Gustaf Alströmer

Everyone is ragging on Jared for this, but he’s absolutely right AI agents *are* incredibly productive with prod db access. If you’re a vibe coder with no idea how a database works, this is obviously insane. But if you’re a professional software engineer and systems thinker like Jared, you’ve already set up guardrails and best practices so your agent doesn’t do anything bad. eg you probably have backups, you’ve set up docs/an md file to define prohibited actions, you probably use an ORM defined in code… and if an incident happens, you do a post mortem and figure out how to improve your system This is all stuff we’ve been doing for decades. And Claude is much smarter than the average new dev!

@karrisaarinen @ycombinator @SlackHQ I think that's a hard question to answer in general terms. In some cases, go all in on replacing all bad software in your category (since building is faster now). In other cases, not. But I think the companies that are doing the best are building more than before

I agree that some of the extra stuff doesn’t feel that useful compared to the messaging part. And I don’t think slack is perfect but so far I haven’t seen a better execution of a company than ode messaging, and these days also company to company messaging. But I think these days it’s so hard to stay on the core. Would you advise YC companies just keep investing in the core or branch out to new ideas for growth?

The degrading of @SlackHQ is in full force. If there is one thing I've learned about messaging apps is that reliability (real and perceived) is #1. Slack isn't meeting the bar anymore. It also seems like PM's there have been tasked with driving engagement and as a result are adding lots of new useless notifications. If you have strong reliability you don' t need that. Whatsapp is a great example.

We’re intense power-users of Slack at YC. Not holding out for alternatives but expecting the product to improve and not get worse - which is my personal experience sadly. We use it so much anything that worse the experience is noticed. We have many workspaces and use all the customizations they provide.

I wouldn’t hold breath for WhatsApp. It’s going to be all ai soon. Slack so not perfect but I haven’t seen better serious message product with good ux. Everything else is quite anonymous, spammy, has even less structure. My usage mostly company wide chat and some ways it’s only secure chat platform among all (in addition to teams). Our employees get phishing emails and messages in my name on every other platform/protocol.

Petraeus: Putin is the personification of evil. He wants to reassemble as much of the former Soviet Union or Russian Empire as he can, and he does not believe Ukraine has a right to exist as an independent country. We did not listen carefully enough. 1/

Claude thinks you are probably right re uptime: Bottom line for your original claim: Your experience is real and well-supported — Slack tells you when things break, WhatsApp doesn't, which is the entire UX gap. But "Slack is more reliable" in raw uptime terms isn't strongly supported by data; both have hours of downtime per year. The honest version of your argument is "Slack has better failure transparency," not "Slack has better uptime." But their UI is not getting better... :)

I’d say Slack. Haven’t really experienced those issues you mention. Unless my internet is very bad. iMessage/whatsapp overly phone and counterparty focused so I’m more often wondering if the message actually got delivered or not and if the problem is me or them. Slack is more of a server and it doesn’t send the message if it doesn’t work.

@karrisaarinen @sreikanth @ycombinator @SlackHQ I don't understand the value of this. And why it doesn't clear out when i've read the messages

Isn’t that the problem with all chat products? If it’s easy to chat, people will chat a lot, there is lot of messages. WhatsApp/iMessage doesn’t really handle it better. There is even less structure and slower to navigate. I think slack works if you use channels more. Focus on DMs, mentions. Then read channels you care about, then either read or ignore other channels.

@karrisaarinen @ycombinator @SlackHQ What is the most reliable messaging app you are using?

@gustaf @ycombinator @SlackHQ What is degrading? WhatsApp imo is not a good example. Can’t even hold login on a desktop, and have to auth with your phone. Sync not super reliable either

@karrisaarinen @ycombinator @SlackHQ I'm experiencing reliability issues with Slack. Message's aren't sent. Messages can't be deleted. App not loading properly. I haven't had any of those issues with Whatsapp ever to be honest. Messages on iPhone is even worse. It's nearly unusable for me.

Over the past year, we've been building our own internal agent infrastructure at YC: over 350 tools, self-improving skill loops, and a shared organizational brain that gets smarter overnight. In this episode of the @LightconePod, we sat down with YC General Partner Pete @koomen to talk about how he led the effort from the ground up. We cover how giving agents unrestricted access to one database was the key unlock, the self-improving skill loops that get smarter overnight, and why he thinks we've arrived at the personal computer moment for AI. 00:39 — YC's AI Stack 02:15 — The Finance Team Problem That Started It All 05:07 — SQL Access Changes Everything 07:20 — One Database to Rule Them All 09:14 — Jevons Paradox 10:07 — Denormalizing for Agents 12:15 — The Single-Player Era of Agents 14:16 — 350 Tools and a Shared Registry 16:24 — Skillify, DRY, and MECE Resolvers 18:23 — The Self-Improving Dream Cycle 20:26 — The Two-Sentence Pitch Skill 23:06 — How Super Intelligence Compounds 25:10 — Recording Everything as a Building Layer 27:10 — The Shared Organizational Brain 29:18 — Trust-Default Culture as a Requirement 30:44 — Raising the Floor for New Employees 32:35 — Horseless Carriages 34:24 — Why Chat Is the Best Interface for Agents 38:50 — Just-in-Time Software 40:49 — Centralizing vs. Decentralizing AI 43:32 — The Personal AI Revolution

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?

For more than a year we've been building tools at YC to make it easier to use agents at work. I enjoyed speaking publicly about this for the first time with the Lightcone crew!

@annbordetsky exactly, its a one-sided description of the role. which is why its a bit tone deaf imo

@gustaf I dislike that term. "Operating" has meaning. "Operator" is meaningless It's like a grab bag of everything non-investing, non-technical, non-founders. No one actually building and scaling a company calls themselves that

It seems like only VCs use the word “operators” when they just mean employees. “former operator” = employee with a non-investing job “operator mindset” = can do the job

@diqitally I think you first have to become a VC and then go back to a job - then you are an operator..

@gustaf am i a current operator?

@jeiting @ycombinator When I grew up in Sweden "Entreprenör" meant someone who work for themselves and operates a digger or a crane.

@gustaf @ycombinator First time I heard “operator” I was like did you drive a crane?

Today we're announcing new offices in Singapore and Tokyo. Combined with Sydney, @WeAreLegora now covers the full breadth of Asia-Pacific. Here's why: Japan is one of the largest legal services markets in the world by revenue – and it's in the middle of a structural M&A boom that connects directly to the US corridor we already cover. We already have customers there. The Tokyo office puts us at the center of that flow, serving both the international firms advising on outbound Japanese transactions and the domestic firms handling the inbound. Singapore is where the Magic Circle and leading US firms base their APAC headquarters. For global firms doing cross-border legal work across the region, it's the natural entry point – and we already have several of those firms as customers. The APAC legal services fee pool rivals the EU in scale. We've been building here since opening in Sydney in 2025. @minterellison, @AllensLegal, @hsfkramer, and others are already on the platform. Now we're taking the next step. If you want to be part of what we're building – legora.com/careers.

Petraeus: The U.S. has not remotely learned the lessons it should from Ukraine. This is the future of war: Ukraine alone uses 10,000 drones a day, and 90% of Russian casualties are caused by drones. That should force institutional change. 1/

yc s26 extended deadline ends tomorrow with the $2M openAI offer which we don’t know if we’ll do again as is an experiment some thoughts on how to tokenmaxx effectively from 0->1 AI native startups that have done it: