I look for intellectual fearlessness. I think it doesn't matter where you come from. It doesn't matter what problem we're trying to solve.That courage, that fearlessness of embracing something hard and go about it and be all in and trying to solve that in however way you you want is really a core characteristic of people who succeed. I learned this from them and I really look for young people who have that and then that as a CEO at World Labs in my hiring I look for that quality. ...

When we started out, we didn't seem like we were going to be successful at all. OpenAI had a billion dollars and like all of these all of this star power and we had seven co-founders in co like trying to build something and we didn't know if we were necessarily going to make a product or what the products would look like. One thing that's interesting to look at is just that humanity is on track for like the largest infrastructure buildout of all time.Tell us about the early days of anthropic. So you had a g ...

[Music] At YC, we work with a ton of founders who are navigating the B2B sales process for the very first time. And I often notice some very common and easily avoidable mistakes that I want to talk about today. So, I'm going to describe the typical progression that a B2B founder goes through.normally starting with something like a a really poorly defined and overly long unpaid design partnership uh all the way through to the like the pro move which is a rapid well-defined tightlyun sales process that result ...

What do people do who are successful. They take an over constrained problem and figure out how to unconstrain it. And that magical sort of three things right which is bringing clarity, creating energy and driving success by solving over constrained problems is what I think leadership is about.But leadership is not about something that you do later in life. If you do it every step of the way,. ...

Figma's Evolution and Strategy - Figma has grown to 1,700 people and eight products, doubling its product lineup recently [3] - Figma emphasizes launching products quickly to gather user feedback, advocating for a one to three-month cadence for product releases [23][26] - Figma identifies user behaviors within Figma Design and then creates separate products to address those needs, such as FigJam, Slides, Draw, Buzz, Sites and Make [46][47][48][51] Design and AI - The design industry is experiencing exponential growth, driven by the increasing importance of design as a differentiator in software development [40][41] - Figma views AI as blurring the lines between design and development, empowering generalist behavior and accelerating prototyping [52][55] - Figma believes the current AI user interface, often based on chat boxes, is similar to the MS DOS era, suggesting significant evolution is expected in the next decade [57] Founder Insights and Advice - Designers are encouraged to step into founder roles, as design becomes a key differentiator [68][69] - Founders should give themselves time to explore and iterate, as early pivots can be crucial for success [13] - Seeking feedback and even rejection is valuable for product development, providing essential data for improvement [36][38]

your inherent ability already is like one part of the ven diagram and then the other part is just something weird. It's literally just like where does your interest come from. Like I'm really taken by to what degree both open AAI and SpaceX for instance were you know the genesis came from like interest and a hunch and just like not really any commercial intent and yet coming out the other side that was enough to attract the smartest people in the world, attract capital and then really create the most enduri ...

The US government spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on consulting. As you might imagine, this isn't the most efficient or innovative part of our economy. But the last couple years, we believe that there are a few big reasons that this will change.Most importantly, today there is political pressure to cut wasteful consulting and spending. Every part of the government now runs on software. This software is usually customuilt by companies like Deote or Accenture.And anyone who used the software kno ...

Market Overview - Salesforce and ServiceNow are major enterprise software vendors, each generating over $10 billion in annual revenue and possessing a market capitalization exceeding $200 billion [1] - Both companies were founded approximately 25 years ago, pioneering cloud-native CRM and ITSM systems respectively [1] Strategic Opportunity - The rise of SaaS provided an opportunity to create products that were 10 times better than existing solutions [2] - Incumbents struggled to adapt to cloud computing, giving startups a competitive advantage [2][3] - AI presents a similar opportunity for new companies to develop AI-native enterprise software [3] Technological Shift - Future enterprise software systems will integrate AI to enhance employee productivity and accuracy [4] - Incumbents may face challenges in rebuilding their products around AI, creating opportunities for startups [4]

AI agents are evolving from singlethreaded loops into distributed workflows that fan out many sub aent calls in a single run. These multi-agent systems are useful for everything from long-running workflows to agentic map produce jobs where hundreds of thousands of sub aents apply human level judgment to filter and search through large amounts of data in parallel. These systems are difficult to build.They require solving traditional distributed systems problems to ensure high throughput and reliability while ...

Thanks to new AI tools, we believe it's now possible for small high agency teams, even solo founders, to build multi-billion dollar companies with as little as just $500,000 in funding from YC. 15 years ago, cloud computing came along and eliminated the need for spending tons of money on physical server infrastructure, making it easier to build a big company with way less capital. This is happening again right now with new AI tools that make it easier for ambitious founders to scale with far fewer people.Th ...