Dalton Caldwell

After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator. YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul, Jessica, Trevor, and Robert for creating this extraordinary institution. Standard Capital is name of the AI-native Series A firm I’m co-founding with two of my favorite people: Paul Buchheit, my longtime colleague at YC, and Bryan Berg, the CTO of my previous startups. AI is reshaping every aspect of our world. We aim to embed AI in every part of our business and back the AI disruptors of tomorrow. Follow us at @Standard_Cap, you’ll be hearing more from us soon!

@semiozz @gruber @aaronsw Of course, but I thought Gruber wrote the Perl script himself? I sort of remember this stuff from the early days of blogging

@daltonc @gruber let’s not forget @aaronsw as well

Uh thanks for creating Markdown @gruber

@YoelNisanov Yep

@daltonc Have you seen Black Mirror Episode "Nosedive"?

These days, it really is all going on your permanent record.

@pedroh96 @OpenAI 🔥

I’m incredibly proud to share that @OpenAI chose Brex to power their global spend and financial operations. When you're building at the frontier of AI and scaling global teams and infrastructure at an unprecedented pace like OpenAI is, Finance can't be the thing that slows you down. You need spend visibility the moment it happens, controls that enforce themselves, and agentic workflows that eliminate the manual work so your team stays focused on driving the business forward. We were so impressed by OpenAI’s rigor in evaluating every solution in the market, and whether they align to the agentic future OpenAI is building. Their decision to run on Brex is a huge testament to our AI roadmap and vision for the future of Finance. We started @brexHQ around a simple idea: companies shouldn't have to choose between speed and control. There's no company in the world where that tradeoff matters more than OpenAI. We are honored to support them as they build the future. The best AI companies in the world, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Granola, Sierra, and Mercor choose Brex over every alternative for that exact reason. If you want to understand who’s truly building the future of AI in Finance, follow the customers you admire the most – not the hype.

Big launch from @simdotai

@_saumya_08 @mwseibel we just have bullet points - no script

@daltonc & @mwseibel podcast's each episode is so valuable, yet delivered in such a natural way to absorb the message. Kudos to both of them & the team putting it together. It is so natural, I wonder if they write script or just zero on bullet points.

@andreicscu @paultoo thanks Andrei!

@daltonc @paultoo Great episode!

New Dalton + Michael episode released: "How to get unique startup ideas" One of the biggest problems founders and (builders in general) have right now is not "how do I build my MVP?" but instead "what idea should I be working on?" It feels like all of the good ideas are taken, and the competition for those ideas is ruthless. In this episode, we discuss some of the starting conditions for coming up with unique startup ideas, and why it can feel so hard to come up with something that is both: 1) something people want and 2) original. We discuss some tactics you consider trying that are more likely to yield differentiated startup ideas vs derivations of whatever The Current Thing is. 🔗 below

@armutyus good luck!

@daltonc I believe we've found that uniqe idea, and right now we're in the "just don't die" phase 😄 great episode as always

@ichbinrc Did you watch the video?

@daltonc A lot of new ideas are being built around consumer but what’s your take on investing in consumer AI in 2026? As per records, the number of YC investments in this space is relatively very low compared to B2B deeptech etc..

@raphaelschaad For sure

@daltonc New bottlenecks being introduced by AI as well! PR reviews is a good example. AI makes it easy to generate code, shifting the bottleneck from writing it to reviewing it. There will always be bottlenecks; there will always be a least-bandwidth part, it's just shifting around.

Folks are justifiably disoriented because bottlenecks are increasingly being removed by AI, and the ramifications of this removal are TBD.

Napster was disorienting because music was previously tightly coupled to physical media/physical distribution. The decoupling of music from physical distribution happened overnight but it took a while for the world to digest. Same issues with print media.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

@the_collins_co @Standard_Cap It generated a random name that happened to be "Dalton"?

Damn @daltonc you spawned today Running @Standard_Cap by day and dropping in for office hours in codex by night I'm happy to call this AGI

I am not the best person to weigh in on this, but basically the music industry saw what the networks did with Hulu and sort of copied it. Vevo was a mechanism for the labels to allow their content on YouTube but keep ownership of it in various ways vs doing a more typical licensing deal, ie the Vevo branding everywhere and the ad inventory they kept to sell for themselves/hired their own ad sales team

@daltonc …please tell us more 👀

Vevo was a joint venture owned by the music industry, a feat of financial engineering that in practice meant weird usernames for artists on YouTube.

@NorelEitan it was much stranger than that

@daltonc The UN of music.