Jared Friedman

Yesterday we hosted 400 top university students at the YC Summer Conference - a fun day of talks about startups.  Talking to the students afterwards, I found myself giving a lot of the same advice. So in case it's useful to others, here is my startup advice for students.

Congrats to @JackOswald10 and @singularitydefc on their $80M Series A at a $400M valuation! They're building low-cost missile-based air defense interceptors designed to be produced at automotive scale. The founding team includes alumni of SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, and Lockheed Martin, alongside operators who sold more than $12B in air defense systems over their careers. They run multiple flight tests a month and are building production lines larger than any comparable US system. tectonicdefense.com/interceptor-st…

I'm excited to finally be able to talk about @JackOswald10, who is building one of the most important companies in the world right now. We've all seen from Iran that not having a scalable air defense system is a critical problem for the US military. That's what Jack and the Singularity team are solving. I first met Jack when he was a student at MIT, but the story goes back way before then. Jack built a 10,000 lb thrust solid rocket motor *in high school*. He spent his undergrad years at MIT working on the Raptor engines at Spacex. He was the first hire at Tom Mueller's startup Impulse Space while still in college. If you tried to imagine the perfect person to start this company, you'd picture Jack. Because this technology is sensitive, Singularity had to stay in stealth for a long time. Over the past two years, they've quietly raised $80M and built one of the best teams in the industry. In particular, they invested early - much earlier than most startups - in building a manufacturing team that knows how to scale low-cost mass manufacturing. The current defense industry is designed to produce a small number of high cost systems, which is why we're in such trouble right now. Only a new company that's built from the ground up for mass production will be able to meet the needs we have now, and that's what Singularity is.

@GaddipatiHarsha Strong showing for Georgia Tech - they're definitely doing something right.

pulled the schools of all 436 founders in yc's current batch. mit: 21 stanford: 20 berkeley: 20 a dead heat at the top. georgia tech at #4, ahead of every ivy. tu munich cracks the top 6. pedigree is getting less predictive, not more.

if you raised on a SAFE, didn’t give up a board seat at seed, launched on hacker news, or took advice from a pg essay, you benefited from yc people forget what venture looked like before them. convertible debt, heavy dilution, founders swapped out for professional ceos. yc dragged the whole ecosystem toward founders, and standard capital is now doing the same to the series a. that lineage runs straight back to yc yc rejected us multiple times. i still raised on a SAFE and learned from their videos the whole time people dunk on yc for clout but every single seed founder is raising on rails they built, yc founder or not

@YossiEliaz Real factories :)

This is the playbook for how we rebuild America's industrial power.

@jscnjay It wasn't! Can't you tell it sounds human?

Guaranteed this post was also written with an LLM.

In that sense, they arguably don't quite pass the Turing Test, because you can still tell you're talking to one, even if it's smarter than you.

LLMs are incredibly good at almost everything, except not sounding like an LLM.

@wtfobaid @ycombinator @sdianahu @garrytan @dflieb @gustaf @t_blom @bosmeny Impressive hacking! Sorry for all the hopefuls out there, but we have patched the bug :). Obaid - thanks for reporting the issue. Look forward to seeing you at Startup School in SF in two weeks!

until YC fixes it. pls do @ycombinator @snowmaker @sdianahu @garrytan @dflieb @gustaf @t_blom @bosmeny

and not only does it accept it, but along with hidden scoring parameters used by yc’s backend, even the visible report strength of the same project uploaded through “regular” and “boosted” paxel differs wildly.

loved seeing @UseCorgi @mintlify @TryLance @cursor_ai @TrustVanta @GustoHQ @Astranis @bild_ai on day #1 of pastry deliveries 🚚 🚛 if you’re scaling your eng team in sf, comment 🥐 and we’ll come to you next

@TO I can hook you up!

How do I get one of these for Corgi Cafe?

YC S24 representing at @RaiseSummit! @ycombinator, @nico_laqua, @UseCorgi, @Starcloud_

I'm building a web app that integrates with a number of dev tools via APIs, and the experience of working with dev tools companies in the Claude Code world is wild. Every time I run into an issue with the APIs, I have my coding agent compose an email I send to the companies. They paste my bug report into their agent, which then sends feedback back to my agent. Yes, the humans are still the slow message passers between the two superintelligences, but we're still making 100x faster progress than the old days. It feels like I'm getting an early taste of an experience that's about to become a lot more common.

@eve_bouff What a great photo. Looks like a cartoon character :)

animals make life so beautiful

Fable is so insanely good. Deserves the hype.

@tariusdamon Great idea!

@snowmaker History revisited with Grok imagine

One of the great chapters in America's history is how we converted our economy to wartime production in the 1940s and used our industrial power to win WWII. I'd learned in high school that we converted car factories into tank factories. But I never knew the full story until last month, when I read Freedom's Forge, the definitive book on this. It turns out the true story is even crazier and more impressive. In honor of July 4th, here's the story of how America won WWII, one factory at a time.

You can read the full book at amazon.com/Freedoms-Forge…

At peak velocity in 1944, America produced fifty merchant ships a day, 9,000 tons of steel an hour, and a warplane every five minutes. That is roughly a 100x scale up during the war. That's what this country is capable of.