Raphael Schaad

Life update: I'm joining @ycombinator as Visiting Partner 🤩 Software ate the world, and now AI is eating software — the founders building in this shift will redefine how we compute, work, and live. In my new role, I'm excited to find those founders and help them build the iconic startups of this generation. YC backed me when I founded Cron Inc. in 2019, and I'm grateful to come full circle and pay it forward. I'll start reading applications in October, interviewing founders in November, and then pack my battered suitcase in January for the W26 batch 🔥 Follow along here & see you in SF!

I’m a sucker for good names. Legora > Harvey Polymarket > Kalshi And it’s not even close. It obviously doesn’t make or break a company (Google), but a good name is a great asset when competing for category domination.

@davidhoang Cute!

My (new) life goal is to own a duck house.

@garrytan Totaly

You can still tell human writing because it's got that wabi sabi

@vanschneider @Ekaeoq @o2klotec Both great watches!

@vanschneider @Ekaeoq @o2klotec Comments already mention but yeah that’s a 222 for sure

I really thought about the best watch brands for each category and this is what I came up with: 1) Unlimited budget: without a doubt Rexhep Rexhepi 2) Best watch brand under 15.000€: Otsuka Lotec, simply unbelievable stuff for money, also the watchmaker is such an incredible person, fully focused on craft and nothing else, it's what watchmaking is all about 3) Holy trinity: it's VC 4) And for a novelty piece under 5k, I'd buy something like a Kollokium Projekt 01

@jorilallo @bernhardsson @StefanFSchubert @grok Bättre folk 🫡

@raphaelschaad @bernhardsson @StefanFSchubert @grok explain Swedish language in finland

Scandinavia has less of that than the US

@jorilallo @bernhardsson @StefanFSchubert What.

@bernhardsson @StefanFSchubert In Finland the wealthy people just speak Swedish 😑

@levelsio Buy aluminum Rimowa and stay at the Grand Tremezzo. Ignore LVMH and buy a 60s Gucci silk scarf off of eBay. Seems you’re just doing ‘luxury’ wrong. No offense! I think it’s common.

It's not just luxury hotels that are a scam, it's almost everything that's luxury that's a scam Gf bought Rimowa suitcases, expensive and supposed to be better quality than regular ones, but of course they're much worse They keep breaking, like all of them, cracks in the handles, cracks in the sides, it's just cheap plastic shit but it costs $1000 or more Rimowa was bought by LVMH in 2016 which has an average profit margin of 66% and whose strategy is to increase prices by ~5x, decrease costs by ~5x and then create artificial scarcity (limited availability per shop) because people want what they can't get (not me though but many) LVMH is kinda like the luxury version of private equity, it makes everything more expensive and worse and hard to get!

@thenanyu @ycombinator @ApolloAtomics Ha ha. Eh, these new gen reactors would just fold in of themselves

@raphaelschaad @ycombinator @ApolloAtomics Not the sound you want from a nuclear reactor

.@ApolloAtomics builds the most compact nuclear reactors with the highest uptime and a deployment time of less than 24 months. Apollo took the pressurized water reactor technology that already powers 80% of the world’s nuclear plants and flipped one part, the steam generator, to make the plant an order of magnitude smaller without compromising power. Congrats on the launch, @AssilHalimi & Drew! ycombinator.com/launches/QXj-a…

Most important writing about the intangible value of YC in a while. I distinctively remember during my YC acceptance call years ago, Dalton saying the words “we believe this could be huge,” which was as huge catalyst. Now — I was going to build Cron with or without YC. And I would advise anyone not getting in to keep building. Re-apply if it makes sense (it typically does). We get these decisions wrong all the time. And for YC founders that are just getting in to the S26 batch now, you might feel some imposter syndrome. You see batch mates that are super impressive. You might think your idea is bad and see all the problems with your startup. But know that for every single one of you, we also believe: this could be huge.

Building lots of systems these days. How I do email. How I train. How I invest. How I advise. How I travel for work. How our family operates. How we do groceries. How I take podcast notes. How I retrieve written notes. Doing the upfront work and then letting it run.

@gregisenberg I think #10 makes sense because it’s so intense right now that you can’t be founder and have little kids (25-45 typically).

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED. I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires. My takeaways: 1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices. 2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha. 3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda) 4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general. 5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million 6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works. 7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead. 8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one. 9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders. 10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time. 11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now. 12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly. 13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS. 14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here.... 15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all. 16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol. 17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet. It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED. But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building. We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real. What an incredible time to be building.

@agupta @bosmeny *that* prompt, that’s why there’s a lot of value in it! #inception

my prompt for aspiring founders: assume the models reach superintelligence (arguably they have already), don't kill us all, and still require us to prompt them to do things. what are the hardest problems you can now point them at?

@stalmico Squarely

@raphaelschaad how does this apply to shipping mvps?

The following is one of the most important Rick Rubin'ism, and applies to musical artists as much as technology builders: If you are excited to share with your friend — if I'm working in the studio, long before the record comes out, and l'm excited to play it for my friend who has good taste, who I know likes good music — it could come out then. If I want to play it for them, that's good enough for everybody. But usually, artists will feel like, well, I'll play this for my boys, but it has to be a lot better before regular people can hear it. And that's ridiculous. It's like, as soon as I liked it enough to share it with one person, chances are, it's ready for everybody. 🚢

@Vraj247 When working, be focused. Earnest. Take breaks, reflect. It's all-consuming because it's fun. Consistency. Show up even when it doesn't flow.

@raphaelschaad What’s your pointers on good work ethic?

Good taste. Good work ethic. Those are the two.

@karrisaarinen and right afterwards I log onto this hell site to shit post 🤡

I spend part of the summer at a cottage in Finland, by the Baltic Sea. There is all kinds of animal and plant life around, and instead of asking OpenClaw, I bought a couple of books about the local fauna and flora. Now when I encounter a snake or some other animal, I may already know what it is. And if I don’t, I go back and check the books. I have small moments like this everyday now, usually less dramatic, that remind me how books have made daily life feel a little more magical.