Harj Taggar

It was awesome hosting @agupta, @xuster, @snowmaker from YC last week in Bangalore with other founders, operators and VCs. Some takeaways: 1. YC Partners are in the trenches coding themselves. They aren't just watching the future; they’re building and living the future from first-hand experience 2. While it's becoming easier to code for non-technical teams, technical depth still matters. Technical teams are more likely to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI - generational companies are built at the frontier 3. Indian founders are going global from Day 1 (a lot faster than before) 4. Open-source models could be a big global equalizer. Tokens are still expensive for international markets. Open-source models will make it cheaper for everyone to access AI cost-effectively

I am about to run through 23 years of gmail, calendar and evernotes and turn them into vector embeddings inside gbrain 🧠

Ron Conway is pure light ❤️

On YC startups flipping to US and paying back taxes while flipping back "We wish that we could just fund Indian companies. We would love to do that. But the Indian government makes it very challenging for US based investors to fund Indian entities. It's not only a problem for us, but also a problem for all the US-based investors that would follow Y Combinator and invest in the companies after us. I wish I had a solution to this problem. But what I can say is that in the meantime, the fact that more and more of the companies coming from India are building for the global market suggests to me that that might be at least a partial solution, which is that if you're building a company like Emergent or Giga, actually the headquarters are in the US, even if a lot of the headcount is in India, and the customers are all in the US and the investors are mostly in the US, maybe it makes more sense for you to be a US entity. And the fact that we can't fund Indian entities is less of a problem than it was in the past."

It's striking how concentrated the AI revolution is. Even though starting startups has spread worldwide in the last couple decades, this wave of tech is as concentrated in the Bay Area as the last two big waves (semiconductors and the internet).

Make something agents want

"It's just markdown files" Dude anyone who believes this hasn't built agentic software yet

This is the future of dev tools and why having a nicer UI or simpler product won’t matter. We’re going to be setting up our tools through chat anyway.

Grateful to these incredible founders for speaking at Startup School India today. Aadit Palicha (Zepto) Harshil Mathur (Razorpay) Vidit Aatrey (Meesho) Lalit Keshre (Groww) Mukund Jha (Emergent) Varun Vummadi (GigaML) Six YC-backed Indian founders. Combined company value: $25B+. Jobs created in India: over 250K.

What I told 2,000 future founders in Bengaluru today: 1/ We believe we are at the start of a second wave of Indian companies that will build world-class AI native products for the global market. Emergent and Giga are the model of the future. 2/ Just because a space seems crowded doesn't mean it's too late. Zepto, Emergent, Giga - none were first movers. Second mover advantage is real. 3/ In fact, a good formula for finding startup ideas is to look at ideas that are showing some promise and just execute them better. Execution is everything: if you're an exceptional engineer, and you can build and move faster than your competitors, you'll win. 4/ There is every reason to believe Indian teams can beat US teams building global products. The level of engineering talent here is on a whole different level, and that's the key input. 5/ In the AI era, the best founders are the ones building at the edge of what's technically possible. You need to be experimenting wth the latest models, the latest open source projects. 6/ Stay in the flow of information. Watch the right podcasts, follow the right people on X. With AI changing this fast, you need to know what the smartest builders are thinking. 7/ Most of the best startups don't come from someone explicitly trying to start a company. They start from someone building a project just for fun, or tinkering with a new technology because they are curious. India needs more of this "tinkering" culture - this is how you have novel ideas when technology is shifting quickly. 8/ Founders are getting younger. Aadit was 18 when he started Zepto. The Giga founders were 20 when they came to SF. Young people who can learn very fast have the advantage right now. 9/ The best founders are pushing AI coding to the max. You can now write 20K lines of code / day. One person can do the work that just a year ago would take a 100 person team. The best builders are taking advantage and building at Garry Tan speeds.

Using OpenClaw is basically is like driving your own Ferrari (that you have to be a mechanic for yourself) and it's broken down all the time, but gives you the time of your life vs driving a reliable Honda (Hermes Agent) vs riding the bus (Claude / ChatGPT)

Giga is one of the first great AI companies to come out of India. Here are some crazy stories @varunvummadi shared: 1). He came from a poor background, but made $100k winning kaggle competitions. 2). To start Giga he turned down an insanely high paying offer from a high frequency trading fund. He had to convince his parents. 3) Giga is a completely different idea from what they started YC with. They wound up building AI customer support after they talked to Aadit from Zepto and realized it was a big need. 4). Most people thought it was too late - many companies were already doing AI customer support and some of the had raised large amounts of money. 5). It wasn't. Giga was able to close huge customers like Zepto and Doordash very quickly. They just built faster and better. 6.). If AI coding agents didn't exist, he'd need 7x the team size to run Giga.

Software going headless is inevitable in a world where agents use the tools 100X more than people do. And the reality is for a lot of software this is actually a huge boon to potential use-cases for these platforms. Software business models have largely been predicated on selling to the number of seats that are in the company in a given function, and the usage of your software is constrained by how much people can do in a given day. This means that your technology is often vastly underutilized relative to what it actually can power for the customer. Enter: agents. Agents can work 24/7, run in parallel, and string together work across systems. This is a big deal because now the agent can do far more than people ever could with these tools. Instead of reviewing contracts one by one, the agent will review all of them. Instead of manually moving data between marketing systems and across campaigns, the agent will let you run 10X more of them. Instead of being rate limited in a client onboarding process by human steps, agents accelerate these. Agents end up using these underlying platforms far more than people ever did, which opens up use-cases that the platform couldn’t go after before. Now, not every software market has the same amount of positive sum use-cases between people and agents, but I’d argue that a significant portion of systems of record, for instance, can be used far more than they are today. Your Salesforce data can be leveraged 100X more to do vastly more customer targeting and sales automation. Your documents can be turned into structured data and analyzed for insights and knowledge to automate other workflows. And so on. Now, of course you have to find a way to make this all commercially attractive, but it’s not hard to picture the revenue from API and agent consumption on these platforms becoming a rich component of revenue streams over time. Seats for the people, consumption for the agents. Lots of upside here for the companies that embrace this trend.

My company @slashapp: > Just raised 100M > Does over 250M annual revenue > Banks 5k of the fastest growing cos in the US > Only 70 Employees I'm 24 years old, and an immigrant. Ask me anything about fundraising, business growth, or AI and I will answer with everything I know.

The future is MCP/CLI

A search engine has many moving parts, and they constantly change with scale of index and traffic. In this blog post, we dive into the code-level abstractions we've built to develop search infrastructure that is both performant and a joy to work with. exa.ai/blog/composing…

we started sending invites to @ycombinator Startup School 2026 and i thought it'd be fun to give people a ticket when they get accepted

Tomorrow. YC Startup School India.

After 7 failed ideas, Han hit “pivot hell”—a week of no sleep, staring at the ceiling, trying to make something work. Then Mintlify clicked. Today it powers docs for 20K+ companies, reaching 150M+ people and, increasingly, AI agents. ~15% of doc traffic was AI a year ago. Now it’s ~50%. Soon, maybe 90%. Docs aren’t pages anymore. They’re context. The companies that win will be the ones that manage it best. Watch the full story ↓ @handotdev @hahnbeelee @mintlify @kevinzhang

We built something like this internally at YC, and I can't imagine living without it. Now any company can have it too.