rick yang

My family was on a group video celebrating my 92 yr old grandmother's second COVID vaccine shot. But it quickly turned to fear for her safety in public after an already isolated year+. It was heartbreaking and infuriating. We must #StopAsianHate and stand united against racism.

If you run ads, you’ve probably heard the news: Meta is banning credit card payments. Which means no more points/cashback on your largest expense. That’s millions of dollars in lost profit overnight. Today, @slashapp changes that.

Perplexity Computer now runs on your portfolio. Connect your brokerage accounts securely through @Plaid, then ask Computer to make a personal terminal that's always on.

Today we’re announcing that @NitraFinance has raised a combined $187 million in financing as we build the AI-native operating system for healthcare practices. We're also announcing that Dr. Richard Park, founder of CityMD and healthcare legend, will be joining Nitra’s Board.

Agentic commerce is here, and it doesn't need stablecoins Today we're launching Slash for Agents so you never have to login to your dashboard again Create cards, set spend controls, and send payments all through your agent over MCP Available to all Slash users today*

“Consumer is dead” is the laziest take in tech. If you believe it, you’ve already missed the next cycle. Consumer doesn’t die. It reboots with new technology and then you have a 7–10 year window to invest to capture 90% of that value. That window is now, so.... Today we announce our VC fund, Connect Ventures, backing the most exceptional Consumer founders.

When you’re running the world’s biggest seasonal operation with billions of customers, nonstop chaos, and overly spirited employees, a traditional bank just can’t keep up. Santa shares why he made the switch 🎅🏻

Dearest mother — I am overjoyed. Not only did our unit defeat the Bears draped in Gold, but we recovered a relic Axe that has a storied lore and great meaning to the men. Stupendous. Wake the hogs. Wake the cows. All will want to be apprised of this victory immediately. — Andrew

@kirbyman01 Beautiful, and so sorry for your loss.

Happy birthday in heaven! Mom would have been 68 years old today. She passed away a bit more than 2 months ago, suddenly and without any signs. I don’t know if I really understand the circumstances of her death or that I ever will. I was dreading today. Like any human, mom was imperfect, but I never doubted that she loved my brother and I. Or that she was proud of how we grew up. I remembered reading a tweet about a parent who passed away that helped me. So I wanted to return the favor to those who may have lost someone near and dear to their heart recently. She was born into a humble family in Korea with insanely high achieving three brothers, under loving and stern parents. Married my dad and they soon moved to San Diego. I don’t think it was easy for her to adjust and we ultimately moved back to Korea. My mom was well educated and proud. She worked as an English tutor to make the ends meet, and encouraged us to study hard. She would stand in line from 4am so that I could attend the best after school programs. I never skipped school and when I was very sick one day and thought I should stay home, she asked me to sit up from the bed. Then she told me if I can sit up in bed, I can sit in a classroom. I never skipped school.  I know she was the happiest when she lived with or around her sons. Years in New York and San Francisco with me and years in Seattle with my brother. I know she was the happiest then. And I am so glad that we loved and treated her the best we could. I’m glad that she got to live in a blue house of her own in San Francisco, with a beautiful garden. I’m glad she traveled many parts of the world, and that we were able to be there for her.  Yet I am regretful about my last conversation with mom. I am regretful that maybe I could have, should have done much more. I am regretful that I didn’t tell her how much I loved her and how much her support meant to me. What  my therapist said after my mom passed away continues to hit me like a brick. This is the first time that I am living my life, motherless. Obvious, but hard hitting.  I miss her. Because she lived in Korea during her last fee years of her life, it doesn’t hit me that she’s gone on a daily basis. But I miss her. Persistent. Ever present. At random times - on a plane, walking to work, late at night. I hope she is happy somewhere. I hope that she is finally resting. Away from it all.  All I can do is to carry her memory with me. And make sure that I am a better person for the world because of her. Kinder, softer and gentler. And remind folks to tell their parents that you love them. Often.  Happy birthday, 엄마. 사랑해요.

