Accounting roll-ups are attracting significant attention right now. The playbook is the same: Purchase high-quality local accounting firms, then leverage AI and centralized infrastructure to drive productivity, margins, and growth. Similar to Berkshire Hathaway and Kelly Partners Group, Thrive Holdings is also leaving meaningful minority stakes with local partners to maintain entrepreneurial incentives and client relationships. Add long holding periods instead of the traditional PE model of buying and selling, and you have a great compounding machine.

Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use. Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.

You can raise millions and fail. You can raise almost nothing and win. Investors are not validation. They don't know whether your idea will work. Fundraising is not traction. The market decides. Not investors. Don't confuse it with progress.

During a pitch a prominent VC once told us the market size for global logistics was only $6B. My CFO’s response: “So you’re saying it’s smaller than the market for USB cables?”

If you’re looking to build a startup, build an AI Native Service. my favorite AI playbook by far. Instead of selling AI products, use it yourself. You’ll reap far more benefit that way: > higher prices > larger market > better product > more defensible These days it’s hard to tell what companies will stand the test of time. These companies will.

Some of the biggest companies of the next decade won't be software businesses. They'll be services companies like insurance carriers, law firms, and tax practices rebuilt from scratch with AI doing most of the work. In this episode of Startup School, YC Visiting Partner @CharlieWarren walks through the playbook for building AI native services companies, covering how to pick a market with the right traits, why variance kills these businesses faster than anything else, and the P&L math that’ll transform your business model. 00:00 — Intro to AI Services Companies 01:01 — Picking the Right Market 02:55 — Markets YC Likes Right Now 03:43 — The Sam Altman Test 04:35 — The Right Founding Team 05:28 — Building the Product 06:19 — Variance Is the Existential Problem 07:08 — The Early Demand Trap 07:53 — How to Price AI Services 08:41 — The P&L Walkthrough 09:33 — AI Operating Leverage 10:27 — Don't Buy Your Way In

Common fundraising deck mistake: using boring slide titles like "Team" and "The Problem". Instead, state the conclusion that you want investors to take away from the slide, and use the body as supporting evidence. If an investor only read the titles on your slides, would they understand your business and want to invest?

A founder kept saying "if only we had money we'd do X." Money is not the fire. Money is gasoline you pour on a fire that already exists. You don't have a funding problem. You have a "people don't want it yet" problem. Go make the first fire.

Sometimes they're a good reason to work on something. When people say a market is "crowded," what that often means is that there's a real problem and none of the solutions are good enough yet.

We built an AI agent for an HVAC company in the southeast last month. They were doing around $3M a year and growing fast, but their CSRs couldn't keep up with the lead volume. Form fills were taking 4-6 hours to respond to. LSA messages and Yelp inquiries went 12 hours sometimes. They were losing jobs to whoever responded first. Here's exactly what the agent does: When a homeowner submits a form on their website, sends a message through their LSA listing, fills out a request on Yelp or Angi, or texts their main business line: > The agent responds within 30 seconds with a personalized message acknowledging the specific issue (no AC, furnace not heating, capacitor replacement, whatever they mentioned) > Sends it all through blue iMessage texts, so the homeowner thinks they're texting with a real person at the company > Asks 2-3 qualifying questions: zip code, residential or commercial, what type of system they have, when they need service > Pulls their calendar in real time and offers 3 actual available appointment slots based on tech routing > Books the appointment directly into ServiceTitan if they accept > Texts the customer a confirmation with the tech's name, photo, and ETA window > Notifies the CSR team only if the lead is high-priority (commercial, multi-system, replacement quote, etc.) What changed in the first 30 days: > Average lead response time: 4 hours to under 1 minute > Booked-to-lead ratio: 22% to 41% > CSR hours saved per week: about 18 > Owner now actually sleeps because after-hours leads get booked without anyone touching them Most HVAC companies are spending $30-60 per LSA lead and then losing 30-50% of them to slow follow-up. AI isn't perfect and it shouldn't fully replace humans in your sales process. But there's no reason not to use the best tech available to make your business more money.