Y Combinator

🧪@Solugen is reinventing the trillion-dollar chemical manufacturing industry by combining biology and chemistry in a new way. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Jared Friedman visits co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti (@Gaurab) and Sean Hunt (@TungstenSeanide) at their Houston HQ to see how they went from a $7,000 PVC reactor to a billion-dollar company competing with industry giants. They cover the breakthrough behind their enzymatic + catalytic production, how they found their first customers, and why starting small and staying close to customers let them win in a capital-intensive industry. 00:00 - A New Kind of Chemical Plant 01:02 - Fusing Biology & Chemistry In a New Way 02:23 - The Eureka Moment: From Pancreatic Cancer to Hydrogen Peroxide 03:30 - Using A Sugar Feedstock Over Oil and Gas 04:22 - Proving Enzymes Work at Scale In Chemical Manufacturing 05:16 - The $7K PVC Reactor 06:44 - Finding First Customers at YC 08:12 - What The Co-founders Got Out of YC 09:33 - Seed Round to Bio Forge 10:32 - Scaling to a Full-Size Plant 11:57 - The Future of American Manufacturing 12:29 - The Next Decade of Solugen

We spent $15,000 on billboards targeting one person: the guy controlling all the chemical spend at a saltwater disposal company in Texas. We mapped his commute and bought every billboard between his house and the oil field. When we finally called, he said "I see your billboards everywhere." That landed us our first oil field contract. At the time our entire operation was a $10,000 reactor built from PVC pipes from Home Depot, turning corn sugar into industrial chemicals. People keep trying to throw it away. It still works. That leaking reactor started a multibillion-dollar company. @ycombinator visited our plant in Houston. The original PVC reactor is still on the floor next to the Bioforge.

We just launched a Tools section on Floot with real, working apps you can try right now. The best way to understand what Floot does is to use something built on it. Explore and see for yourself. If there's something you'd like to see built on Floot, let us know. What would you actually find useful?

Somewhere in India, the next great founder is building their ambitious idea. It's time to find them. @ycombinator is bringing Startup School to India. We wanted to create something worthy of it, not another event that looks good on a poster. Presenting Vibecon India. [1/5]

Tune in: youtu.be/PCypBUVhff8

🧪@Solugen is reinventing the trillion-dollar chemical manufacturing industry by combining biology and chemistry in a new way. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Jared Friedman visits co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti (@Gaurab) and Sean Hunt (@TungstenSeanide) at their Houston HQ to see how they went from a $7,000 PVC reactor to a billion-dollar company competing with industry giants. They cover the breakthrough behind their enzymatic + catalytic production, how they found their first customers, and why starting small and staying close to customers let them win in a capital-intensive industry. 00:00 - A New Kind of Chemical Plant 01:02 - Fusing Biology & Chemistry In a New Way 02:23 - The Eureka Moment: From Pancreatic Cancer to Hydrogen Peroxide 03:30 - Using A Sugar Feedstock Over Oil and Gas 04:22 - Proving Enzymes Work at Scale In Chemical Manufacturing 05:16 - The $7K PVC Reactor 06:44 - Finding First Customers at YC 08:12 - What The Co-founders Got Out of YC 09:33 - Seed Round to Bio Forge 10:32 - Scaling to a Full-Size Plant 11:57 - The Future of American Manufacturing 12:29 - The Next Decade of Solugen

I am so thankful for @paulg @jesslivingston @bchesky @cjoneslevy for believing me and selecting me to be the President & CEO of YC. To be able to lead this brilliant band of partners is beyond the best job I’ve ever had! If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life

Big congrats to @adrmtu and Felix on their $5m seed!

Today we're announcing Agent Auth Protocol An open standard for agent authentication, capability based authorization and service discovery ⇃read more ⇂

If you really want to hold yourself to a high standard, graph the growth rate of the number you care about instead of the number itself. Then you're winning if you can even keep it flat.

