Mahir Karuthone

just got my visa approved. been waiting for 5 years - - finally i get to visit SF 🤩 (@garrytan pls meet me)

@gustaf @ycombinator @gustaf made a killer announcement of something yc in Europe and disappeared

Good morning from a sunny San Francisco. Today is @ycombinator Demo Day. Godspeed, founders. 🚀

@gustaf Germany bitte

Planning an insane YC event in Europe this spring.

@daltonc If takeoff was certain, Prioritize speed over polish

What would you being doing differently if you knew for a fact we are in takeoff vs if you knew we aren't?

When the typical outcome for a post seed, post series A, and post series B startup is death. Perhaps the best strategy is to be careful how much you copy the startups around you. Are you brave enough to think different?

@gustaf Just landed in SF today for the first time. I'll post the same in 20yrs 😌

Moved to SF nearly 20 years ago. Wild how much it changed everything.

@saasmakermac @ColinGardiner Raised nothing, 1 signed pilot, 3 more in pipeline (will close after new yr)

@Mahy__K @ColinGardiner High existing sales numbers compared to total raise.

Kinda bullish on the founder/operator > VC > founder arc for investing in.

I started Boom knowing literally zero people in aerospace. Networks are built naturally when doing something interesting—they are not a precondition.

Naval Ravikant: “Networking is overrated… Do something great and your network will instantly emerge" Naval offers the following advice to startup founders: “Don’t spend your time doing meetings unless you really, really have to. I really think networking is overrated. There’s all these articles about how you’ve got to network more, and it makes me want to vomit.” Instead he suggests: “Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge. If you build a great product or if you get a good customer base, I guarantee you will get funded.” Recruiting (customers and employees) and learning from really smart people are two exceptions. But don’t worry about building relationships with VCs or going to conferences early on. Just focus on your product, your team, and your users.

@t_blom 🤣 🤣

I was just talking to a scheduler on the phone and the quality was great. I started asking more and more obscure questions to try to catch it out. "What's the travel time from San Francisco?" She asked "Are you trying to figure out if I'm an AI?" It was a human 🤦‍♂️

@ycombinator @medi_search Does this offer API to be integrated into other AI agents

Max from @medi_search is the most advanced medical AI available. Max scores 53.3% on HealthBench Hard, OpenAI's new benchmark for difficult medical cases, beating both GPT-5 and GPT-4o. Available on web, iOS, and Android: medisearch.io/refer?utm_id=m…

Talking to users early has an upside people rarely mention. Beyond feedback, validation, and early sales -- it also helps you spot future hires. When you talk to enough users, you’ll meet smart, experienced people already deep in your space. Later, when it’s time to scale, you’ll know exactly who to hire. I realized this after a few user interviews where I ended the call thinking, “Damn, this is someone I’d want to work with someday.”

the advice which pushes me through hard times. i first saw this on one of the linkedin posts (or maybe comments idr) by @daltonc. since then, i tell this to my cofounders everyday.

@raphaelschaad Watches

What are other examples of this for you?

As long as all newly founded startups prefer your product, don't worry about competitors who can convince larger customers. You'll own all future cohorts of companies, and that's more than enough. Plus in practice you'll eventually convert the old cohorts too, if you bother to.

If you want to know whether you have a good product, it's a lot easier to make it a little harder for the user to use it, and see if they use it anyway. - @mwseibel

@agupta We are building agent for biotech. Dm'd you after our last convo 👐

I'll be at NeurIPS later this week meeting researchers. I'd be particularly interested in to chat if you're curious about starting a new research-focused startup. I have some projects cooking that might be of interest. DMs are open.

@GJarrosson If you build a great product, VCs will have convince you to let them invest.

What’s harder: 1- Building a great product 2- Convincing VCs to fund it

I was talking recently to a startup using AI to take over a certain kind of work. Apparently investors are skeptical that AI could do it. I told them they should point out that most of this work already seems as if it's done by AI.

@philchiever @elijahmuraoka_ Often users only know the problem. They dk the apt solution for it and so they'll start asking for 100 random features.

@Mahy__K @elijahmuraoka_ I think what they ask for and what they want is the same, or am I wrong?

We followed YC's advice religiously, but it nearly killed our startup. Everyone says the same thing: Listen to your customers. Build what they want. Ship fast. Iterate. We did it all. Hit $1K MRR in one month. Customers were paying. They liked what we built. But nobody loved it. A few months ago, I met Michael Xing (Founder of Pingo AI) with my cofounder, @mikelong107, over some tasty soup dumplings. I told him everything we were doing. All the customer feedback we were collecting and the incremental improvements we were making. He looked at us and said, "You need to take big swings to find PMF." That stuck with me. Henry Ford once famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." This is exactly what we were doing: Building a faster horse when we needed a car. So one month later, we made one of the hardest founder decisions. We closed down all our customers. Walked away from $1K/month. Rebuilt everything from scratch. Scariest thing we've ever done till this day. But just one week later, we closed our first high-ticket client. 2x'd our lifetime revenue in one deal. This is when I realized customer obsession isn't building every little thing a customer asks for. It's understanding the core problem they're trying to solve and having the vision to solve it 10x better. Listen to your customers. But protect your vision. One of the most important traits I've noticed in top founders is their ability to say "No". If you're only building what customers explicitly request, you're not a visionary. You're a feature factory. And hate to say it, but nobody remembers feature factories.