Tatiana Botskina

800 attendees. 1 mission: Automating the cloud 🚀 Last week, we hosted the inaugural @kubeautoday in Amsterdam, and the energy was electric! We set out with a simple goal: to bring together practitioners using AI to automate cloud at scale through real production stories. The community response blew us away: 🧑‍💻 800 checked-in attendees. 🔥 House full sessions from the first keynote to the final talk. 👏 Deep-dive technical discussions that prove AI-driven automation is no longer "the future", it’s happening now. A massive thank you to our sponsors for making this possible: @cast_ai, @AMD, @QodoAI, @stack8s, @awscloud, @coderabbitai, and @OpenObserve and amazing speakers including Kelsey Hightower, @Njuchi_, Daniel Gebler, @salaboy, @tbotskina, Ioana Adelina Apetrei, @virtualized6ix, Andrew Martin, @janakiramm and more! 🌍 Next Stop: The KubeAuto Global Tour! We’re just getting started. We are taking these stories across the globe: 📍 São Paulo – 27th May, 2026 📍 Mumbai – 17th June, 2026 📍 USA – Late 2026 🔗 Read more about it in our press release: cast.ai/press-release/… Stay tuned for registration details!

@bhalligan Creating something from nothing is always more challenging than scaling existing business that already works.

@tbotskina Wowsa. Why’s that?

Being a startup founder is relatively easy Being a scaleup CEO is extremely hard

A few months ago, I criticised YC for funding dropouts to build compliance tools. Apparently, I was right. Delve was accused of faking compliance reports. Am I surprised? No. What can you expect from people who failed to complete a university degree because it was “too boring”? Compliance is boring too. Unfortunately for these founders you cannot “drop out” of it.

If you are not technical, you probably should not start a tech company unless you already sold something before you built it. In that case you can simply hire technical talent.

If you want to evaluate the quality of an AI startup, look at who they are hiring. If they are not hiring PhDs in AI and instead are hiring salespeople and software engineers with LLM skills, they are most likely building an AI wrapper.

Add a little more detail and your choice may change: Option A Single. No kids. Feel safe and secure. $10M net worth. Travel anywhere. Total freedom. Quiet house. Quiet holidays. Pursuing your passion every day. Option B Married to an abusive partner. 3 kids, one with severe disability. $1M net worth. Drive a Toyota. Live in a country affected by war. Chaos every morning. Loud house. Full dinner table. Feel unsafe and worried about your family. Don't have time and energy to pursue your passion.

Imagine you had to choose your life at age 40: Option A: Single. No kids. $10M net worth. Travel anywhere. Total freedom. Quiet house. Quiet holidays. Option B: Married. 3 kids. $1M net worth. Drive a Toyota. Chaos every morning. Loud house. Full dinner table. Be honest, which life are you choosing?

@jackclarkSF Are you only hiring "friends"? Because there is no other reason to reject highly qualified candidates who work in AI safety for longer than your company exists.

This is an incredible time to join - if this interests you, please apply to our Research Scientist or Research Engineer / Scientist roles. Find the application links & more info on the team here: docs.google.com/document/d/1fa…

We’re aggressively scaling up the Societal Impacts (SI) team at Anthropic as our models are beginning to have non-trivial impacts on the world.

@gailalfaratx How is the fact that she has no children and divorced related to her professional abilities? It is so sad to see such a sexist comment about a woman from a woman. Nobody would care if a man had children but for women it’s always a headline.

Amanda Askell, who has no children, was previously married to William MacAskill, co-founder of Effective Altruism Dario and Daniela Amodei, CEO and President of Anthropic, used to live in a rationalist group house with Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded GiveWell, an early Effective Altruism-aligned organization Daniela and Karnofsky are now married. Anthropic also received significant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF was also a prominent Effective Altruism donor, prior to the collapse of FTX due to fraud. These connections between Anthropic leadership and the Effective Altruism community are alarming and if you go down the rabbit hole and trace the money trail, it will be very interesting…

@StefanFSchubert Man with dozens of children doubting professional credibility of a woman just because she doesn’t have children is outrageous. Mr Musk can have as many children as he wants but it doesn’t give him entitlement to define the future of the world.

Any sane person would rather entrust Amanda with the future than Musk

@esindurmusnlp Are applications reviewed by the hiring team directly, or are many filtered out at the recruiting stage before that happens? Why do you keep reposting roles while rejecting high quality candidates without inviting them for the interview?

We also have an RE/RS opening if you're interested: job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs…

@garrytan Such companies should be cancelled. Nobody should work or buy from them. They do not deserve it. I applied to YC 8 times. PhD in AI - you do not care. Real customer traction - you do not care. What you care about is funding young minds so you can control and influence them.

Delve is now a top YC startup. YC funded 10% of the people who came to this talk. You can do a lot in two years.

@garrytan You fund people who do not deserve it. How on earth could you fund dropouts to build compliance software? This is outrageous. People with real expertise cannot get funded, yet inexperienced dropouts get huge amounts of money, your network, and YC branding. YC is a shame.

@gdb Why?

agents are kinda magic

@BenjaminDEKR AI research labs and companies with strong research focus should not be run by non AI people.

Can somebody explain what Mira Murati is good at? I'm not trying to be mean, I'm asking genuinely. Like what is her main expertise or skill? Her time at OpenAI seemed less than stellar, she appeared not fully prepared for several high-profile media interviews (including the famous Sora one) She leaves to found Thinking Machines and raises huge sums of money (billions) based on........ what, exactly? It was widely reported that they provided no clear product plan and only vague financials. Have not shipped anything of substance (only aware of a very lightweight API tool Tinker) And now everyone is leaving, she can't keep people and it appears to be a sinking ship So I'm genuinely asking, what were investors betting billions of dollars on here? What was the selling point?

@t_blom Asking for age is discrimination. Is it the main criterion you are filtering by at YC?

I'm thrilled to announce that YC will be visiting Europe's no. 1 university - Imperial College London - on Jan 28th Get your ticket here: events.ycombinator.com/yc-imperial-20… (although it pains me to say that as an Oxford alum 😭)

@t_blom @paulg If it pains you, don’t say that.

@antonosika I just got my .env file with all credentials completely erased by AI coding app. Now, I am more cautious with using any AI for coding. I am curious how do you manage changes to the app code on the background to ensure consistency for users?

The sentiment around AI-generated apps has changed a lot in the last couple months. I'm not really seeing people use the word "slop" anymore. Slop came from lowering the barrier to entry while quality stayed low. Now the barrier is even lower, but the general quality is a lot higher.

@helderbuilds Personally, it would be challenging but with sufficient resources, why not trying? Other AI labs are not too far from OpenAI and might be even better at some benchmarks.

@tbotskina OpenAI's moat is real - model quality, inference, and API adoption are unmatched. But the race is accelerating. What's your take on competing with them?

@patrickc @Microsoft @Copilot @stripe Is it a coincidence that I started building economic infrastructure for AI before you, and then you decided to hack my platform and steal the idea? It seems that rich people do not have any ethical standards. 😭

New: @Microsoft is launching a shopping experience inside @Copilot, powered by @Stripe. Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI. We're eager to rethink every part of the existing commerce and financial stack.