Perplexity is now powering health connectivity for millions of users through @TerraAPI Given that the best AI labs are moving into the health space, here's what I think is coming: You make thousands of daily decisions that change by the second Biomarkers, workouts, meals, sleep cycles, and stressors We are not meant to hold all this information No matter how brilliant your physician is, they see you for 15 minutes and work from a snapshot. The human brain doesn't scale to this problem AI does The doctor becomes the person you go to for surgery, and for judgment under uncertainty No doctor will ever know you better than your AI And software will be written for you daily Today, a doctor looks at a snapshot and puts you in a bucket. "Pre-diabetic", "at risk". These are population labels applied to an individual They tell you where you are. They don't tell you where you're going With continuous, full-context reasoning, the system doesn't label you, it tracks you. Your testosterone has drifted 10% over 10 months, your performance is dropping, here's exactly what to change this week to reverse it Medicine finally gets a feedback loop Chronic means we caught it too late. By the time you get the label - diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune - the damage has been accumulating for years. The disease isn't the problem. The delay is A system that monitors continuously doesn't wait for symptoms. It sees the drift at month 2, not year 10. The intervention is early, precise, and adjusts as your data changes. The feedback loop confirms it's working in days, not decades Chronic disease is a timing failure. The timing problem is solved

Helion has taken the #1 spot on the @geekwire 200 🎉

We moved to SF at 19 with hundreds of dollars last November. Since then, we got into YC and today we're launching Sonarly (@sonarlyhq). The missing layer of self-healing software. Coding agents are good enough. Building software is becoming easier because the codebase is the only context needed. Fixing it is much harder : context is spread across tools and human knowledge. We're fixing that. Sonarly is the context infrastructure that lets AI agents fix software autonomously.

Announcing 10x data efficiency on NanoGPT Slowrun! There are two macro trends worth highlighting: - pretraining is nowhere close to done, and - 100x looks feasible. Writeup on all the core ideas: qlabs.sh/10x

Paul Graham is back in the latest Social Radars, talking about what went on behind the scenes in the early days of YC. If you like the fly-on-the-wallness of Social Radars interviews, this is the most fly-on-the-wall of all. pod.link/1677066062/epi…

Tune in on: YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=2Q2uh1… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2sogpO… Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pau…

Paul Graham is back on The Social Radars with @jesslivingston and @cjoneslevy. This time, they focus on what was happening behind the scenes at Y Combinator in the early years. PG shares how YC grew through word of mouth, what it was like working closely with founders, and how much of it they figured out as they went. Along the way, he recalls stories from the early batches—the advice that stuck, and how small decisions shaped what companies became. He also reflects on how the startup world has changed since then, from becoming more visible to how AI is influencing what founders build now. 0:00 - Paul Graham Returns 0:52 - “We Never Tried to Grow YC” 3:38 - How YC Actually Got Its First Founders 7:12 - Why Press Didn’t Matter 12:06 - The Real Reason YC Worked 17:48 - What It Felt Like Behind the Scenes 24:31 - How They Helped Founders Day to Day 30:57 - Writing Demo Day Pitches 36:42 - When Everything Started Getting Harder 44:18 - The Sam Altman Transition 52:06 - What Surprised PG About AI and the Next Generation of Founders 59:21 - Final Thoughts

Another advantage of focusing on growth rate rather than absolute numbers is that it makes it easier to switch to a new variant of the product if you discover one. It makes it easier to see tails that will eventually wag the dog.

Re-introducing...Bond, your AI Chief of Staff. You worked 10 hours yesterday. Maybe 2 of them actually mattered. The rest? Standups, Slack threads, status updates, triaging emails. Executives don't need to work harder. They need Bond 👉 bondapp.io

Today we’re launching the newest version of @paradigmai When we started Paradigm, the goal was never to tack AI onto existing spreadsheets. It was to build a new type of interface that does the work for you. Now we’re pushing that vision much further. Workflows turn Paradigm into a system that runs research processes for you. Connect your CRM, existing spreadsheets, Slack, email, and internal data, and let Paradigm continuously run the research workflows your team already does. Same intuitive interface. But now a system of action. If you tried Paradigm before, try it again. Manual research is now a competitive liability.

Rippling is going to be one of the main companies where AI meets organizations. They're still young enough to embrace AI thoroughly, but they're also big enough that they touch organizations in many places.