Yashraj Shukla

This is me so far in the journey which started two years ago with one dream to bootstrap a company Top Learning: Speed of execution is your only friend when new data changes your reality every week. Can sense the Sun on the horizon, inflection point is near. God bless the hustle

@elonmusk But there is no way you are buying them for $60B when twitter itself cost $44B?

After 15 years of investing, we realised that truly exceptional founders have something impossible to fake: deeply unconventional lives. We analysed 15,000 founders using five binary signals to measure this: odd hobbies, early signs of exceptionalism, extreme life choices, unusual geographies, non-linear careers. These sum to give a 0-5 score per founder. Whether someone started coding at 10, speaks five languages, climbed Everest or quit a safe job to live in Chile, the signal was deviation from the mean. Rather than focusing on IQ or EQ, we call this metric the Outlier Quotient, or “OQ”. When forecasting founder success, it turns out that OQ was the single most predictive variable in our entire classification model, trained on ~70 different factors. Our OQ score had zero correlation with having worked at a top-tier company or attending an elite university. The signals most VCs rely on aren’t just noisy, they’re blinding. The best founders don’t signal like everyone else, they don’t think like everyone else, and they certainly don’t build like everyone else. If you want to spot breakout talent before the rest of the market, stop screening for conformity. Back the founders the system was built to filter out.

Typical valuation at YC demo day (most will dilute 15% because of this OAI deal) Mid‑tier startup: $15 million post‑money "Average" startup: $18–$22 million post‑money (w few thousand dollars in monthly revenue) Top / “hot” companies: $25–$40 million post‑money (if they have $1M ARR) Outliers (Breakout AI or hardware): $50M–$100M+

OpenAI is offering $2M in tokens to every YC company in the spring and summer batches. We extended the summer deadline to May 25 so more founders can get in on it. ycombinator.com/apply

@localhostIND Loved the idea of Taan, when I met you at MagicBall event. Also have you thought about going into sound design for movie production?

Finding the right soundtrack for a scene is still weirdly hard. Adithya is trying to fix that. Introducing taan, it watches your video and generates music around how the scene actually feels.

@TheRohanVarma @sama “getting $100-200M valuation for your seed round”

Yesterday @sama just offered to invest $2M of OAI credits into any current YC company as an uncapped SAFE. If I was in YC today, here is why I would take the deal: 1. You will spend that much $ on tokens building your product quicker than you think. The best AI-leveraged engineers are spending ~$10k+ per month on tokens. Thats $1.2M/year for a 10 person engineering team. The OAI deal means you don’t have to think twice about accelerating your engineering. 2. OAI tokens are worth 2X Anthropic tokens. Our frontier models are ~50% more token efficient than Ant’s. This means our $2M in GPT tokens is worth $4M in work accomplished with Opus. 3. You can use the tokens on the API. This means you can offer agentic products to customers without worrying about price or charging while you find PMF. Any product you offer that is useful with agents will use a non-trivial amount of tokens. Worrying about those costs while finding PMF doesn’t seem worth it. 4. The dilution will be minimal if you find PMF as an AI-native product and raise a Series A. A lot of series A’s I see these days are in the $100-$200M valuation range. $2M at that valuation is 1-2% dilution, which is very worth it if it allowed you to defer raising as much in your seed in order to pay for tokens. Would be curious how folks are thinking about it! Definitely an interesting offer to consider 👀

@Ayush_cg counter initiative findings. loved your process to validate/invalidate ideas. maybe you can document it too

After talking to 30-40+ AAA game designers, producers, and directors, I wrote an article on why I don’t think AI NPCs are a particularly attractive startup opportunity. I’d love to be wrong, given how much VC money has been deployed into this space, but we’ll see how it plays out. ayushhh.medium.com/the-bearish-ca…

@thinkwithmark But reading books is a converging market?

We raised $1M dollars to reinvent how people read. Introducing Mark II - a $159 AI bookmark. Thread below

@avipat_ @PaulYacoubian you clearly got something wrong if couldn’t capitalise on first movers advantage, there was no need of this video apart from it’s a brilliant pegging strategy

General Catalyst just co-led a $31.5 million seed round into a blatant rip-off of my company, Kled. (skip to 40 seconds if you want to skip context) I would typically not speak on things like this, but this level of blatant copycatting is egregious and completely unacceptable, and needs to be made an example of. This is one of hundreds of YC startups who have conducted this disgusting behavior. Unimaginative slop that continues to get rewarded due to nepotism.

Major green flags in a founder: 1/ crazy grit, won’t give up 2/ started building before pitching investors 3/ constantly moving, constantly generating new information 4/ very technical 5/ not addicted to founder cosplay 6/ goes out and talks to users 7/ finds creative, experimental marketing channels 8/ genuinely cares about what they’re building 9/ never blames others or external factors 10/ tinkered with projects obsessively at a young age 11/ constantly comes up with interesting ideas 12/ knows their metrics cold 13/ doesn’t chase hype, chases truth 14/ excellent storyteller. Can sell the vision to hires, investors, and customers 15/ can clearly explain what they are building in one sentence 16/ can’t stop talking to customers If you hit a good chunk of these, tell me what you are building

@StoryfulNews Any update?

@whynesspower Hello, I’m with Storyful, a news agency that works with newsrooms including the Washington Post, ABC and more. Did you film this footage? If so, may we distribute this footage, with a courtesy to you? Thank you.