Slash, @slashapp, just crossed $150M in annualized revenue profitably. We went from $2M -> $150M in 24 months making us the fastest-growing business banking* platform of all time. 700 word post on 4 guiding principles that got us here. This cost us >$10M dollars to learn... (Bookmark this) I'll cover: • Picking the right market (where 99% of founders go wrong) • Why revenue is the ONLY business metric that matters • Why market saturation is fake • What every founder does day to day that they shouldn't 1. Attack “small” markets: Startup founders - myself included - gravitate towards working on companies that have huge upside. Here's the problem: it’s difficult to find aggressive product-market fit / build a differentiated product if you don’t sell ONE offer to ONE person. I'll repeat: one offer, to one person Examples: • PayPal didn't start by trying to own 70% of online payments they started with payment processing just for eBay merchants. • Uber started as black cars for rich SF people. Ask yourself, what am I selling and to who? If you're selling more than one thing to more than one person, in the beginning, you're not niche enough. Slash started by building a better credit card for SNEAKER RESELLERS. Ridiculously niche. And that tiny wedge alone got us to $5M ARR in 11 months. Once you dominate the niche, you earn the right (and the cash) to expand outward. We STILL go after “small” verticals because our competitors are too arrogant to do it. We walk in and own them. 2. Revenue is the only metric that matters. Everything else is cope. If your revenue isn't growing, nothing else matters. Revenue gives you two things: A) Money to redeploy. (Obvious.) B) Momentum. A team that’s winning wants to work harder. A team that’s losing checks out. To become a unicorn, you have to outwork everyone else. To outwork everyone else, you need morale. To get morale, you need wins. To get wins, you need revenue. Everything ladders back to one thing: Sell more, sooner. Drive sales and demand → everything else falls into place. 3. “Market saturation” is fake. When starting Slash, everyone told us we'd never be successful because Ramp, Brex, and Mercury were already worth > $10bn. The reality is that fintech is only 5% penetrated. 95% of business deposits and corporate card spend still runs through the legacy banks. Many markets are similar to B2B fintech. They can “feel” settled because there is a sexy startup that everyone’s heard about, but dinosaurs have all the rev share. There's always a way to find your wedge. 4. 99% of founders do the wrong thing at the wrong time When you start your role as the founder is to do EVERYTHING. And you should outsource nothing. Example: If you run an ecom business you should write film and edit EVERY single script. If you're a CTO you should write every line of code. Biggest 🚩in an early stage founder is someone who says they need to "outsource to an expert". No. You ARE the expert or you become one. Founders who outsource early are lazy. When you grow this needs to change rapidly. >10M ARR you need to SHIFT fast. Your role as the founder should be to bring in people competent enough to deliver on all of your initiatives. There is simply too much to do and it won’t be possible for you to brute force your way out of every problem. We're winning because 65% of our team is on the spectrum. We have savant engineers who this year alone have, shipped treasury, Stablecoin Payments, check deposits, SWIFT, Global USD, accounting automations, a completely new interface, and more. We have a world-class GTM and ops team. Because of it, we blow our competitors out of the water when it comes to revenue / employee, payment volume / employee, and other efficiency metrics. -------- If you have read this far, thank you. I got told countless times Slash would never be anything. We want Slash to be the first trillion dollar fintech company in the world. At our current growth rate we'll hit 1 billion dollars in revenue run rate in 18 months and 100 billion in 7 years. We’re giving it our all to accelerate our growth rate and hit these metrics even faster.

@juliannaelamb Congrats!

