Md Halim

YC teaches every founder to build, measure, learn and pivot fast. We’ve lived that firsthand. In YCW20, we were building a crypto neobank. But the deeper we went, the more we realised: the real mess wasn’t in banking, it was in accounting. 🧵

Web 1.0 came with new channels: - email, search, link sharing, etc Web 2.0 too: - feeds, creators, viral invites, etc Mobile: - app stores, SMS invites, vertical vid, mobile ads What about AI? I’ve been complaining that AI hasn’t come with much. But we’re seeing a big growth channel opening now: Products that are built as APIs/CLIs that can be pulled into new projects by Codex/Claude on the fly Maybe the “AI-native hotel app” doesn’t mean a mobile booking app with an AI chat panel. It means a CLI that can book a hotel for you, that an AI agent can pull into a bespoke answer or project or into code. Bolting on an AI chat panel is this generation’s weak form of AI. Maybe the full reinvention involves making it agent-first not human-first and once you start looking at it that way, a lot of existing products suddenly feel mis-specified. they’re built as destinations, but agents don’t want destinations. they want capabilities. composable, callable, reliable capabilities. So instead of “go to Expedia” or “open the app,” the future interaction is more like: an agent assembles a workflow on the fly. it pulls a flight search tool, a hotel booking tool, maybe a weather model, maybe even your personal preference graph. none of these are full products in the traditional sense. they’re more like endpoints with taste and state. This flips distribution completely. historically you win by owning the surface area. seo, app store ranking, homepage traffic. in an agent world, you win by being the default callable primitive. the thing that shows up again and again in agent-generated plans because it works, has clean interfaces, and returns structured outputs. distribution shifts from “top of funnel” to “top of call stack.” And the crazy part is this might actually compress product surface area dramatically. the best products might look more like tight, extremely well-designed CLIs with opinionated defaults rather than sprawling UIs. almost like the stripe api moment, but for everything. imagine if every vertical had a “stripe-level” primitive that agents preferentially use. there’s also a weird inversion of brand here. humans used to choose brands. now agents will. so the brand becomes partially machine-legible. reliability, latency, error rates, schema clarity. you can almost imagine “agent seo” where the ranking factors are things like success rate across thousands of agent runs, or how easy your tool is to integrate in a chain-of-thought execution loop. This also suggests a new kind of moat. not just data or network effects, but integration depth with agent ecosystems. if claude or codex or openclaw learns that your tool is the safest way to accomplish X, it gets baked into prompts, templates, maybe even fine-tunes. you become a default. and defaults, historically, are insanely sticky. The contrarian take is that most current “AI features” are a local maximum. chat panels, copilots, assistants. they’re transitional. the real end state might look closer to invisible infrastructure that agents orchestrate. the ui is just a debug layer for humans to peek into what the agents are doing. so maybe the new growth channels for ai look like: - being callable - being composable - being reliable at scale in agent loops - being embedded in agent templates and workflows - being the default primitive in a given domain and if that’s right, then the question for any new product isn’t “what’s the ui” or even “what’s the killer feature.” it’s “what’s the minimal, highest-leverage capability we can expose such that agents will repeatedly choose us when building something new.”

After YC, Airbnb raised $615k at a $3M post-money valuation. We were the highest valuation in our batch.

@Markmanson Authenticity is quiet rebellion.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” — Emerson

@PeterDiamandis The catalyst is a person.

The most powerful force on earth isn't money, technology, or politics. It's a human being who feels something deeply enough to do something about it.

@marcrandolph can’t outsource the reps.

You learn by doing. There’s no other way.

@geoffreylitt resonance

best advice i ever got for leading creative teams: "it's a jazz band, not a sports team." instead of trying to "win", get curious: what new music will emerge from this unique group of people?

@mishadavinci Own your brain’s extension.

Decentralized intelligence is the future. Your AI. Owned by you.

@tferriss so true, vague worries feel bigger than written ones.

Whenever upset or anxious, ask “why” at least three times and put the answers down on paper. Describing these doubts in writing reduces their impact twofold. First, it’s often the ambiguous nature of self-doubt that hurts most. Defining and exploring it in writing demands clarity of thought, after which most concerns are found to be baseless. Second, recording these concerns seems to somehow remove them from your head.

@signulll Taste, judgment, relationships. The things that couldn't be automated even when we had less to automate with.

the irony may very well be that the more advanced tech gets, the more value concentrates in *very old human qualities*.

@faionur Every cycle ships a new lottery.

the easiest PMF in consumer is making people think they’ll get rich quick using your product the base motivation to use lovable/replit or kalshi/polymarket is identical even though the products couldn’t be more different

@Codie_Sanchez the bar is low

Normalize realizing the whole cheat code to life is just showing up again and again.

@0xNairolf Launch anyway.

you can have two mindset: waiting for the bull run to launch your product or be the product that restarts it

@ay_ushr yes.

If you are selling to founders and asking them to book a demo with you, PLEASE use google meet instead of Zoom

@staysaasy Finding more customers to talk to is carrying the whole weight of distribution

Working with startup people > hey there’s this cool new tool > thanks for letting me know. I just checked it out and I agree. Let’s start using it! Working with non startup people > hey there’s this cool new tool > we already use a different tool. We dont have time to do an eval. We’re hiring someone next quarter who is going to own this. Have you talked to legal. Security will never sign off. Talk to my admin. It’s not in the fiscal plan.

@jackfriks Find leverage

how can you make the most money, while having the most fun, and working the least hard something i think about a few times a week

@colejaczko Also, the regret tax compounds.

Better to pay the embarrassment tax than the regret tax

@RetentionAdam The roadmap is literally customer calls.

Until you have PMF, there are only 4 things you should be doing: > talking to customers > improving the product > creating content > finding more customers to talk to That's it.

@SahilBloom day 47 of embracing the boring. still boring. will report back.

I’m increasingly convinced that life gets more interesting when you embrace the boring. Success isn't flashy. It's built through disciplined routines. If you need constant novelty, you won't make it very far. To shine in the light, you have to embrace the boring work in the dark.

@naval the tool keeps eating the job description.

A “computer” used to be a job title. Then a computer became a thing humans used. Now a computer is becoming a thing computers use.

@elonmusk Past, present, and machines

This is the way