Nothing more energizing than a week of meeting with @ycombinator companies! Congrats to @garrytan and the whole team for another fantastic cohort - and to the founders taking big swings. YC is often a few months ahead of the market - trends I noticed from the batch 👇 1. "Real economy" AI is here. Manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, etc. We have agents that can reliably operate across platforms, plug into legacy equipment, and scrape data from systems of record. Businesses that haven't bought new software in decades are now customers of AI. 2. The broker and the agency are becoming software. Founders are taking businesses that have always run on human middlemen and rebuilding them as agent-run platforms. This both unlocks labor budgets allows you to own transactions and get outcome data that can be further used to improve the product / build a network. 3. Vertical AI is (often) routing around incumbents, not integrating with them. For many founders, the new playbook is to skip the official API entirely (computer-use, front-end reverse-engineering) so legacy software can't shut you off. Fragmented industries with no dominant platform are suddenly wide open. 4. Founders are going upmarket early, not eventually. ACVs for the first few customers are going up. Founders are starting on enterprise logos from day one and treating SMB as validation they've already outgrown. This might mean 1-2 $100k ACV customers in the first 6 months versus a long tail of $10 - $20k logos. 5. Everyone is moving to the US - fast. A striking number of teams are international and already have real traction in their home markets, but are relocating to the US within weeks (visas in progress) post-YC to chase the bigger market. Yes, there will be outliers who build massive cos locally - but SF is the center of gravity. 6. Self-improving products are here. Teams are spinning up companies operated by agent "org charts" - who can not only run the product but proactively and autonomously make it better over time. Customers can prompt their own workflows...or the product will start to do this intelligently over time (on a per-product basis).

Watch me control my computer with just my voice. This is the future of operating systems. No hands. GPT-Realtime 2.0 is very, very underrated. Demo:

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Engineering software maker Autodesk has agreed to buy MaintainX, a firm focused on maintenance tools bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

An alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply. This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes. The era of abusing our nation’s immigration system is over.