We started Stytch 5.5 years ago to build the next generation of identity infrastructure. We’ve come far in that time, but there’s still so much more to do as the way we interact with applications and the threats to identity security are evolving rapidly with AI. Today, I’m excited to share that we’re joining forces with Twilio to accelerate our roadmap by bringing identity and communication infrastructure together to help you build a new generation of AI-driven applications. I vividly remember sitting in the backyard of my mom’s house one Saturday amidst the 2020 lockdowns, working on what would become the Stytch API. One of the very first pieces of code that I wrote was a Twilio integration for doing SMS OTP login. It was the first end to end auth product that I built as part of the initial POC for Stytch. I remember sending my mom an OTP code and running in the house to make her finish the login, one of the first end to end Stytch authentications. The next product I worked on was email magic links, and as I was going through the setup, I excitedly sent @McStempel the onboarding flow for SendGrid (by then a part of Twilio), impressed with how thoughtful their developer experience was. Twilio has been a cornerstone of the Stytch product from before it was even a product, when it was mostly an idea and a little Go server running on my laptop. So it feels incredibly full circle to be joining forces with Twilio to double down on building identity infrastructure that makes securing applications simple for developers. Building Stytch has been an amazing journey, I’ve gotten to work with incredible, customer obsessed people, been challenged in ways I could never have imagined, and I’m so proud of the work we’ve done. But we’re just getting started. I'm excited for this next phase of the journey, to build even better products at a scale that we couldn’t even dream of when those first OTP codes were sent.

@McStempel @stytchauth @twilio Congrats!

I’m excited to announce that @stytchauth is joining @Twilio to continue our work to build the identity layer for a trusted & frictionless internet! Before we reached this point, Twilio had already shaped the development of Stytch in countless ways: - In our employee onboarding, Twilio is covered in 2 different sessions (Our Mission & Values session and our API design session) as an example to emulate and aspire to - We’ve used Twilio at every company I’ve worked at, and its global & reliable communication rails power Stytch’s own SMS, Email, and WhatsApp verification products - Twilio was often an example @juliannaelamb and I referenced for the type of developer brand we wanted to build We started Stytch with the simple goal to make identity easier for developers. Together with Twilio, we’ll bring that vision to life at a new scale, combining identity, communication, and data to make every digital interaction more trusted, for both people and the AI agents acting on their behalf. I’m deeply proud of what this team has built and grateful for everyone who’s been part of the journey so far 💙 If you’re a Stytch customer: your product, support, and pricing remains the same – our vision just got bigger, and we’re excited for you to see what we ship together with Twilio’s platform, scale, and data capabilities behind us stytch.com/blog/stytch-jo…

Our first big drop of the season 🍁 ⬇️ Introducing 𝗟𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗦𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 🚀, a first-of-its-kind credit risk score for modern lending. LendScore reflects financial behaviors using real-time cash flow data and network insights you can’t get anywhere else. The score is designed to complement traditional credit scores, so lenders can access creditworthiness with greater precision, and context than ever before.

🚨 Slash & @AppLovin are giving away $500,000 🚨 100 founders. $5K in matched ad credits each Spend $5K on @AxonAdsManager → Get $5K free Plus earn 3% cashback with an exclusive code Fill out our form below to get access

The best agents for software development are becoming the best agents for everything. Droids are the best software development agents in the world, reaching #1 on Terminal-Bench. We have raised $50M from NEA, Sequoia Capital, J.P. Morgan, Nvidia, Abstract Ventures, and other industry leaders including Frank Slootman, Nikesh Arora, and Aaron Levie. Today, Droids are available to anyone, with any model, in any interface: CLI, IDE, Slack, Linear, Browser.

