I’m part of the YC P26 batch that got offered $2M by Sam Altman in funding with OpenAI tokens. I’ve had a few days to think about it so I thought I would share how I’m thinking through the entire thing. The first thing that makes this offer interesting is how founder-friendly the deal is, meaning that it is low dilution and is a huge token allocation for a small team. If you are spending thousands of dollars of token per month building, this could be a huge relief and can decrease your burn and improve your startup life expectancy. There are a few questions that I am asking myself regarding this deal: do I want to lock in with one provider? If we start building an entire company's workflow on OpenAI, what will be the switching cost in a few years? How is token cost gonna evolve and how will that change the value of the deal? Do I need cash right now? On the other hand, if you are building an AI-native company this could be the opportunity to keep pushing. It is part of the scaling law, the more you put resources in it, the more the potential (at least it kinda worked for compute and LLMs). It also gives you leverage while fundraising because now the question becomes “why would I raise at a X valuation when I can have all this spend already on tokens?” By having that alternative option you can really think about which investors are right for you, and what they can bring to the table aside from just capital. In the end it obviously depends on your situation and there is no playbook here. I’m excited to see how this will turn out to be in 3, 5 or 10 years from now. This is the beginning of tokens becoming a utility.

Book a demo here: tryscope.app/

Introducing Scope (@tryscope_app): the platform that breaks down exactly how AI agents see and interact with your product. Products are increasingly being used through Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and similar AI agents. Most companies have no idea what an agent's decisions look like. Scope fixes that. What Scope does: → Run real workflows across Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, and show you when agents choose you vs. a competitor → Pinpoint exactly where agents get stuck: auth, onboarding, docs, setup → Show the full trace of every agent decision so you know what broke and why → Tell you what to change to get picked more, used more, and kept more. Every company we've shown this to has immediately thought of a workflow they want to run. Want to know how agents see your product? ↓

Scope (@tryscope_app) helps companies see when AI agents choose them, get stuck, or pick a competitor, and what to change to improve it. It runs real workflows across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and similar AI agents. Congrats on the launch, @anandPa94! ycombinator.com/launches/QK8…

I had a working product, ~10 paying customers, had just signed a Fortune 10 logo, and last week I still decided to pivot. 1 week later, I know it was the right call. Quick retro. On Wednesday 10 days ago, I was in a demo with a prospect who just raised a Series B. It was going well until I asked about next steps. The response were "let me check with marketing if we have budget for this" and "we're a small team right now." But this wasn't the first time I was hearing that. The pattern was clear, my product was great but not urgent. A box to check, maybe market timing, who knows. So mid-call, I started asking about a slightly adjacent idea that a few earlier prospects had hinted at. They were on classic GEO/AEO (humans discovering products through AI), but kept mentioning how AI agents themselves were already discovering and choosing for them. Different problem, and maybe a bigger one. And then I felt it shifting. The same prospect who 10 minutes before was saying "idk, small team, no budget" went to "let me send this to XX right now, they'll take it from here." I met with that person the next day. It's never easy to pivot from a working product with paying customers. But that shift in 30 minutes made me realize something bigger and more urgent might be there. So I gave myself 48 hours to talk to as many companies as I could that might be feeling this same pain, and go sell to them. My take: if someone went from "idk" to "we need this" in a 30 minutes call, I should be able to find at least 10 companies in 48 hours saying the same. I cooked up a quick MVP and met with 13 founders and engineers I knew would potentially feel this pain. I closed 2 of them with one being an enterprise. The pull was something else compared to my previous product. Prospects were moving 1000x faster than anyone before so I knew I had to do it. The vision was the only clear thing. The "how" was completely blurry though but I kept sketching and started building a v1. 1 week later, I have 12k MRR secured and the product is already in demo and showing value. Now I'm facing a new problem: how to balance market pull and servicing my new customers extremely well. For now I'm thinking about focusing on a small set of paying customers and to service them extremely well. This will help me figure out the wow moment and the repeatable cycle, then open it up and get aggressive on growth. I will tell you more next week after experimenting :))

If you want to see this in action, book a demo —> tryscope.app

Career choice: bet on your boxing teammate. When Anand first mentioned @tryscope_app, it was pre-idea, pre-product, pre-everything. But having sparred with him in the ring, I knew this guy is onto something great. He was right. Within a month at @fdotinc, Scope signed global brands and got backed by @ycombinator. We are defining how products and services are discovered in the age of AI. Starting with prediction. Scope is the predictive layer in your GEO/AEO and SEO marketing stack. Check us out at tryscope.app

Joining @ycombinator P26 as a solo founder! :) Every company investing in GEO/AEO is flying blind. There's no way to know what will actually drive visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity until after you've already committed. So I built @tryscope_app: a simulation engine that lets you A/B test your AI search strategy before launch, so you can focus on what actually works. Thank you @dessaigne and @collinmathilde for believing in me and joining this journey. Marketing leaders or solo founders on a similar path, let's talk!