Jason Freedman

There’s literally nothing better than sharing what you do with your kiddos. My middle is joining me for YC alumni demo day. Can’t wait to see all the amazing things she builds over her lifetime. and I can’t think of a better group of role models. Thank you YC for being so welcoming. Truly a wonderful day!

Outside of code generation and coding copilot tools, there hasn’t been a mass adopted AI native piece of software in the enterprise yet. I think Sazabi could be the first. The product is built from the ground up to be a no-brainer and easy for any enterprise to adopt. AI tools that are proactive, dramatically better and yet work with your existing set up is the style of beachhead that every company should be pursuing. Sazabi nailed it here. And security is an increasingly important problem, so this is not just incremental features or reduced cost on some existing department. Bringing Sazabi into a company is essential today and will be increasingly more essential tomorrow. And as always, you can learn a ton just by reading what @shcallaway has to say about the industry.

Turned right instead of left at the stoplight this morning on my way to drop off my oldest at school. Surprise daddy-daughter trip to Starbucks instead of first period. 5 star.

agreed. Other ways we say it: slope > y-intercept law of inertia: objects in motion tend to stay in motion what have you learned in the last week that you didn't previously know and how will it change what you focus on next week.

Dear all journalists: This is what we want more of. Real stories of people who are trying to build the future interviewed by people who are curious and optimistic. We would love to just skip the perp walk, hater, politics-laden portion completely. Sincerely, Everyone

Which do you dislike more?

A reminder to everyone. What people talk about on X is mostly just not that important The best companies are focusing on their customers and most of their customers don’t care about whatever is the main thing on X. People on the sidelines are always very vocal and often prone to ragebait (posting it and reading it). Some founders who have never gotten into YC: prone to ragebait. Some investors, but not an investor in a specific company, prone to ragebait. Weirdly and unfortunately, nearly all tech journalists, prone to ragebait. Don’t have enough to do and thus scrolling around on X: prone to ragebait. (Self-own!) And even if 98% of those groups above aren’t rage baiting, the 2% that are get quite loud quite quickly. This doesn’t have anything to do with X or algorithms or YC or venture capital or startups or whatever… it’s just what happens when forums get big and successes present themselves as targets. We know this because the same thing happened on Slashdot in the 2000s and Hacker News in the 2010s. And we know this at YC because 100% of all founders who are in startups that get big eventually face an online mob. Some do more to provoke it than others and some react more than others, but the inevitability is the same. So I come back to my original statement. Don’t worry so much about it. It’s not that important.

I’m working on a really fun thought experiment about the Fermi Paradox involving Quantum Decoherence. I’m looking for people to read early drafts. If this is you and you’re that somewhat rare combination of thoughtful/well-read on the subject, but also not too pretentious to join in a lay person‘s fun thought experiment… Please comment below.

How do we do DD on a company? Watch as our most talented, hardest grinding, fastest growing, scrappiest portfolio founders… Vote with their dollars. Getting Yahia on board is HUGE vote of confidence. He would never let any company into his infra if it wasn’t clearly the best.

I’m fundamentally not opposed to this. This particular example may have more nuance, but the premise is really interesting. Remember, all fundraising activities do massive harm to a startup's focus on its customers. And 'help' from investors is never more helpful than the tax on time and focus. And there are lots of wonderful, hands-off investors that would happily invest directly in startups without the access of earning a meeting. Currently, they only get access through SPVs where there's a large fee+carry tax. I would LOVE to see more entrepreneurs do a version of allowing investors to just request allocation first come first serve. Most fundraising is high reps at investor conversations where the exact contact could be delivered as a video, deck, memo, data room, etc. There is nothing sacrosanct about the vibe check an investor gets from their 1-1 interaction. We believe this at Orange Collective - which is why we publish our investment committee memos first our LPs and then the internet. We WANT follow-on investors to be able to offer investment to that startup without needing the meeting. We did do this ourselves with our investments in several OC companies where we told them in our meeting request email that we were already all-in on their company, allocation already approved and requested, even before the meetings.

I'm one month into my Starlink airline trade. About $10k invested, open positions up $114 (1.15%), marking the puts at their quoted midpoint. 56 shares of United, 31 Alaska, two Delta January 2028 $85 puts. United's gains are covering the loss on the puts. United now reports Starlink on 45% of its fleet. I don't expect matieral changes in consumer behavior from Delta to United until confirmation of Starlink is available at the booking moment. Long $UAL, $ALK and $DAL puts. Not investment advice. Eleven months left.

What surprised me about Alpha School once we sent our 3rd grader...

