conor brennan-burke

what a year at @hyperspell! we started 2025 with: 👥 2 cofounders working remotely across continents ⚙️ no product 💸 no revenue or customers, having just refunded everyone and pivoted 🏢 working from coffeeshops, sleeping in a hacker house closet 🚫 6 rejections from @ycombinator all we had was determination and something to prove we're ending 2025 with: 👥 a team of 3, cofounders living + building together in sf ⚙️ a product customers choose over competitors with tens of millions raised 💸 hundreds of thousands in revenue from dozens of customers 🏢 sharing an apartment and workspace, surrounded by our yc batch ✅ accepted into yc f25 on app #7 and 5x'd revenue during the batch thank you to the customers, investors, and friends who believed in us before we had anything to show for it I'm proud of what we built, and even more proud of who we built it with. huge gratitude to my cofounder @manuebert and our founding engineer @benhorowitz couldn't ask for better people to build this with onwards

@wadefoster the company brain is a game-changer for deploying ai internally

TBPN asked me how Zapier keeps AI from drowning in data. Short answer: we built it a brain. Three layers: 1. Company-level source of truth (strategy, values, ICP). Curated by me and a handful of senior leaders 2. Team-level context that cascades down 3. Individual context, private to each person. Meeting transcripts, Slack threads, project docs, etc. So when anyone at @Zapier talks to AI, they're not starting from scratch. They point the SDK at specific documents against the backdrop of that brain. Better inputs, better AI. Thanks to @TBPN for having me on

@meh_agarwal Legend

I think I found the perfect fit for SF summer. Thanks Jensen and Dwarkesh!

@xdenuzzo @thatguybg shhh don’t leak it too early

nothing to see here… 👀

@TTrimoreau vibes

If AI builds everything for you, what’s your real job?

@faizan10114 it's not a perfect 1:1 correlation, but most companies who get to series B have pmf

@contextconor that post assumes, series B is PMF, or that you will continue having PMF even after series B.

the thinking is: pre-PMF (usually before series B) founder time is the biggest bottleneck post-PMF the team handles execution, so making the right decisions matters more than raw hours relationships need time to nurture. best to build after pmf

agents will take care of all details for your company in the future @EragonAI just filled out a contract for us, no human input required insane

@zagdotdev incredible launch video

Introducing Zag AI review agents for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS developers. Zag runs agents in real Apple developer environments with Apple Silicon, Xcode, simulators, and your complete toolchain. Describe agents in TypeScript or Swift that do code review, QA, security, or App Store compliance, and run them on every PR.

@thestefanl @IditOryon @hyperspell @realbenhorowitz @maebert @xdenuzzo @szar_david she’s crushing it

@contextconor @IditOryon @hyperspell @realbenhorowitz @maebert @xdenuzzo @szar_david amazing! idichella?

today was @IditOryon’s first day at @hyperspell! idit is leading gtm and we’re so excited to have her join the hyperspell family we made a team card to welcome her, and even our ai agent cubert pitched in

Conor (@conor_ai), @hyperspell’s founder, applied to YC multiple times before finally getting the "Yes" that mattered. He realized that joining an earlier batch would have actually killed the company's long-term potential. The rejection forced them to focus on the product without the distraction of a Demo Day deadline. This "forced focus" resulted in a technical breakthrough that defined their eventual success. Timing is everything in Silicon Valley, and sometimes a delay is just a setup for a bigger win. Don't rush the process if the tech isn't there yet.

Closing a deal, whether it’s with an investor or a program, requires the same persistence as closing a customer. When I got rejected from the co-founder fellowship, I didn't see a wall; I saw an opportunity to provide more data. I responded to the rejection email with a clear, direct value proposition that changed their mind instantly. That single reply led to me meeting my co-founder and the birth of Hyperspell. If you can’t handle a rejection from a fellowship, you’ll never handle a rejection from a $10M customer. Stop being polite and start being persistent. @conor_ai @hyperspell

@adisingh the legend returns sf isn't ready

Landed back in SF today. Feeling as refreshed, relaxed, and ready as ever. Spending some time away helps you grasp how early in AI we all are. There is still so much to be built, so much to be done. We’re just getting started - back to work.

@hahnbeelee the team at mintlify is next level announce a series b and host an incredible gala then the next day right back to shipping 🚀🚀

Agents are setting up and debugging software more than humans now. This is a huge opportunity for anybody who wants to make their docs better: agents read more carefully than humans, and have infinite patience for giving feedback. We think this could be incredibly beneficial for the developer ecosystem. But we also know that instructions telling agents to send info to a third party is essentially prompt injection and there is no standard on how to go abou this. So we're asking for feedback—what do you think the best version of "agents giving feedback on docs" looks like? You want your agents to use our products better, we want to make our products better for agents, let's figure it out!

@Kyriakos_Pelek you got it

@contextconor PMF first, then scale the team and partnerships

@RobertDMellish Yeah. Similar tradeoff for building solo vs with a cofounder I have an amazing cofounder, but no cofounder is better than a bad cofounder and if you’re spending lots of time trying to find one, then you’re better off just building solo

@contextconor It’s one of the most important questions for a solopreneur: do I spend a significant portion of my limited time and energy on cultivating a high-risk/high-reward cofounder relationship, or do I accept the well understood challenges and limitations of going it alone?

@BrookeDukellis It’s all about tradeoffs and priorities in the short term The goal is to all one day find both love and pmf 🚀

@contextconor Love this framing around PMF / founder time tradeoffs Much more nuanced than pure hustle culture… because in that case, dream bigger 🤣

@itsajinkyaraj it’s hard to be a great partner as a pre-pmf founder you have no time or emotional bandwidth, it’s very stressful and tough on the other person too

@contextconor Yep, it's a solid advice. I have seen healthy relationships ending up in a break up cuz of pre pmf stress and exhaustion.