Congrats to @metriport on their $26M Series A 💥 I was lucky to work with @dimagoncharov_ and @ColinElsinga from their pivot in S22 to their crazy success today. From a "small" data integration play, they are becoming the single source fo truth for customers like Amazon One Medical, Strive Health, Color and Canvas Medical. Patients are already getting better treatments because of their work. Can't wait to see how they'll transform healthcare 🚀

On the sidelines of Paris Startup School, I sat down with @oliveur, cofounder and CEO of @datadoghq. Little did I know that Datadog actually applied to YC in 2010 and was rejected! Nearly every other investor passed too. Nine years later, it went public at about $7.5B. They are now at over $80B. Olivier still keeps PG's rejection email. In this video, Olivier shared how they got there and how he continues leading the company in founder mode. 1/9

On the sidelines of Paris Startup School, I had one of the most interesting conversations with @james406, the founder of @posthog. PostHog is going through what feels like a new pivot. They are known for being the best at product analytics. But now they are using AI to become what James calls a "doing company": finding problems, fixing them and opening PRs while you sleep. I sat down with James to understand how they got there.

Moderna is a great example of what happens when people are bold enough to ignore the haters and invest in technology platforms. In 2019 this company was widely assumed to die. But in COVID they likely saved several tens of millions of lives, bought themselves a financial lifeline to go after cancer, and now they’re going to save many million more. Incredible (Cambridge based!) company

In 2013, @cjoneslevy created the SAFE at YC. It's since been used by YC founders to raise $15B+ and has become the standard way startups raise money. So we're launching Send a SAFE: a free tool to generate, sign, & send one in ~2 minutes, built to be used by founders (and their AI agents).

Introducing the new $30k Firecrawl deal for YC 4 years ago we joined YC, and it totally changed the trajectory of @firecrawl Now we're offering the community: - Up to 5x your plan's monthly credits - $30k/yr max - Shared Slack channel & 🔥 swag Build something agents want!

"There are no Amish with autism" There are "Vaccines aren't tested against placebo" They are "MMR has never been studied as a possible cause of autism" It has. It's not the cause. I apparently need to say this stuff over and over and over and over again. And again.

Most people don't understand how uniquely powerful YC software is and why it matters so much for founders. It's not a fundraising CRM so that you don't have to buy their own CRM. It's a fundraising CRM that allows each YC founder's experience with a given investor be tracked, anonymized, and shared with other founders so that founders can spend more time with great investors that are likely to invest and less time with less-good investors who are less likely to invest. It's a not a custom built calendar-booking link so that you don't have to buy a calendar-booking app. It's a calendar booking app that imports YC data to help the founders understand the sort order they should meet with investors, based on their likelihood to invest based on many different factors. For instance, some investors are an 8/10 for value-add but write checks without social signal. Other investors are a 10/10 but never enter a round early. Sequence them accordingly. These innovations are not just technology. They are thoughtfully solving problems YC cares a ton about...AND they are examples of how YC startups should build features for their own customers.

I sat with a founder recently who had just raised a good round. Almost immediately, he got slower. They had raised, and he felt they were supposed to behave like a much larger company: OKRs, a responsibilities matrix, quarterly planning, etc. But the team was still only a handful of people. The two-week goals they used during the batch worked much better for them! We did our own version of this mistake at Algolia. Our first HR hire wanted to build a career framework. The idea sounded good to me, I wanted people to be able to see how they could grow. But it backfired. People started looking at the ladder instead of what the company needed. Processes are good when they can help make things faster. Hiring and support are good examples. But don't put in place processes that are going to slow you down! Do the thing that gets you users. OKRs can wait.

Agents can look like they’re working even when they’ve failed. Lemma catches that before users do. Jerry and Cole are deeply technical and move absurdly fast. Huge congrats on the round @zjearbear, @colegawin_, and the whole @lemma_ team!

Pedro Franceschi on the advice Paul Graham gave him about scaling Brex In 2019, Brex was generating more than $100 million in revenue, scaling, and growing really fast. Founder Pedro Franceschi recalls having a conversation with Paul Graham around this time and asking, “What’s the job of the founder at this new scale?” Paul Graham replied: “The job of a founder is to figure out how to be happy. If you believe in founder-led companies, the thing that matters most is you being there to lead it. And if you don’t like it, you’re not going to do it because people won’t do what they don’t like for a long time. What’s impressive about the Collison brothers at Stripe or Mark Zuckerberg at Meta is not that Meta is a trillion dollar company and growing. It’s that it’s a trillion dollar company, growing, and the founder is still there 20 years later. That’s the part that’s really impressive… A lot of it is: how do you manufacture the culture, the way of working, and the way of building to be something that gives you energy so that you can do it for a long time?” Source: @kleinerperkins (Apr 2025)