Founder and Partner @Standard_Cap, Partner Emeritus @ycombinator
SF Bay Area
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It's insanely easy to run models like DeepSeek R1 locally via @ollama (YC W21)
Once ollama is installed, you just need to type "ollama run deepseek-r1:8b"
DeepSeek's first-generation reasoning models are achieving performance comparable to OpenAI's o1 across math, code, and reasoning tasks!
Give it a try! 👇
7B distilled:
ollama run deepseek-r1:7b
More distilled sizes are available. 🧵
ALT ollama runs DeepSeek models
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When a startup is competing against a large competitor, they aren't competing with the *entire* company, they are likely competing with some PM focused on internal politics/career progression.
With this framing, it shouldn't be surprising to see startups win as often as they do.
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I wonder what % of people know that the way to fix a lot of devices is to reboot them, but have no mental model for *why* this works.
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After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator.
YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul, Jessica, Trevor, and Robert for creating this extraordinary institution.
Standard Capital is name of the AI-native Series A firm I’m co-founding with two of my favorite people: Paul Buchheit, my longtime colleague at YC, and Bryan Berg, the CTO of my previous startups.
AI is reshaping every aspect of our world. We aim to embed AI in every part of our business and back the AI disruptors of tomorrow.
Follow us at @Standard_Cap, you’ll be hearing more from us soon!
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There is no substitute for a strong internal drive to do things, everything else is built on this foundation.
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One hallmark of a high agency person is someone that can reinvent themselves without skipping a beat.
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Paul, Bryan and I are proud to announce the close of Standard Capital's $425M Fund I.
Standard Capital is Series A for the best founders. Applications for our inaugural funding cycle are open now.
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Consultants aren't strictly selling their expertise, they are selling a luxury product that gives the buyer some peace of mind and comfort that they threw money at a problem.
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You only get better at something if you manage to practice when you don't feel like practicing.
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It seems that optimism, rather than money, is the fuel that startups at the earliest stages run on.
I have seen examples of startups successfully recovering from almost every kind of problem (i.e. no $$$/bad idea/team issues) *other* than founders losing hope/becoming cynical.
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I sometimes talk to founders who wish they had started their company 10 or 20 years ago because there was little competition and lots of great unsolved problems.
I tell them it's hindsight bias, and not what it felt like at the time. This moment, now, is wide open too.
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The pareto principle pops up all over the place, but one of the facts that both surprised and really stuck with me is how much the alcohol industry is driven by a relatively small % of the population.
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I have noticed more excitement about AI tools from technical generalists filling in knowledge gaps vs hyper-specialists that don't feel the tools are good enough to help them much within their zone of expertise.
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One thing a lot of interesting people have in common is they made unconventional long term bets that ended up working out.
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Incentivize the removal of parts/process/etc and not conflate "adding value" with "adding complexity".
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Intrinsically motivated folks have a competitive advantage vs those that are extrinsically motivated.
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Based on the hundreds of companies I have personally funded at YC, the speed at which founders move is the single most predictive variable of if a startup will succeed - *not* traction at the time of getting into YC.
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One way to spot a high friction process is the existence of an industry dedicated to helping people navigate said process.
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Sprinkling some AI on a legacy process won't work as well as redesigning the process from scratch with AI at its core.
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The first Standard Capital Series A deadline is in 6 days.
Cost: ~1 hour to fill out an application (and the questions help you think about your business).
Benefit: Raise your Series A in 2 weeks with clean terms:
- No board seat
- 10% dilution
- Post-PMF founder community/support for the life of your startup
The value proposition is simple: minimal downside + unconstrained upside.
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Excited to launch something I have been working on!
blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-sta…
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The biggest signal that someone will iterate quickly in the future is that they iterated quickly in the past.
Building and shipping things quickly when you are young is great practice. It teaches you that making things and giving them to people is fun!
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We just opened up applications for Standard Capital’s inaugural fall 2025 funding cycle!
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"Ok grandma lets talk about memory leaks and what it means for a long running program to get into an undefined state"
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One of the biggest improvements in startup culture today vs the past is the normalization of taking care of your body and mind. Things aren’t perfect but it’s better than it was.
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Something I learned over a decade as a YC partner is when a founder is struggling, to first debug if they are taking care of themselves or otherwise under personal stress.
If a founder can fix those things, their startup problems suddenly don’t seem insurmountable anymore.
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Make Something Agents Want
B2A: Business-to-Agent
@daltonc
Not b2b, not b2c, but b2a: Business-to-agent.
We are looking for startups that are building products where AI agents are the intended customer.
Make something agents want.
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Few things hold folks back more than the belief they are “too advanced” to do the humbling, low status work required to create something out of nothing.
From what I have seen, rather than believing you are so experienced you can skip the grind, it’s better to fully embrace it.
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High integrity people tend to behave in the same way whether or not anyone is watching.
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A wave of crazy new AI-related stuff is coming next month.
