Russell Smith 🤙

Having done YC before, it's amazing to be back. The energy is the same 14 years (!!) on. Also, the quality of the folks I met was just as a high, if not more. So many have done a ton already, some are early. All are moving super fast. Crazy achievement by the YC team and @garrytan. My personal takeaways from the kick off of P26: - the vibe/how folks/users feel matters - prolly even more for hardware - what is the smallest thing one can actually ship rn - watch out for hero-mode; are we solving the real problem, or the easy one - strong cofounder bond is key, and the easiest way to fail, even vs funding - building a pro sports team, not family - post more to LinkedIn, as spaced rep is a thing, and starts a brand - create a tribe. convert people. if founders don't no one will: but build one tribe, not more

Opus 4.7 is so much worse at stopping in autoresearch style setups it's almost unusable. Any tips here? What worked before, even with tweaks breaks every few hours now.

@gdb Dang. This looks solid.

GPT Image 2 for learning about endangered animals

I think @garrytan's GStack is cool.

“ok this startup is cool but …” 1980: … what if IBM builds this? 1995 … what if Microsoft builds this? 2010 … what if Google builds this? Today … what if builds this? reality is, if founders listened to the “what if” pessimists we’d never have any startups or new products. That’s why they’re building and the pundits aren’t My observation: When these huge waves happen, these new markets are so damn big there will be tens of thousands of new viable companies, hundreds of unicorns, and a few iconic companies that become generational. The big cos play a role but can never compete with the glorious open market known as capitalism So for all the “what if” people - sit down, log off X for a bit, and let the founders do their thing. And let’s cheer them on when they do

@HarryStebbings @Kieranleehill Do you keep a list of misses?

I remember when Mike sent me the pre-seed of Granola. Naturally my partner @Kieranleehill turned it down but Mike has always been a visionary and OG! PS. Love you Kieran 🤣

@hthieblot defense 9mothers.com

pitch me your company in 1 word.

Ugh.

I do love QMD, but embedding is slow. Any one figured out making it faster? Different model? using api?

‼️ ZELENSKYY: For the first time in the war, an enemy position was captured entirely by ground robotic systems and drones - without any infantry. A robot entered the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier and took the positions. «The future is here, on the battlefield, and Ukraine is creating it. These are our ground robotic systems. For the first time in this war's history, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned GRS platforms and drones. The occupiers surrendered, and this operation was completed without infantry involvement and without losses on our side. Ratel, Termite, Ardal, Lynx, Zmiy, Protector, Volya and other GRS completed over 22 000 missions at the front in just 3 months. In other words, over 22 000 times lives were saved. A robot went into the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier» - Zelenskyy’s address to the workers of Ukraine’s defense-industrial complex. April 13th, 2026.

@garrytan How come? For me, I'm so much faster talking than typing, so default to that when it's not weird. It's def not perfect though - guessing as my accent isn't standard.

@rhs Not my bag yet

I don’t even know what is going on with software anymore because I’m by a pool in Kona Big Island right now and coding my personal AI voice agent by chatting with it on Telegram on my iPhone while sipping a virgin pina colada It was loud while testing with Twilio and I wondered if we could do dynamic VAD setting and it did it 🤯

@andrewchen btop > top btw. I was more thinking ask it to build it's own (inter)face and dashboard...

@rhs Not quite sure what to do with the screen yet but it's fun to run top on it

built my openclaw a new home (mac mini + nvidia dgx spark in a 8U mini rack)

Was talking to friend at a major lab about what we do vs what they do when writing code with agents - aka how can I learn / be better things we're missing; 1) isolated environments agents can spin up / be in on demand 2) end to end simulation 3) inter agent comms #1 easy, #2 we have some, not e2e, so harder, #3 they just put them all in slack, lol... but then, if we have those, the overall agent planning is then the missing part. anyone doing this outside of a lab? tools to checkout, or just build?

@hanghuang_ Glad to be in P26 with you, congrats - y'all will do well!

After 6 applications and 6 rejection emails, we finally got into Y Combinator. Yes, read that one more time: 6 applications. 6 rejections. We turned a rejection into an admission offer. For a long time, every rejection led to the same question: "Do we pivot, or keep going?" We didn't think much of the first few rejections. Our reaction was mostly just: okay, back to building, apply again next time. Honestly, the hardest one was the 5th rejection because we felt so close. It was the first time we got an interview. We believed we had a real shot. But in the end, we got rejected… again. Looking back, the decision was fair. We were only doing around $300/month, and YC didn’t see a clear path to building a billion-dollar company through enterprise. So we stopped guessing and started listening. We did 20+ user interviews and realized something important: the people who really loved InsForge were not big enterprises. They were AI-native small teams and startups. That fundamentally changed how we saw the company. We clarified who the product was actually for, doubled down on what was working, and kept building in public on X and LinkedIn. We grew from 2,300 to 4,000+ databases in 2 months. Then we applied again. Our second interview with YC. We really thought this would be the one. But once again, we were rejected. That was the moment the question we had been asking ourselves after every rejection finally changed. No longer: “Do we pivot?” Instead: “How do we execute so well that the need for this product becomes impossible to ignore?” After 30 days of hell, we launched @InsForge_dev Launch Week 1. And it took off. Like, really took off! → 1.5M+ views on X → #1 on Product Hunt → #1 on GitHub Trending → 3K+ GitHub stars in one week But here's the craziest part: after rejecting us, YC changed their mind. Here was our second chance. We got an email from general partner Andrew Miklas (@amiklas), congratulating us on our launch and asking us to meet one more time. We figured it would be another tough interview. But the meeting was in two hours. No time to prepare. We were so nervous up until the very end. When we finally hopped on the call, he just said, “You guys have made huge progress. I want to work with you. Do you want to do YC?” WTF????????? Tony (@tonychang430) and I looked at each other. We were so shocked, we didn't even know what to say. Of course, the answer was yes. This is when we learned: Execute so well that your company becomes impossible to reject. Every rejection forced us to clarify our vision. The last one forced us to prove it. Next stop: YC P26!! @ycombinator 🥳 ( Read the full story below ⬇️ )

SFO approved Waymo — then buried it at the Rental Car Center. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft run 800K trips/month from the main garage. Zero safety rationale. Pure incumbent protection. gli.st/kftxyzj8

Tech like this, fiber and theseus are coming. How we stop them is behind.

@CostSegDylan Isn't hearing also excluded lol?

Why the hell is dental or vision not included in healthcare? Like…the ENTIRE rest of the body is covered…but these two random things…nah. These are expendable

@xoaanya Ask PMs, CEOs and designers everywhere; can they really call those projects they worked on theirs?

Can you really call a vibe-coded project yours if you didn’t write a single line of code?

youtube.com/watch?v=EtK5es… by @Ken_Goldberg @MITRobotics 100% agree that the future of robotics lies in combing deep learning and foundational engineering principles. good old fashioned engineering + data = win.