I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30 minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going. I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital. You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious. It's a dance. And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious. If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird. No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there. It is weird.

.@9Mothers is making AI mission systems for the DoW. Their first product - EDDA - is a tiny robot that protects soldiers and critical assets from Group 1 suicide drones. They're building it small enough and cheap enough to put that protection on everything: every vehicle, every position, every asset. Congrats on the launch, @rhs, Roman, and Bogdan! ycombinator.com/launches/Qgn…

Thought experiment: if every company suddenly had infinite free compute, what new products would emerge? My take: with very few exceptions, not much would change. The bottleneck is figuring out what people want, and it’s not so easy to apply compute to solve that.

New site, new things! 9mothers.com

Geoffrey Moore says startups die in the chasm because pragmatist buyers demand a "whole product." These folks won't tolerate gaps. They need references. They need the complete solution. The chasm is lethal because because the buyers won't buy without perfection. But Moore's model assumes there's an EXISTING solution the buyer is comparing you to. The whole framework assumes the buyer has a status quo they're comfortable with. When the *bar is zero*, when the alternative is literally "we die" or "we do this entirely by hand with 2,000 people" (Block's compliance team) or "we just don't have this capability at all"? The chasm doesn't exist for those. Buyers start acting like visionaries instead of skeptics, because they have to buy. The alternative doesn't exist. They'll tolerate a 60% solution, missing features, no references, because 60% of something beats 100% of nothing. The companies I get most excited about aren't disrupting incumbents. They're filling voids. 9 Mothers in the YC Spring 2026 batch is a counter-drone defense co for whom bar is zero, there is no viable close quarters defense otherwise! There's no chasm to cross for that. The practical implication for founders: if you're in a market where the bar is zero, stop worrying about whole product, stop worrying about crossing the chasm, stop worrying about pragmatist references. Ship the 60% solution. They're begging for it. If you're NOT in a bar-is-zero market (if there's an incumbent, a status quo, a "good enough") then Moore applies in full and you need the whole playbook (beachhead, bowling alley, whole product, the works). The question every founder should ask: is my customer's current alternative literally nothing? If yes, you're in a different game than the textbooks describe. Ship it in whatever form you have. You'll know. And it's a great place to be.

500 founders. 1,500 nominations. 100 companies. The Black Flag 100 is back 🏴‍☠️ No VC votes. No fund picks. Just pirates chasing storms over certainty. The 2026 list 🧵🏴‍☠️

Counter-Swarm Defense @bosmeny A Patriot missile costs $3 million. An FPV drone costs $500. All the cost advantage lies with the attackers, and the next wave isn't one drone, it's swarms. Drone defense is starting to look less like operating a weapon and more like running a real-time distributed system. We want to fund founders building the counter-swarm stack.