spent the last week deep in @ycombinator 's P26 batch. figured out some patterns across 192 companies. here's what the data says: 1/ team sizes 61% of p26 is 2 founders. 19% is solo. 18% is 3 people. only 4-5 companies have 4 founders. AI made building smaller. median team in this batch is a pair, not a squad. 2/ who's actually getting in @shreyansj (@manicule : 18. just finished high school. was a founding engineer at Supermemory. @akkkkiira (@ArgaLabs ): skipped high school. finished university at 19. then quant at Goldman. then SDE at Stripe. now building sandboxes for AI agents. @johnbachm (@mountinsure ): started his first company at 18. now building insurance for AI agents. @adisingh (@agentmail): 21. built a Rust IDE from scratch. processed 8 billion tokens. the entry bar used to be "ivy league degree 5 years at Google." it's now "finished high school." 3/ the founder backgrounds a neurosurgeon: @sparkcpark, trained at U Washington. solo founder. building the OS for clinical AI imaging (Lattice Health). the designer of the iPhone 17 Pro body: @michaelblhssn, Apple hardware for a decade. now building a wearable that reads your emotions (@anoria_inc ). a NASA guy who tracked asteroids: Gregoire Chomette - MIT aeroastro. worked on asteroid threat systems at NASA. now building underwater drones (AICE). the co-founder of Zepto: @alitabba_ - built KiranaKart which became Zepto. then joined BlackRock. now building an AI finance agent (Gravy). a med school dropout: Tane Kim, left med school to build AI patient tools (@FramewiseHealth). 4/ 9 founders came from trading desks @oscar_lvy (@river_markets): ran models at BlackRock managing $6B. then Sandbar ($2B). now building prime brokerage for prediction markets. Jeremie Cohen (@kelaicapital): ran a global systematic equity book at WorldQuant. led ML at Millennium. now building AI for market research. @jackzumwalt (@KimptonAI ): ran his own quant firm. now building the IDE for investors. Theodore Otzenberger (armature): ex-Palantir, Polytechnique. now building observability for AI agents. the path: trading desks → yc. 5/ two ex-pro gamers are now building AI infrastructure @hanghuang_ (@insforge ): pro League of Legends player. then Amazon PM. then Yale MBA. now building cloud infra for AI agents. Akira Tong (@ArgaLabs ): pro competitive gamer. skipped high school. quant at Goldman. SDE at Stripe. now building sandboxes for agents. 6/ which industries are actually being targeted developer tools infra: 40 companies (21%) manufacturing industrial: 27 companies (14%) finance fintech: 22 companies (11%) healthcare: 20 companies (10%) sales marketing: 15 companies (8%) defense: 6 companies (3%) recruiting: 4 companies (2%) legal compliance: 3 companies (2%) government: 1 company (0.5%) industries with zero companies: farming, edtech, climate, media, transport, retail. yc's summer 2026 wishlist explicitly asked for farming/agriculture AI. nobody in p26 built it. 7/ the two things yc is building at once 7.1 - plumbing for AI agents: tools that agents need to actually work. phone numbers (@AgentPhoneHQ ), permission layers (@clawvisor ), payment cards (@useallowance ), shared memory (@memorydotstore ), browsers (@StableBrowse ), safe databases (@ArdentAI ), messaging between agents (@primitive by @itsjustemail )... 7.2- agents doing real jobs (~55 companies): @revnu_app (by @artfreebrey & @GeorgeJeffersn) replaces your growth team. @trymemoir_ai (by @MaanavA51108 & @ZhanJason179) replaces your CMO. @manicule replaces your DevRel. @StandardSignal replaces your fund traders. Arden replaces your SOX audit team. @lab0_ai ( by @onkar_borade_10, @tokenaware , and @SujaySriv ) replaces your forward-deployed engineers. @walterindustry replaces your manufacturing manager. Foaster replaces your strategy consultants. the ratio: for every 2 companies building AI workers, 1.4 companies are building what those workers need to function. 8/ the university numbers 18 founders mention Stanford. MIT: 10. Oxford: 5. Berkeley: 4. but 4 Stanford/MIT founders left before they finished their degree this batch. Joshua Wang: Stanford dropout. top 250 in the US in math (USAMO). first intern at Perplexity. @sudiprokaya (@laminalabs ): MIT CS Math , on leave. building Lamina Labs. universities are one of the pipeline's into yc, not a ticket to get in. the ones staying are there for the network. the ones leaving figured out the return on time is higher elsewhere. /end

smart mktg strategy hope it didn’t spook y’all when i grabbed a picture hahahaha @primitive