I just got into YC S26 as a 40yo solo founder.
Did YC W20 with Upflow, was CTO/CPO for 6 years. Company is doing millions in ARR and still growing.
But Iβm a maker at heart, so I left to go 0-1 again.
Last year I built an MCP gateway with a friend. MCP servers are notoriously insecure, so I wrote a CLI to run them inside VMs. There was pull on the gateway, but I wasnβt passionate about the problem.
I loved the CLI though, so I pivoted, and started selling it to friends. They loved it too. It grew and became machine0.
Itβs dead simple: `machine0 new devbox` creates a powerful, persistent VM (dedicated RAM/CPU/GPU, static IPs, HTTPS, 99.99% uptime...) running NixOS or Ubuntu, pre-loaded with modern tools/agents. Snapshot, suspend, or destroy in one command. Billed by the minute.
Customers are running OpenClaw/Hermes, coding agents in `--yolo` mode, compiling massive Rust codebases, and hosting real apps.
Surprisingly, the buyers are humans, but the users are almost exclusively agents.
If you want a safe place to run agents, give them serious compute, or have been meaning to try NixOS: check it out at
machine0.io
DM me & Iβll personally onboard you and help you get the most out of the product!