Boyuan :D

@samanthajeanneb We help founder automate their GTM motion in SEO/GEO front.

If you're building something that makes founders' lives easier - what is it and how does it help?

@suraj_sharma14 what if I have already raised?

Stage 0 → Silicon Valley. > 8 weeks in SF • For non-US founders • Pre-idea/pre-team welcome • 40 spots > $250K investment + round-closing support • Backed by Collisons, Hassabis, Hoffman, Schmidt > Alumni: Cleo • Aztec • Gensyn • PolyAI • Neptune • Magdrive apply: join-thebridge.com

@ankur_d @ycombinator YC companies have balls

Pre-@ycombinator, i don't think i would have had balls to send this email. PS: American seed investors are soo good. wish European early investors would adopt their mindset.

The FDE is the best seat in tech right now because the gap it sits on is closing. The AI-native company owns the system. The enterprise owns the context. The FDE bridges them, until that bridge gets pulled in-house. FDE is the front seat that tells you exactly what type of agentic system delivers results inside those orgs and hence the closest to where the problem is resolved.

@FroggyLainee @X @jayyeh Yeap yeap yeap don’t spam him plz

@boyuan_ddd @X @jayyeh jayyeh actually reads DMs?? wild

It’s really amazing that @X is such a cool place where you can just dm investors cold and they will read your story and gave feedback. I have never seen this type of interaction in any other platforms. Shout out to the goat @jayyeh for caring. That’s exactly what founders needed when they are early. Checks are getting cheap but I care and I believe are getting rare!

@KyngX23813 @X @jayyeh I have a reply rate of 50% after dm 15 or so

@boyuan_ddd @X @jayyeh ok but how many cold DMs did you send before this worked lol

@ArianaMyLifeeee @X @jayyeh Yeah not all VCs are awesome

@boyuan_ddd @X @jayyeh Ngl i've cold DM'd like 20 people on here and got maybe 2 replies, maybe just depends who you reach

@sandykory Too bad that quarter of my customer base come from polarized platforms. Need to be where my customers’ attention are but totally respect the grinding mindset!

One of my portfolio founders doesn't have a cell phone. At first, I thought he was crazy. But I’ve come to think he might be onto something. For the median founder, the best thing you can do with the news cycle right now is ignore it. If some extreme event happens, you'll hear about it. Important things will find you. So much of our time is spent just chasing noise that many have become slaves to their feeds. But is any of it actually making us better at the thing we're trying to do? Whether you're bullish or bearish on an issue, the algorithms will find extreme, polarizing, distracting content for you. Social media algos are more seductive than ever. Plenty of interesting (and uninteresting) people are shouting from the rooftops and howling at the moon. Trying to white-knuckle your way past it is a losing game. Conviction is the antidote. When you have a deep mission and you're really heads-down focused on something you care passionately about, it becomes easier to not follow whatever the news trends of the day are. I think that's what's going on with my no-cell-phone founder. In his mind, he's not doing anything radical. He just knows exactly what he wants to work on, and that makes it easy to tune out everything else out. The founders who struggle most with this are the ones pivoting 6 ways to Sunday and not really connected to a problem. Those are the people who are most concerned about FOMO. When you’re disconnected from the problem you’re solving, the noise does a good job of filling that void. This is how I think about investing too. At Horizon, our thesis is simple: follow the best founders, they will show you the way. We don't need fancy thought pieces about business models. We just talk to the most talented founders we can find. That's ultimately a better signal than anything the algorithms are serving up. For a VC, having some eye on trends in tech is probably more important than it is for a founder, although even that's arguable. Granted, maybe this is all a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” I probably spend more time thinking about the news cycle than I should. But I always come back to that founder without a cell phone. He gets by more than fine. And the important things always find him.

RankAI doesn’t replicate an SEO Agency’s playbook (although there was a period we did. RankAI think differently in a sense that if this ai agent thing is so cheap and so scalable. How could we make it deliver much much better results at an insanely fast pace that no hand made work is able to compete. That’s where things get interesting. If your business has great margin, then keep them and reinvest into creating more value!

@geoffreywoo People are okay paying us a crazy margin comparing to tools when we solve the last mile delivery problem using a service. We saves u 95% comparing to 100% capture value at a total different level.

personal observation: the founders i trust least are the ones with perfect answers to every investor question. real company-building creates scar tissue, weird tradeoffs, and a few answers that sound insane until the customer behavior explains them. what is the ugliest true thing in your business?

@aaron_epstein No longer need Software as a service just provide the service with AI Native Agency! Who liked software at the first place? They all wanted results and tolerated software as a proxy.

A lot of people are worried software is dead. But throughout history, any time humans have gotten new tools, we've always found new things to create with them that weren't possible before. It just doesn't always look exactly like the things of the past.

Our client base will be whoever is using seo agency or geo agency right now. The typical profile for us are growth stage company who have a strong need to build a scalable channel that doesn’t scale with money💰 ROI is very positive when you talk to people who are paying Social ads and Google ads.

@boyuan_ddd Ok but who's actually paying $5k/mo for this at scale? curious what the sales motion looks like

@FinnMurphy12 Very typical founders lineup investors to create pressure 😅 will make sure that doesn’t happen to Rankai Investors!

tip for YC founders - don’t ask someone to intro you to an investor if when the intro is made & the investor asks for a time in next 72 hours you send them a post demo day booking link - it’s like ‘you asked for this intro & now you want to book in 2 weeks from now?’ - kills vibe

@samuel_spitz What would you pick between startup founder and hyper growth employee at your 20s. I wrote a whole article upon it and would appreciate feedback

There are so many early employees getting rich in tech It's hard to start a unicorn It's hard to invest in a company that becomes a unicorn It's not hard to pick a hot $1B company that might be worth $10B in a year

@brettcalhounn Most founder put stealth because it looks cool and mysterious

@IshaKyarah Hahaha that’s why it is important to make sure FDE come back and distill knowledge to the system just like how cursor distill coders

@boyuan_ddd context engineering as the moat makes sense until a competitor just poaches your FDE person who holds all that context 😬

@daltonc Very sad we are too old for this! But this seems super fun 🤩 could we expand the age requirement?

YC founders from P26, W26, F25 and S25, this is for you 👇