📍Guys, I saw 15 falling stars from Bengaluru sky yesterday. At 2AM overheard a guy in our shared office space that Lyrid Meteor shower is happening, sneaked to the roof top of the office building, couldn’t see shit. Then went to this strangers house, sat there for four hours, first saw fireballs, light flashes lasting 0.1s, thought I must be hallucinating. Around 4 to 5:30AM, it was moving stars with a trail, one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen. Then we had this wild idea, let’s go watch Project Hail Mary at 6:30AM :)) Serendipity ✨

@vladivalz Any update?

Hi whynesspower! I hope you're doing well. I came across your video and was really impressed! We at VBear media would love to share it with our media partners. Would it be okay to use it under a non-exclusive license, giving you full credit, of course? Also, if you could share the date and location of the video, that would be fantastic. Thanks a bunch! vbear.media/permission

🚨#BREAKING: Cursor stores your full conversational history, secrets, source code (in plain text) locally on a SQLite file with no encryption, no OS keychain protection and no integrity check sqlite3 "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb" \ "SELECT key, value FROM cursorDiskKV WHERE key LIKE 'bubbleId:%';" That single SQL query dumps every message of every chat the user has ever had with Cursor's AI - system prompts, model replies, attached file contents. No permission, no auth I dug deeper and ran the query with regex filtering to find specific env variable exposed in chats with Cursor. Any random npm package/github runner can CARRY OUT A SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACK ON YOU Be very skeptical of any third party VC code extensions or pip package - they all have the access required to do this silently

@jd_startup Just post more letters!

@whynesspower distribution?

i'm doing: > aggresive sales w F50 companies > going to private night dinners with customers and pitching cold to the us govt. officials > still programming 10+ hours a day > iterations on company's vision > linkedin outreach at this point, you think i am still employable?

If you want a life that feels like yours, you have to get in touch with your inner madness. Become a rebel. Unapologetically you. Take the path nobody dares to walk. Read 700 page philosophy books. Work for a month straight. Build something from nothing. Then disappear for a week. Don't be rational. Don't be logical Don't be normal ever. Be rare. Be obsessive. Be exactly who you are. This one mindset shift can absolutely change everything.

@nathaneo_j @grok name the background music used in this video and tell me if that is copy right free?

Introducing Series - the AI social network that lives in your texts. For the first time, you can now discover new people directly within iMessage. Live now (thread below)

@mernit the building part is figured out, how do you actually audit them? you pitch as a consultancy and tell them the ROI of them letting you observe the employees work?

For the past few months, I’ve been running an AI swat team. We learn about a company, audit their workflows, and build them an AI app to automate their busywork. This sounds straightforward, but building these apps is annoying because you keep rebuilding the same things over and over: a filesystem, sandboxes per user, auth, streaming, and connections to messaging apps like Telegram and Slack So today we’re releasing all of it together in a batteries-included Python framework called Capsule It includes a sandboxed computer, multi-channel messaging, background jobs, multi-user auth, and payments – everything you need to ship a production-ready AI product super fast The faster you ship, the more you’ll learn from real customers, and the sooner you get PMF

@CausalMarkets 🙌 thats also the reason why i am so inactive here on twitter

@whynesspower Good stuff

@cyrilXBT @grok summarise the whole video into crisp actionable steps on exactly what to do

ANTHROPIC JUST EXPOSED HOW BADLY MOST PEOPLE ARE PROMPTING CLAUDE. Their applied AI team dropped a 24 minute workshop. Free. From the people who wrote the model. Not a course creator. Not someone who figured it out by accident. THE TEAM THAT BUILT THE THING. Here is what makes this uncomfortable to watch. There are 6 elements to a properly structured Claude prompt. Most people are using 1. Maybe 2 if they are being generous with themselves. That gap is the difference between Claude giving you something useful and Claude giving you something you could have Googled. The people who watch this workshop tonight will prompt differently tomorrow morning. The people who skip it will keep wondering why their outputs feel slightly off no matter how much they tweak the wording. 24 minutes. Free. From the only people on earth who know from the inside exactly how Claude thinks. I watched it twice. Then I built a Claude Skill that applies all 6 elements automatically so you never have to think about prompt structure again. Every prompt you run goes through the framework without you doing anything manually. Full guide and the skill setup is below. Bookmark this. Come back to it this weekend. This is the thing that compounds. Follow @cyrilXBT for the exact Claude skills, prompt architecture, and systems I use to get outputs that most people do not believe came from one person.

@Aniketh_Deb here is my contrarian opinion: idea == product there is practically no time delta left between knowing and building i reject "ideas don't matter, only execution" both of them are the same thing will share, only the day i come out of stealth

@whynesspower hey yash I'm super curious to know what you are building is it possible for you or are you comfortable sharing about it ?

@willchen500 tbh u r slow, 2 weeks is a lot of time

Harvey is valued at $11B. Legora just raised at $5.5B. I built their entire web application in two weeks and I'm making it open-source and free for everyone to use. Say hi to Mike: mikeoss.com. When I got the chance to try Harvey and Legora, I was surprised by how simple they were. A thought came to mind: I could probably build something similar in no time at all with Claude. And so I did. Assistant, project, tabular review and workflows. You get it all without vendor lock-in. Mike offers law firms an alternative, where they own the application layer and aren't stuck with a vendor they're renewing forever. You can try Mike in the demo on the website, or go to the GitHub link on the site to download the code and run a local version yourself.