start Small to Demonstrate Feasibility and Gain Traction
-Secure Early Commercial Validation
-Focus on Solving a Significant Problem
-Think…

Thanks Y Combinator for sharing our story! Really cool to make it on the pod and get a shutout from Garry Tan 💥♻️ e/acc, Harj Taggar and Jared Friedman

And thanks to the partners that supported us during the batch - Michael Seibel and Brad Flora

19:12 to hear about us!🚀🪨…

Exactly a year ago, I pushed the first commit for a side project I was working on with pradhit and omar. Today, we accepted a check that closes our seed round after having just finished the most thrilling life experience Y Combinator. Get after it kids.

YC has a lot of software wins but some of the biggest mega Unicorns will be in hard tech. How did this happen? How can you go zero to one slinging atoms, not just bits? New on the Lightcone

youtu.be/erDE2e69dlc?si…

As Y Combinator stresses so much — talk to your customers! I hesitated for weeks building this when Jon OBryan suggested this feature. Just 8 hours after launching, 15% of our customers are already using it!

Its funny how this plays out over and over again.
Big companies and competitors with unlimited money, large teams have a b2b product in the market for many years.
An early stage YC-startup with a 2 person team, builds a much better product in 2 months.

Mutable.ai is excited to introduce Auto Wiki v2, Auto Wiki transforms your codebase into Wikipedia-style articles. Now featuring code diagrams and the ability to use AI to revise your wiki, it’s our favorite way to to learn about new codebases and maintain up-to-date…

During YC I push Hard Tech companies to think like a software company. That means moving fast and not spending much money to prove you're making something people want. We talk about how this works surprisingly well in our latestLightcone episode:

youtu.be/erDE2e69dlc?si…

had a great birthday this year

spent it learning from Kevin Systrom and hanging with brilliant minds Y Combinator

thankful 💐

here's some YC magic:

- hit extremely obscure macOS obj-c audio issue that's core for our product tied to libraries two decades old
- spend hours getting nowhere with LLM help, or usual searches
- search on bookface just in case, two results
- find a convo from two years ago…

When you have 8 to 9 digits of annual recurring revenue, it becomes unfathomable to some tech startup infra CEOs that their core tech could get leapfrogged

But new capabilities like LLMs come online, that is exactly what is happening now

🌴We recently released a feature that embodies the way we think about AI at Sieve: The Job Tree (1/X)

How do you start a startup that's building a supersonic jet?

Blake Scholl 🛫 did, and his company Boom Supersonic just did their first flight.

Here's a breakdown of 8 hard-tech companies with crazy ambitious ideas, and how they got started.

🦊 @useInari (YC S23) surfaces customer insights and revenue-generating product opportunities from your customer data auto-magically using AI.

Spend less time manually sifting through 1000s of pieces of customer feedback and more time on building product: ycombinator.com/launches/Kpg-i…

We just reached 100,000 users, ten months after launching publicly.

Resend is now powering millions of emails sent every month with a small team of six people, and this is only the beginning.

Here's a recap of our journey so far and what's next.

resend.com/blog/what-is-n…

Congrats to the team PeerDB (YC S23) on the $3.6M seed!

PeerDB (YC S23) offers a fast and cost-effective way to move data from PostgreSQL to data warehouses and queues, enabling businesses to have real-time and reliable access to data. blog.peerdb.io/peerdb-raises-…