Yesterday we hosted 400 top university students at the YC Summer Conference - a fun day of talks about startups.  Talking to the students afterwards, I found myself giving a lot of the same advice. So in case it's useful to others, here is my startup advice for students.

YC was already the best startup accelerator in the world. Then AI showed up and made every founder inside it 10x faster. Goals are bigger. Timelines are shorter. Demo Day bars keep rising. Each new batch breaks the records of the last one. The pressure cooker works better when everyone inside it is sprinting. That's what's happening right now. YC isn't peaking. It's compounding. And I'd rather be invested in it than watching from the outside.

Gavin Newsom came for a @garryslist event at YC and we were proud to talk little tech, YIMBY, how to stop the the asset seizure tax, and how to keep California's innovation wave going while making sure things work for every Californian. Thank you @GavinNewsom

We've always told startups to launch early, but I realized there's a powerful new reason to. Before you launch, the speed you can build is now mainly limited by your imagination in what you tell AI. After you launch, the AI can watch your users and make improvements on its own.

lots of investor horror stories being shared, but very few are from yc companies one of the underappreciated benefits of yc is how it puts a check on investor behavior if an investor treats yc companies poorly they will get bad bookface reviews and hot companies won’t take their calls if it gets bad enough they can even get banned from demo day i’ve fundraised both as a yc company and as a non-yc company, it was night and day difference in how we were treated by investors the smart investors know everyone is watching and are careful to not waste time, not ghost, not break promises etc the bad investors get filtered out automatically and find nobody will take their calls have @ycombinator behind inverts the usual power dynamic

I last raised money in 2023 & have no stories of VCs saying unethical things or being rude Personally, I blame @ycombinator

People are often surprised how many hard-tech companies YC funds, and for how long we've been doing it. It's been about 10% of the batch since 2014 when Sam became CEO.

At YC we're now running on the latest versions of rails and react for the first time since we started the codebase. Now that AI made library upgrades easy, people should do them more.

we're funding a lot of PhD researchers at YC these days super pumped that we're hosting a reading group at the og YC office near Stanford and will be putting the videos on youtube. More of this to come!

2 years ago, Corgi had $500K and a plan that sounded insane. They almost didn't make it, more than once. They are the most relentless people I've worked with, and this success was hard-won. I'm proud of them.

Everyone is ragging on Jared for this, but he’s absolutely right AI agents *are* incredibly productive with prod db access. If you’re a vibe coder with no idea how a database works, this is obviously insane. But if you’re a professional software engineer and systems thinker like Jared, you’ve already set up guardrails and best practices so your agent doesn’t do anything bad. eg you probably have backups, you’ve set up docs/an md file to define prohibited actions, you probably use an ORM defined in code… and if an incident happens, you do a post mortem and figure out how to improve your system This is all stuff we’ve been doing for decades. And Claude is much smarter than the average new dev!

One night I quietly gave our AI agent full access to YC's production database. It made the agent 10x more useful. That's what convinced me that trust-by-default is the only way to get the most out of agents.

at its core, yc is just a way to work with your best friends on cool stuff and call it a job

I did the math, and $2M in OpenAI tokens is equivalent to a 450 pre-AI human engineering team for 2 years, in terms of raw LOC output.

This is why the OpenAI $2M offer is a no-brainer for YC companies.

Token spend is not something to be frugal about as a startup founder. You have to be at the frontier to see what’s even possible. It’s like not moving to SF because the rents are high.

OpenAI for YC companies:

OpenAI is offering $2M in tokens for every company in the summer '26 batch. We're not sure if we'll do this again, so we've extended the deadline to apply to the summer batch to May 25.

This is bullish for startups. OpenAI is willing to exchange $800m of compute for ~2% equity in 400 YC startups. That’s only a bet you make if you believe the equity has the potential to be very valuable.

I went to BJ's Restaurant last night with my kids. The bathroom was disgusting. The front of house was kind but sloppy and slow. The food upset my stomach and I woke up at 4am this morning because of it. Whoever BJ is, they probably aren't a real person, because everyone acted like nobody's name is on the door. I studied the management history of BJ's. The original founders left after the seventh location. Then it was sold to their accountants. Then it went public. Then the CEO resigned last year after 19 years and was replaced by an interim board member from Darden Restaurants, who was then replaced by a "Chief Concept Officer" promoted to CEO. The CFO also quit. Roaches behind the takeout counter in Coral Springs. Rodent droppings and mold in the ice machine in Pembroke Pines. An "F" retention score on Comparably. Glassdoor reviews that say "management turnover is high... that should say quite a bit about the company culture." Seven layers of management between the person cooking your food and anyone who owns the outcome. General manager reports to area director reports to regional director reports to regional VP reports to SVP of Operations reports to the COO (who started in January) reports to the CEO (who started last year). 218 locations. Founders long gone. Managers rotate every 18 months. The kitchen is run by compliance checklists, not pride. A dirty bathroom is nobody's personal failure because it's nobody's personal restaurant. This is the stewardship crisis in America in one building. In Chinese restaurants, the 老板 (laoban) is there. He tastes the food. He watches the kitchen. His family's reputation is the business. The restaurant is clean not because of health inspectors but because his name is on it. Haidilao built a $30B hot pot chain with less than 10% employee turnover. Servers can give you free dishes without asking a manager. Why? Because they're treated like stewards, not interchangeable parts. The West replaced stewardship with professional management. MBAs who optimize spreadsheets for people they've never met. CEOs who've never touched the product they sell. Politicians who sign the bills and spend the people's money but never checked the money built anything that helped the people they claimed to care about. Founder mode isn't new. It's the oldest idea in Chinese business culture. We just forgot it. The best founders I fund at YC are natural stewards. They own the outcome. They're in the kitchen tasting the food. They care about the bathroom. Most of society's problems are a stewardship crisis. Not a lack of resources or technology or intelligence. A lack of people who give a shit because their name is on it.

people don’t realize that without yc, the whole startup ecosystem would probably be 2x, maybe even 3x smaller than what it is now. it’s one of the biggest opportunities that make young founders believe they have a chance at success. even when people don’t get in, it gives them hope. this is infectious, and diffusive. hate to see the hate on here.