This is honestly one of the best win-win-win moments I've ever seen as an investor and a supporter of the startup ecosystem and a supporter of YC founders. We're an investor in @ParadevAI (formerly Superset). And Conductor is not just their main competitor, Conductor is also another YC company, and we have just an absolute ton of respect for @charlieholtz and the entire team. The Conductor team has a great outcome and they're stoked, they're joining our YC buds at Meta. Meta will build incredible projects with this team inside their organization. And for everyone that wants a model-agnostic, independent, IDE for running teams of agents - Paradev is now the clear leader. Here are the migration docs: docs.paradev.com/migrate-fro… docs.paradev.com/migrate-fro…

Yahia ends all his toughest engineering descriptions with... 'this will be fun' The best jobs are not work at all.

YC interview requests have not yet gone out. When they do, there will be this whole sub-industry of YC alumni mock interviews and prep and advice and iteration and feedback. But I can tell you right now exactly what you need to do to prepare: Make more progress on your company in the next two weeks than any two weeks ever before. In two weeks, you will have grown your users, learned new things from their users and changed portions of your product based on what you’ve just learned. If your YC interview becomes in part a discussion of everything you’ve done and learned in the last two weeks, you’re going to do great.

Hey Apple, Could we get an iPhone mini next year ? Just once and I promise we won’t ask again for another six years. Like it could be literally the iPhone 13 mini with just new components inside. Asking on behalf of literally every runner.

I've read maybe ~10,000 YC applications. 8000 for YC admissions/PG quite a few years ago and anther 2000 informally as an alum. There's a new and growing mistake and I want to share why it's more important than you think. By the way - I try not to ever say YC admissions works this way or that way. That's YC's job and they're always changing things and making up their own minds. But I will share my impression and you can see what you think - YC partners, please chime in as well if you like. The YC application is fundamentally an evaluation of a founder's potential. And much less an evaluation of a specific business. (Airbedbreakfast transitioning into Airbnb because Brian, Nate, Joe never give up and never stop listening to their customers) So, in your writing of the application, YOU need to shine through. This batch, I read ~200 applications. I'm guessing over half were significantly written, edited, or polished with AI. That half was easily in the bottom half of my informal rankings, almost every time. To be clear, most were NOT AI slop. I often couldn't tell at first they had used AI. Founders were pouring their heart and soul into their app - so I what I received was high quality. But I think the AI really hurt them. Here's why: Once polished by AI, I as reader lost insight into the personality of the writer. I love the YC application because the questions are the same questions I would ask in office hours or casually to a friend that wanted help with their startup. It pushes the founder out of their pitchdeck/VC talk style into simple worded questions that can be answered simply as well. And great founders shine through when they just write like they talk. The LLM writing made answers feel more like a corporate cover letter, with the personality drained out. The AI-assisted drafts also gave me a sense of mid work. The writing itself seemed like zero standard deviations from the mean. The LLMs had lopped off the outlier portions of sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts. Given the YC App is an outlier detector, a writing tool that lops off outlier writing is the opposite of what you want. And the AI writing was needlessly verbose. Which hurts when a reliable predictor of great founders is that they're deep thinkers and deep thinking shines through in the density of their writing. So... I did an experiment. I asked a bunch of these seemingly AI-assisted app writers to talk with me live. I just asked them the same YC app questions and recorded their answers. I then gave them back the transcripts. Unedited and unpolished. And... OMG! A good number turned from easy no to actual good applications. Magic! Remove AI >> Improve application. This happened BOTH with native English speakers and founders abroad. So this is my recommendation to all of you. Don't let AI touch your application, even for a second. And maybe try the dictation approach with a friend. My apologies to the YC admissions team if you already knew AI-written applications were crap and you were using this insight to help you easily move applications to the No pile. YC's Winter Batch Application deadline is Nov 2nd.

Dear Apple iOS Dictation team: GrokBot ≠ crockpot Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Hey @bot Let me know when this is ready for us. Clockshot has started!

Nearly everyone I know has two versions of their trust and estate set-up. 1. It's on their to-do list to set up for themselves, for their parents, for their siblings, et cetera. 2. It was set up years ago. Lives in a folder somewhere and is no longer current with their assets or various advisors. We invested in Sava because we realized this was the case for us personally, as well as nearly everyone in America. And because @nimit and Rush @updating_priors have perfect founder-product fit on what happens when you sell a company and didn't think through QSBS, wealth management, trust and estate issues. I'm personally moving my family over to Sava for modern Trust set-up and on-going maintenance, and recommending it to every one of my friends and everyone in our portfolio. It's also a perfect solution for estate lawyers and private wealth managers. Read more in Axios today: axios.com/pro/fintech-deals/… And watch the video: youtube.com/watch?v=yR2bV3KT…