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I spent weeks reading everything YC has ever published about what they look for.
here are 9 things that would have changed how I thought about the application
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YC Insights.
3.6K posts
YC Insights.
@YCInsight
Practical, No BS, YC insights (Not affiliated with YC)
Katılım Mart 2023
196 Takip Edilen1.4K Takipçiler
The Series A "why we win" answer that closes rounds
Partners always ask: "Why will you win in this market?"
The founders who close: answer with structure.
We win because
- We have data competitors can't replicate
- We reach customers through channel they can't access
- Our retention is 95% because of specific product insight
Together these create compounding advantages that get stronger every month.
Moat + evidence + compounding.
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Jared Friedman on AI startup moats
"The question we ask every AI startup
'What happens to your business when OpenAI builds this natively?
If you can't answer that, you don't have a business yet. You have a feature.
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PG on why the best startup ideas seem bad
"If everyone thinks it's a great idea, there's probably a lot of competition."
The ideas that seem ridiculous in 2026 become the unicorns in upcoming years.
- Airbnb: "Strangers sleeping in your house?"
- Stripe: "Another payment processor?"
- Coinbase: "Internet money?"
All ridiculous but All massive.
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The YC Demo Day median seed round - $3.1M
Top decile: $8–12M (strong outliers can go higher)
What determines which tier you’re in
→ MRR at Demo Day
→ Growth rate (consistent MoM over consecutive months)
→ Retention data (NRR / churn)
→ Market size + reasoning
→ Team credibility (track record + execution)
The metric that predicts round size most strongly
- MRR growth rate sustained for 5+ consecutive months.
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The Series A investor due diligence reality
They will call your customers.
They will talk to former employees.
They will ask your existing investors about you.
This is not optional.
It's not exceptional & It's standard.
Prepare for
→ 3 customers ready to take reference calls
→ A data room with 12 months of clean metrics
→ An honest answer to "what hasn't worked?"
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YC Insights. retweetledi
for folks thinking about a role change this summer, we want to find you a job at a startup -- we’ve invested in >350 companies so far via a16z speedrun.
I’ve spent time with all of the founders: I’m betting (literally) that they’re the next Cursor, Kalshi, Decagon, Databricks, etc.
their jobs are never listed - they tend to hire via referral or from our intros via the speedrun talent team
want to work with them? Let us know here: bit.ly/4fe2B4V
if the team sees a match, they’ll reach out to intro you to the founders.
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Gary Tan on the YC network:
"The $500K isn't the deal. The network is the deal.
5500+ founders who've been where you are.
Who'll answer your question in 6 hours. Who'll intro you to the right investor in one email.
You're paying 7% for a lifetime of unfair advantage."
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"Frontier risks in cybersecurity, bio, and control of agentic systems demand cautious optimism through public policy and responsibility"
Very well put...
Demis Hassabis@demishassabis
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@paulg what do you see as the single most native/core use case AI was effectively built for?
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It's interesting in this case how well AI fits into existing trends. Programming wasn't evolving in this direction because AI was coming. No one knew it was. And yet we end up with what looks like a smooth acceleration along much the same path.
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Before vibe coding became a thing, programming was already evolving in that direction. It already increasingly consisted of installing and configuring stuff other people wrote, without reading the source.
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The pattern in every rejected application:
- The founder spent 70% of the application describing what they will build.
The pattern in every accepted application:
- The founder spent 70% of the application describing what they have already built and who is already paying for it.
Future tense = plans. Past tense = evidence.
YC funds evidence.
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YC Insights. retweetledi
Tom Blomfield on How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI
Tom Blomfield@t_blom
Personal update: I'm taking a leave of absence from YC to join Anthropic. I'll be working with @NotTomBrown on the compute team. Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and, as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement, availability of compute becomes one of the most important issues to solve. I'm excited to get started 🚀
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The YC portfolio outcome distribution:
Top 10 companies = 80% of total portfolio value.
Airbnb. Stripe. Coinbase. DoorDash. Instacart.
The other 90% of companies: modest exits, acquisitions, or shutdowns.
YC's model: fund 1,200 companies/year.
Find the 10 that return everything.
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The Series A pitch evolution most founders miss
Seed pitch: "Trust us. Here's our early signal."
Series A pitch: "Here's the proof. Here's the model. Here's exactly how $10M gets us to $10M ARR."
The shift: from "trust" to "evidence."
From "this might work" to "this is working. Here's how to scale it."
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Prediction - Anthropic will announce $2m of tokens in exchange of Equity in YC company... all the best @t_blom
Tom Blomfield@t_blom
Personal update: I'm taking a leave of absence from YC to join Anthropic. I'll be working with @NotTomBrown on the compute team. Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and, as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement, availability of compute becomes one of the most important issues to solve. I'm excited to get started 🚀
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Dalton Caldwell on why founders stall
"The number one mistake: working on the wrong thing.
Not bad execution & not bad timing.
Working on something that doesn't matter enough to enough people.
Talk to users until you find what matters. Then build that.
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One of the weird constants about YC is that the disses are always the same. Investors always claim valuations have become impossibly high. Competitors always claim we've jumped the shark because the batch sizes are now too big. Historically both have always been mistaken.
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The insider insight about YC's "requests for startups"
Every RFS category - a problem YC partners have personally seen in multiple portfolio companies.
They're not guessing at what the market needs.
They're describing gaps they've watched companies struggle with.
When you apply in an RFS category - you're not just describing a market.
You're answering a question partners have been asking for 2 years.
Read the RFS as a list of their most painful unresolved observations.
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@YCInsight Criteria changes based on the market cycles: bull vs bear. The dynamics changes based on so many factors.
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The Series A metrics bar that hasn't changed:
→ $1M–$3M ARR at time of raise
→ 20%+ YoY growth
→ NRR above 110%
→ Gross margin above 60%
→ Clear path to $10M ARR in 18 months
→ Customer count growing, not just revenue
Every Series A investor checks all 6
Build toward these from the day you close your seed.
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@paulg and now its almost 5000+ startups funded by YC, wild journey...
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YC Insights. retweetledi
Robert Scoble interviews me outside YC after the summer 2010 Demo Day. By that point we'd funded what seemed the enormous number of 208 startups, including 36 in that batch.
youtube.com/watch?v=UacbJ7…
YouTube
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