💡 Materials underpin nearly everything: the homes and infrastructure we build; energy generation, storage, and transmission; mobility and aerospace; computing, communications, and sensing; clean water and food systems; health care and medical devices; textiles and packaging; and national security. Advancements here ripple across the economy. @cusp_ai is on a mission to solve the breakthrough materials needed to power human progress. NEA's @lilatretikov, @PhilipChopin, @andrewschoen, and @aya_somai_ detail our Series A investment in CuspAI, and why we believe founders @wellingmax & @ac_edwards_1 have the vision and ambition to transform the future of materials. 📰 nea.com/blog/algorithm…

What's next for Fintech? Hunter Worland, @rickyang, and @PhilipChopin dive deep into NEA's working thesis on the next chapter of fintech, including: 🌎 Macro trends 💸 AI-driven cost shifts 🤖 Agentic payments 🪙 Stablecoins 🔨 Opportunities to build 🤑 ...and more! 📰 Read it, bookmark it, revisit it here: nea.com/blog/fintechs-…

I first met Jimmy in 2021. Kevin and I had just launched Slash. We were barely a company. Our office was our Discord server. When we got a cold DM from one of Kevin's Waterloo friends interested in working with us, I was initially skeptical. - Jimmy hadn't made money online yet. - He had only started coding recently. But we took a chance on him and the moment he started working for us, we knew he was special. He would work 12-14 hour days unprompted, constantly wanted to learn more about the business, and cared deeply for our customers. He soon dropped out of school to join us full time. Fast forward a few years and he's done what has taken other fintech companies *dozens* of engineers to accomplish: build our issuer processor (low level integration with Visa) from the ground up. 100,000 card transactions a DAY are now made using the code he wrote. Why did we make this video and others about our team? Because Slash is what it is because of the amazing people we hire. The most important part of my job is hiring people smarter and more ambitious than me. Jimmy and all the other people we've highlighted on our X have made Slash the company it is today. Thank you @z54deng. Here's to continuing to build a legendary team. We're hiring.

Such a pleasure working with @victorcardenas @kevinbai0 and the entire Slash @slashapp team. The focus and velocity of shipping value creating features to their customers is impressive. If you’re looking for a 🚀🚀🚀, they’re hiring!

@victorcardenas @slashapp @base Congrats to Victor and the Slash team! So excited to see the continued progress that you are shipping!

We raised $60M for this moment: Introducing Slash Global USD (in partnership w/ @base). It's the first banking platform that lets you open a USD account without an LLC, EIN, or the rampant account closures they call "account safety". It took major legislative changes AND 3 years to pull this off. Here's what makes it so different: 1. Banking without an LLC. Before Slash: You needed a LLC, $1K in fees, a virtual address, and a U.S. tax ID. With Slash you get a real U.S. account & routing number in ~10 minutes with your foreign documents. 2. No more hefty fees. PayPal charges a 3-4% conversion fee. We let you receive USD and crypto (USDC) with NO fees. Not enough? We pay you up to 4.5% cash rewards just for holding your money with us. 3. Account freezes. The big guys love flagging success as “fraud”. We're built for fast moving founders. We'll never wrongfully freeze your funds. I'm putting my money where my mouth is: If we do, I'll wire $10K to a charity of your choice. ------------------------------ In 2021, I dropped out of the number 1 school in America as a Venezuelan immigrant to build Slash. I pivoted the business 2x before getting our first customer. Today: - 3,000 businesses use @slashapp - We bought the domain Slash . com for $1M - $4B is spent on our credit cards every year And we just raised $41M from the people who built fintech: @MenloVentures @NEA @ycombinator @goodwatercap -------------------------------- To celebrate this launch, we're giving away our internal AI finance Agent free. It watches your bank accounts 24/7. Flags double charges. Cancels forgotten subscriptions. It saved us $39,000 last month. You don’t need a Slash account. It works with any bank. Retweet + comment “Slash” and I’ll send you a free access link.

Engineers and cracked technical builders: Are you interested in working as a forward deployed engineer at @elevenlabs , @FactoryAI , Aurelian (@MaxKeenan3), or Forge (@markiewagner)? Come to our talent event Thursday, July 24th from 6:00–8:30 PM in SF where founders of some of the fastest growing AI startups will pitch you. You don't need to be a forward deployed engineer today to attend. These startups are just looking for people who are: -Deeply curious, move fast, and hustle -Engineering background -Excited to be customer-facing and creatively dig into customer problems Signup link below.