Traveling today and noticed that each page of the U.S. passport has a quote at the top. Whoever picked them did a great job. This one’s my favorite: “For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man.” Happy Fourth!

what surprised me most about yc was how many wildly successful alums come back for their next startup we had the founder of cruise in our batch since then the founders of zapier, webflow, firebase, circle medical, etc have all returned these founders could raise enormous rounds on pedigree alone i even met someone who had been a yc partner and still came back with a startup they all had plenty of other options yet they still chose yc

Amazing news. Christopher @Golda is one of the best angel investors I know. He was a great friend, sounding board and collaborator to me over all my years of running @WayfinderVC and founders are lucky to work with him at YC.

Today, we're launching Aside, the AI browser you’ve waited for. ⋅ Crafted in every detail: vertical tabs and Liquid Glass ⋅ SOTA on agentic browsing benchmarks: outperforms Claude Fable ⋅ Full privacy: Everything runs in local and encrypted ⋅ You can use Claude or ChatGPT subscription The first AI browser built to do real work for you. aside.com

I was 37 when I started YC. It changed my company and my life. I’m sharing that because a lot of founders quietly think they missed their window. Too old, too settled, should’ve done it at 25. You haven’t missed it. The experience you think makes you late is often what lets you build.

At Demo Day, YC founders set their own valuation. Investors always grumble it's too high... but watch how rarely they counter with a number of their own. Don't negotiate against yourself! Ask them to make an offer at a price they can commit to. "Too expensive" costs nothing; an offer is the only signal that means anything.

Introducing Magnitude. It's a coding agent that runs entirely on open models. It costs 60% less than Claude Code with no drop in performance. Try it now: npm i -g @magnitudedev/cli Here's how it works 👇

Harshita Arora was 17 when she cofounded AtoB and got into YC. I was 27 when I cofounded Posterous and got into YC. Nicolas Dessaigne was 37 when he cofounded Algolia and got into YC It doesn’t matter what age you are. YC is the community to join to go fast when starting.

Come by our lemonade stand at @ycombinator Demo Day! Synphony is here to dominate the physical AI deployment race We’re $1M contracted revenue in

If you want to find a truly impactful idea, a good place to look is in the trash bin of history. Most of the ideas that have most broken out in the last 5 years aren't new. They're old ideas that got written off too early. examples: 1) AI: When Sam started OpenAI, saying "AGI" got you laughed at 2) Space: Elon started SpaceX after people had written off the 1960s-era dreams as sci-fi 3) Supersonic flight: Blake started Boom after everyone assumed Concorde already proved it couldn't work 4) Nuclear energy: fission and fusion are roaring back decades after ambitious people stopped studying nuclear physics 5) GLP-1's: After the fen-phen disaster, weight loss drugs were synonymous with snake oil. There's a good reason this keeps happening. When a hyped idea fails, there's a backlash. It becomes embarrassing to work on - anyone still working on it is assumed too dumb to know better. So, if you want to work on something like this, you have to teach yourself to feel the tinge of that embarrassment and push past it.

The current line is “AI can replace execution, but not taste.” But taste is just compressed judgment from lots of exposure: see enough examples, classify enough good vs bad, and you develop instinct. That is not a moat against AI. That is a training set.

Introducing: Tasklet for Teams. One place for your team's agents, connections, apps, and knowledge. Scale productivity without adding headcount.

Plena (@plena_health) is the AI OS for specialty medical practices. It runs the operations — referrals, fax, scheduling & collections — end-to-end so doctors can focus on medicine. In 8 months, they've grown 17x and crossed seven figures in contracted ARR. Congrats on the launch, @eebadaeebada and Ahmed! ycombinator.com/launches/QdQ…

Gravy is building Agents for your money. @gravy_finance connects to your banks, investments, email and more to explain your money and automate your financial tasks. Congrats on the launch, @alitabba_ & @DevMaxC! ycombinator.com/launches/QdW…

Uno Wallet (@myunowallet) replaces Apple Wallet on iPhone and helps you pay with the right card every time. Add your cards, double-click to pay, and Uno picks the best one. Congrats on the launch, @RuleSaket & @MordiShadpour! myunowallet.com

Spilling some beans 🤫 This very startup is actually looking for their first design engineer: tasklet.notion.site/Staff-De… It's an incredible opportunity, owning the product design end-to-end. They've identified that great design is essential for them. Funnily, I've told the founder to *not* look for a "design engineer." I told him, the most cracked product designers are all AI-pilled and now working with code anyway. If that's you and you're remotely curious, highly rec to get in touch with the founder. Oh and, did I mention, it's the Firebase founder?!

If you're building a devtool and you have customers with 100k end users making millions in ARR, but they are paying you $25 / month... something is wrong with your pricing.

Arlo Industries builds passive sensor networks that track drones and missiles in 3D. No radar, no emissions, no single point of failure. The sensing layer for Air Defense. Congrats on the launch, @DeoArlo! ycombinator.com/launches/QWQ…

Totalis (@totalistrading) lets users parlay on anything. Combine multiple event markets into one trade across politics, crypto, stocks, sports, weather, and macro. Starting with parlays, expanding into structured products. Congrats on the launch, @ImTheBigP & @ericliujt! ycombinator.com/launches/QUr…

Founders often ask me what to listen for in customer calls to know if they have a hair-on-fire problem. This is the wrong question. Can you run their business? If you were CEO, would this be a top 2 priority? Because most businesses never get to #3. Rather than pitching your idea, learn the business so well you could run it yourself. You'll know exactly how big the problem is and what they'd pay. And if this is going to 100x their business and they still won't buy? You just discovered the AI version of their company.