Joee

You don't need a $2M pre-seed to start building deep tech. When I started building @laminalabs (@ycombinator P26), I had no funding, no team of 10 engineers, and a vision that required serious GPU compute and AI infrastructure. So I did what any desperate founder would do. I cold emailed. I wrote to @agupta , who was building the YC student credits program. I told him I was going all in on building a deep tech project, why it needed serious compute, and the commitment I was putting behind it. I sent that email at 10:50 AM on November 14th. He replied at 10:52 AM. Two minutes. That reply changed everything. Thank you Ankit, that early access was the unlock. From there, it was months of grinding through architecture after architecture. Rewriting core pipelines more times than I can count. Shipping, breaking, rebuilding. Just me, Claude Code, and Codex running in parallel, the closest thing an early founder has to a 10-person engineering team, except they never call in sick. AI coding agents are the single greatest force multiplier available to founders right now. I'm not exaggerating. The leverage is unreal. Here's the thing most people get wrong: you don't need a massive round to get something real off the ground. You need compute credits, the right AI tools, and the willingness to grind through hundreds of iterations until the architecture clicks. If you're a student or early founder sitting on an idea that feels too ambitious, just start. Email the people building the programs. Apply for every credit you can find. Reach out to people you think won't respond. They will. The infrastructure to build serious things as a solo or two person team has never been more accessible. The funding comes after you've already started building something real. Because someone gave me that first unlock, I want to do the same: I'm giving away 5 x $50 Claude Code credits. And whoever ships the best project with that gets $200 in Claude credits from me personally. I know firsthand how much potential $200 in credits has for a builder who's willing to grind. Just comment below with the link to the coolest thing you've built. I will DM you myself.

Excited to announce that today is my first day at the @SolanaFndn working on growing the consumer ecosystem. The mission is to accelerate Solana ecosystem teams to bring billions onchain. Grateful to continue the work I love: find exceptional people and help them turn their ideas into reality. I have utmost conviction that Solana is and will continue to be the consumer chain, home of internet capital markets, and more. There's still so much work to do, we're still early, but even from glimpses so far it's clear: builders are here, momentum is real, and the best is ahead of us. If you're building something interesting, DMs are open - let's chat!

𝐌𝐞𝐞𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦: 𝐏𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐩 (Developer Relations) Philipp has been coding since he was 11. Drawn to the possibilities of crypto from an early age, he dove into DeFi and smart contracts – eventually co-founding a security collective dedicated to protecting protocols from onchain exploits. A relentless builder, Philipp has contributed to protocol standards and competed in numerous hackathons along the way. At @0xMiden, he supports teams building on Miden – creating technical docs, tutorials, and example applications to help developers get started with building privacy apps.