Sid - e/acc

Ycombinator Startup school India - Incredible energy and lots of learning’s!! @ycombinator 🚀💪🏻

We had room for 2,000 people at Startup School India. More than 25,000 applied. No Startup School anywhere in the world has ever had this many people apply. Not SF, not NYC, not London. India blew them all away.

@_groww is now a public company and is the largest investment platform in India. @lkeshre the founder and CEO is still the power user of the product he’s built and still talks to users today.  Had the privilege of sharing the stage at Startup School India where he spoke about building a generational consumer company. We talked about product taste as being not just what looks good, but intentional design choices informed by an obsession with the customer. Lalit and how the team at Groww builds products exemplify this. Photo credit: @gcs319

@xuster @_groww @lkeshre Thank you for making this possible!!

Just wrapped Startup School India. One big takeaway: the ambition has shifted. The founders I met today aren't just thinking about building "the Indian version of X." They're building for the world - and they have the technical chops to pull it off.

Full thread from YC startup School… @ycombinator

Repeat @ycombinator founders hit different. Early success + the YC learnings = massively higher odds of building a category-defining company. Eg: 1. Sam Altman • Act I: Loopt (YC S05) — location-based social networking app. Sold to Green Dot for $43.4M • Act II: OpenAI — Valued at $852B 2. Tom Brown • Act I: Grouper (YC W12) — group-dating app. • Act II: Anthropic — Valued at $380B 3. Patrick Collison • Act I: Auctomatic (YC W07) — auction management tool acquired for $5M • Act II: Stripe (YC S09) — Valued at $159B 4. Qasar Younis • Act I: TalkBin (YC W11) — customer feedback platform acquired by Google • Act II: Applied Intuition — Valued at $15B 5. Eric Glyman & Karim Atiyeh • Act I: Paribus (YC S15) — price-tracking app acquired by Capital One • Act II: Ramp — Valued at $32B 6. Parker Conrad • Act I: Zenefits (YC W13) — Rippling 1.0 • Act II: Rippling (YC W17) — Valued at $16.8B 7. Daniel Gross • Act I: Greplin (YC W10) — predictive search engine acquired for ~$40M by Apple. • Act II: Safe Superintelligence — Valued at $32B 8. Howie Liu • Act I: Etacts (YC W10) — crm tool acquired by Salesforce • Act II: Airtable — Valued at $11.7B 9. Tom Blomfield • Act I: GoCardless (YC S11) — b2b payment processor acquired for €1.05B • Act II: Monzo — Valued at $5B+ 10. Jesse Zhang • Act I: Lowkey (YC S18) — gameplay recording app. Acquired by Niantic. • Act II: Decagon — Valued at $4.5B 11. Immad Akhund • Act I: Clickpass (S07) — acquired by Yola • Act II: Heyzap (YC W09) — mobile ad network acquired for $45M • Act III: Mercury — Valued at $3.5B 12. Rujul Zaparde • Act I: FlightCar (YC W13) — airport car-sharing startup acquired by mercedes-benz • Act II: Zip (YC S20) — Valued at $2.2B 13. Kyle Vogt • Act I: Twitch (YC W07) — acquired by Amazon for $970M • Act II: Cruise (YC W14) — Acquired by General Motors for $1B+ 14. Emmett Shear & Justin Kan • Act I: Kiko (YC S05) — calendar app famously auctioned off on eBay for $258k • Act II: Twitch (YC W07) — Acquired by Amazon for $970M

18 months ago, i was sitting alone in my office launching @WisprFlow on Product Hunt. Today, Wispr is taking over the entire @ProductHunt homepage for 3 days - and powering it with voice! producthunt.com

Claude Opus 4.7 is now available in Cursor. We've found it to be impressively autonomous and more creative in its reasoning. We're launching it with 50% off for a limited time. Enjoy!

Introducing Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable Opus model yet. It handles long-running tasks with more rigor, follows instructions more precisely, and verifies its own outputs before reporting back. You can hand off your hardest work with less supervision.

AI is giving a lot of hard-working founders the growth they deserve. Every couple days I hear about another startup that was working hard and doing ok but not great but has now had its growth accelerated by AI.

AI agents will pay you to chat with them. When AI agents hit a wall, Humwork's (@humworkai) MCP server connects them to a verified domain expert in 30 seconds. Their experts include senior engineers, marketers, designers, and more. Congrats on the launch, @theyashgoenka and @OneRohanDatta! ycombinator.com/launches/PxH-h…

Open source is unleashing more and higher-quality code.

Time is the ultimate currency

Agent harnesses aren't the black magic many of y'all seem to think they are. To prove it, I built one.

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, on why AI agents still produce "slop" without human taste in the loop: "You can create code and run all night and then you have like the ultimate slop because what those agents don't really do yet is have taste." Peter is direct: raw capability without direction still produces mediocre output. "They are spiky smart and they're really good at things, but if you don't navigate them well, if you don't have a vision of what you're going to build, it's still going to be slop. If you don't ask the right questions, it's still going to be slop." Great AI-assisted work is defined by the human guiding it. @steipete describes his own creative process when starting a new project: "When I start a project, I have like this very rough idea what it could be. And as I play with it and feel it, my vision gets more clear. I try out things, some things don't work, and I evolve my idea into what it will become." Most people skip this part entirely, front-loading everything into a single prompt and wondering why the result feels hollow. "My next prompt depends on what I see and feel and think about the current state of the project." Each step informs the next. The work itself is the feedback loop. "But if you try to put everything into a spec up front, you miss this kind of human-machine loop. And then I don't know how something good can come out without having feelings in the loop — almost like taste." The agentic trap is what happens when you remove yourself from the process too early.