conor brennan-burke

what a year at @hyperspell! we started 2025 with: 👥 2 cofounders working remotely across continents ⚙️ no product 💸 no revenue or customers, having just refunded everyone and pivoted 🏢 working from coffeeshops, sleeping in a hacker house closet 🚫 6 rejections from @ycombinator all we had was determination and something to prove we're ending 2025 with: 👥 a team of 3, cofounders living + building together in sf ⚙️ a product customers choose over competitors with tens of millions raised 💸 hundreds of thousands in revenue from dozens of customers 🏢 sharing an apartment and workspace, surrounded by our yc batch ✅ accepted into yc f25 on app #7 and 5x'd revenue during the batch thank you to the customers, investors, and friends who believed in us before we had anything to show for it I'm proud of what we built, and even more proud of who we built it with. huge gratitude to my cofounder @manuebert and our founding engineer @benhorowitz couldn't ask for better people to build this with onwards

@zagdotdev incredible launch video

Introducing Zag AI review agents for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS developers. Zag runs agents in real Apple developer environments with Apple Silicon, Xcode, simulators, and your complete toolchain. Describe agents in TypeScript or Swift that do code review, QA, security, or App Store compliance, and run them on every PR.

@thestefanl @IditOryon @hyperspell @realbenhorowitz @maebert @xdenuzzo @szar_david she’s crushing it

@contextconor @IditOryon @hyperspell @realbenhorowitz @maebert @xdenuzzo @szar_david amazing! idichella?

today was @IditOryon’s first day at @hyperspell! idit is leading gtm and we’re so excited to have her join the hyperspell family we made a team card to welcome her, and even our ai agent cubert pitched in

Conor (@conor_ai), @hyperspell’s founder, applied to YC multiple times before finally getting the "Yes" that mattered. He realized that joining an earlier batch would have actually killed the company's long-term potential. The rejection forced them to focus on the product without the distraction of a Demo Day deadline. This "forced focus" resulted in a technical breakthrough that defined their eventual success. Timing is everything in Silicon Valley, and sometimes a delay is just a setup for a bigger win. Don't rush the process if the tech isn't there yet.

Closing a deal, whether it’s with an investor or a program, requires the same persistence as closing a customer. When I got rejected from the co-founder fellowship, I didn't see a wall; I saw an opportunity to provide more data. I responded to the rejection email with a clear, direct value proposition that changed their mind instantly. That single reply led to me meeting my co-founder and the birth of Hyperspell. If you can’t handle a rejection from a fellowship, you’ll never handle a rejection from a $10M customer. Stop being polite and start being persistent. @conor_ai @hyperspell

@adisingh the legend returns sf isn't ready

Landed back in SF today. Feeling as refreshed, relaxed, and ready as ever. Spending some time away helps you grasp how early in AI we all are. There is still so much to be built, so much to be done. We’re just getting started - back to work.

@hahnbeelee the team at mintlify is next level announce a series b and host an incredible gala then the next day right back to shipping 🚀🚀

Agents are setting up and debugging software more than humans now. This is a huge opportunity for anybody who wants to make their docs better: agents read more carefully than humans, and have infinite patience for giving feedback. We think this could be incredibly beneficial for the developer ecosystem. But we also know that instructions telling agents to send info to a third party is essentially prompt injection and there is no standard on how to go abou this. So we're asking for feedback—what do you think the best version of "agents giving feedback on docs" looks like? You want your agents to use our products better, we want to make our products better for agents, let's figure it out!

@Kyriakos_Pelek you got it

@contextconor PMF first, then scale the team and partnerships

the thinking is: pre-PMF (usually before series B) founder time is the biggest bottleneck post-PMF the team handles execution, so making the right decisions matters more than raw hours relationships need time to nurture. best to build after pmf

@RobertDMellish Yeah. Similar tradeoff for building solo vs with a cofounder I have an amazing cofounder, but no cofounder is better than a bad cofounder and if you’re spending lots of time trying to find one, then you’re better off just building solo

@contextconor It’s one of the most important questions for a solopreneur: do I spend a significant portion of my limited time and energy on cultivating a high-risk/high-reward cofounder relationship, or do I accept the well understood challenges and limitations of going it alone?

@BrookeDukellis It’s all about tradeoffs and priorities in the short term The goal is to all one day find both love and pmf 🚀

@contextconor Love this framing around PMF / founder time tradeoffs Much more nuanced than pure hustle culture… because in that case, dream bigger 🤣

@itsajinkyaraj it’s hard to be a great partner as a pre-pmf founder you have no time or emotional bandwidth, it’s very stressful and tough on the other person too

@contextconor Yep, it's a solid advice. I have seen healthy relationships ending up in a break up cuz of pre pmf stress and exhaustion.

@BrookeDukellis @thestefanl I would love to have an amazing partner now, but there literally aren’t enough hours in the day to find one and also build the startup better to just acknowledge the reality and lock in now than try to find love and find pmf at the same time (and not get either)

@contextconor @thestefanl haha this is super fair, the logic makes sense I see the value of founder time daily as an early stage founder

People need to stop being lazy on here. No dating until Series B. Let’s dream bigger… what, nobody wants an IPO?

@claudiaroussel_ @longnow @grayarea this existed pre-Covid with the tech + burner crowd lots of tech money going into burner art + music + camps hasn’t been happening with the post-ai founders yet though

there is a difference between patronage vs. curation that sf has lost if tech stopped trying to produce the underground, what it could actually offer is real estate and audio gear and sustained funding for weird, cool shit that doesn't monetize (see @longnow, see @grayarea) the WORST version of tech in SF is tech trying to curate culture and play taste maker the bridge is tech learning to underwrite w/o needing a seat at the table and the underground learning how to accept resources without selling the soul

@sporadica this was happening pre-Covid with the tech/burner crowd (Justin Kan with TE, etc), but hasn’t happened with the younger ai generation of founders yet

SF culture could be fixed pretty quickly if someone would come 'round and find a way to be the bridge between the tech crowd and the creative, underground crowd, and then actually produce cool shit remind the people how to have fun and be unserious thank goodness it's happening

@thestefanl @BrookeDukellis haha I mean you do you the reason it’s single until series b is bc pre-pmf founder time is the most valuable resource, after pmf you have a big team so decisions are what matter time to series b is ~4 years and IPO is like 15+, I want to get married before I’m 40 lol

@BrookeDukellis well @contextconor whats your take here? up the stakes?

@BrookeDukellis @thekevinqi the original idea was by series B you have pmf and a team, so your time stops being the bottleneck your decisions are what matter series B+, so that’s when you finally have bandwidth to find love pre-series B the critical input is founder time

@thekevinqi This is fair

@adisingh @IditOryon @hyperspell @realbenhorowitz @maebert @xdenuzzo @szar_david 🫡🚀🚀🚀

@contextconor @IditOryon @hyperspell @realbenhorowitz @maebert @xdenuzzo @szar_david Most cracked team on the planet