Betting on the models getting smarter reminds me of the 1990s bet that network bandwidth would only keep growing: a good one.
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The biggest tech shift I noticed in hospitals when my kids were born over a six year period is now everyone orders DoorDash vs eating hospital food.
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A brand new startup with no traction has a non-obvious edge over an established startup with sunk costs on something that isn't working.
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Was just thinking about a guy I know who decided to start his career over and devote his life to AI research like 10 years ago, and is now one of the founders of Anthropic.
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One signal that a startup is not going to get huge is that the CEO asks for career advice about "how to break into venture"
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Some nerdy interests end up being more useful later in life than others, and it’s not easy to predict which ones those will be.
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Certain categories of common search queries have been mostly destroyed by SEO-optimized adfarms.
For example, looking up a simple recipe on ChatGPT is currently much nicer than googling because there are not 15 crappy ads causing the page to bounce around and be hard to read.
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When deciding to tackle a hard problem a certain type of naïveté can be extremely helpful, if not necessary.
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Just announced the YC Fall 2024 batch!
Applications are now open and due on August 27. The batch begins on September 29.
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It's much more fun to talk to people that are obsessed with building things than it is to talk to people that are obsessed with squeezing money out of things.
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Speed is a feature. Adding a bunch of bells and whistles that adds complexity and/or slows down the core experience of your customers is usually a bad trade off.
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The super secret algorithm software startups use when trying to figure out their initial pricing.
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You learn a lot more about a persons true character when they are under pressure than when they believe everything is going their way.
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The argument that “AI can do A, but it will be a long time before it can do B” keeps aging poorly.
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Imaging trying to explain to the ancients how we taught sand to think by instilling it with lightning.
(But also we would insist to them that, no, magic isn’t real)
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People used to believe that recorded music was scarce and expensive, but Napster broke that mental model.
What scarcity-based mental models do we currently have which are about to get broken?
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It's tempting to overestimate the transferability of skills developed within a large corporate environment to early stage startups.
The most straightforward way to develop early stage startup skills is to... work at early stage startups.
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The Wizard of Oz lesson: you endure a lot of nonsense trying to meet and impress famous gurus you think will fix your problems.
After much time and effort you finally meet them and it becomes obvious the wizards can't help... the only person that can fix your problems is... you
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This is my post about the @ycombinator application deadline. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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One surprising thing I have noticed over the years is that there is more collateral damage in startups as a result of over-delegating rather than under-delegating.
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A sizable percentage of problems people attempt to solve with technology aren’t technology problems at all.
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A lot of people are currently rethinking their assumptions around what the bottlenecks to produce high quality work are.
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It’s easy to forget that a lot of founders are quietly struggling right now.
Remember to check in on your founder friends even if their external persona keeps saying that they are “killing it”.
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Ambitious work requires just the right mix of extreme impatience and extreme patience.
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AI coding assistants are undeniably making engineers more productive.
Where and when will these productivity gains first show up in macro data?
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Many people first heard about a new website called Google on Slashdot, a forum for programmers. One killer usecase was to paste stack traces/error messages and get shockingly great results. Google gained programmer superfans who told everyone they knew about it.
Sound familiar?
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A lot of hard-earned life and business lessons are just "the scorpion and the frog" over and over again.
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It’s hard to come up with new ideas if you believe that everything is broken or everything is perfect, best to be a clear-eyed optimist.
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Hard to think of something less helpful than teaching young ambitious people to hate technological change. It’s a setup for a life of confusion and frustration.
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“In weird times you need weird people” - @paulg
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A root cause of founders being deeply confused/hurt/offended by investor behavior is the assumption that if someone says they are an investor they must be competent.
Sadly, there is no competence certification for someone to say they are an investor. Act accordingly.
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A dangerous (and common) scenario is a startup with a little bit of traction... just enough traction that they aren't willing to change ideas/markets and not enough traction for them to actually know they have product market fit.
It's the uncanny valley of product-market fit.
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When working on a project, our brains tend to seek unlimited time, unlimited budget, and unlimited scope, but being handed those things isn’t the gift it appears to be.
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Few things cause analysis paralysis more than worrying about problems many steps ahead of the one right in front of you.
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Believing that the more money a startup raises the faster it will move is like believing that the more calories a person eats the faster they will run.
Diminishing returns at first, actively counterproductive at some point.
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The high % of the YC W24 batch that uses @posthog and @porterdotrun is a powerful indicator that these two companies are onto something big.
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If I were an employee evaluating which startup to work at I would be doing my own deep diligence figuring out who *actually* has product market fit vs. amount raised or perceived noteworthiness.
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I think a lot about early career folks whose entire frame of reference about how the professional world works is 2020/2021/2022.
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It's interesting how often things can go bad for a person when they feel like they have "made it".
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People who reluctantly go along with things they don't agree with in order to be perceived as "supportive" or "easy going" are rarely the heroes of a story.
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A lot of financial modeling exists to justify the decision, not help make the decision.
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