i refused to send cold emails. so, we sent custom doormats to 100+ of the hottest startups instead. "your shoes look good. do your SOCs 2?" (spoiler: it got us more responses than weeks of cold emails.)

Karun and I left MIT in 2023 to build an AI compliance startup. Here's the real origin story behind @getdelve:

since everyone's been asking, here's how much we actually spent on our doormats hack: $6,318 total. and it generated us $500k in pipeline in 1 day. growth hacks for the win.

I came out of my dentist appointment and saw my co-founder taking a call on his car like this He’s an absolute sales demon

took my mother to the Delve dropout billboard she might be smiling but she's not too happy about this one

how it started: small team cramped in a MIT single-person dorm how it's going: whole floor of an office building in FiDi

WE’RE DELIVERING 10,000 DONUTS ACROSS SF TODAY! Comment below and we’ll drop some off to you!!!

2 years ago, I attended Treehacks as a participant. This year we’re sponsoring it. Crazy how things change. Stop by the Delve booth if you’re on campus!

In my freshmen year at MIT, I participated in HackMIT itself - MIT's famous annual hackathon. The following year, I was one of the organizers helping pull off the hackathon. This year, we're returning as sponsors. If you're on campus, stop by our booth to say hi!

she's soc razyyyyy love her 2

we spent $6k on a silly doormat idea and accidentally created our most viral campaign ever for growth hacks, the bar for success is incredibly low you don't need a grand and elaborate idea. just go and execute on your simple+stupid ones.

we were 2 hackers coding out of a dorm at MIT, taking turns alternating between the one desk and floor because there wasn’t enough space. years later we’re in our SF office automating the future of compliance with an amazing team and incredible customers. it’s been a wild journey getting here, and it’s only the start.

Half marathon before & after Next up: SF marathon

I helped a bunch of founder friends get into the upcoming YC batch the secret lies in the interview (hint: it's not what you say, it's how you say it) 🧵

My absolute sales demon of a cofounder pt. 2 Bro’s full on dripped out in gear with a custom paddle challenging YC founders and if they beat him they get $1000 off @getdelve

we dropped off donuts to YC Demo Day and apparently one of you guys said this-

My takeaways from the @ycombinator closing event: 1. Don't die in the next 2 years 2. Stay in SF if you know what's good for you

Since the YC deadline to hear back for W25 is coming up next week, here’s the story of how we went from 2 students coding in an MIT dorm room to being full-time YC founders building Delve in SF For all you founders waiting anxiously to hear back, just keep building — you’ll be successful regardless of the decision

Yesterday, we announced @getdelve's $32M Series A at a $300M valuation led by @insightpartners. Read more about our launch in @ulonnaya's article for @TechCrunch. Link to the article in the comments.

Startups of today move faster. Build faster. Ship faster. Sell faster. We built Delve for those companies. @11x_official is one of them. Congratulations on $50M and SOC2.

2 hours after one of our customers launched on @ycombinator, we sent them custom Patagonia jackets with their logos on it. When we say we love our customers, we really mean it. We're not software, we're your partner in building the biggest company possible.

In the past 2 weeks, we received a cake, cookies (4x), and donuts to our office. Amazing to see more and more companies pulling off growth hacks But now I've had too much sugar Can we start sending salads and protein shakes next :)

young founders are taking over SF. read the story about how Mercor, Artisan, and we at Delve are doing it in the @nytimes. link to the full article in the comments!

I analyzed all of our growth hacks to understand what makes them go "viral." After sharing the results with 100 founders earlier this week, I'm dropping them here too:

Just over a year ago, Karun and I were coding out of an MIT dorm room hacking away at side projects. Several months later, I’m proud to announce our $3.3M seed raise with backing from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, FundersClub, and more. We're excited to bring AI to the compliance industry and make the process effortless. Thank you to everyone who’s been part of the journey and we're incredibly excited for what's to come.

Since the deadline to apply for YC W26 was yesterday, here is the survival guide I wish I had going through the batch. 🧵

First marathon in the books

Someone sent a box of donuts to our office. (Taking after our viral donuts campaign) And then sent a cold email saying he's applying for a growth position. Got an instant interview.

we're looking for people who can fertilize our github grass. DM me if ur github looks like this

moving into the new office at 12am

out of all of our billboards, this one is probably my favorite “Bent out of shape over compliance?”

As much as we love this shirt, the number of people that have asked if they should beat up Karun-

We’ve been building in SF for the past year now. Here’s my year in review: January-March 2024: Did YC → Left MIT and moved across the country to SF June 2024: Launched a new product at @getdelve → Went to many customer offices in person, started to grow faster than ever before July 2024: Ran a marathon → Managed to make it over the finish line, couldn’t walk the next day, but would definitely do it again August 2024: Did a Navy SEAL bootcamp in Wisconsin → Flew out to the middle of nowhere Wisconsin with a bunch of founders to train November 2024: Moved into our office → Not complaining given that we started out of an MIT dorm room January 2025: Met the state senator, CIO, and CDO of Hawaii while on a company offsite → This is our version of fun :) 2025, bring it on.

Last year we pivoted in the middle of our @ycombinator interview Good luck to everyone interviewing for YC! Embrace the crazy

we generated millions in pipeline with an embarrassingly small marketing budget. stop buying attention with paid ads. start pulling off growth hacks that get people talking.

we're live in Times Square. 0 to 100s of customers in months. and this is only the start.

We just launched a new landing page at Delve as part of our Series A announcement. here's how our landing page has evolved over the months 🧵

we're one of the first 100 companies to get certified with ISO 42001, the international AI compliance standard. when we say we're AI-native, we really mean it.

When a company offsite turns into a 2 hour meeting with the state senator followed by a session with the CIO and CDO of the state. If you want to join a team doing crazy things like this to impact the future, DM me.

Since our team has been growing fast, here's a spotlight on two Delve Ladies that recently joined. Leah: dropped out of Stanford, starting taking customer calls in her first week at Delve, working on CS x product. Agnes: full stack powerhouse, scaled web dev agency to 200+ customers in 1 yr, graduated Northeastern CS in 3 years.

Delve makes an appearance at @fdotinc

In March, we pulled off a huge growth hack by giving out 10,000 donuts across SF. Since everyone’s been asking, here are the results: → 4x our daily average of demos → $1M ARR in pipeline unlocked → Influx of enterprise inbound → Multiple team members had their calendars completely booked out Plus, you’d be surprised how much we spent on this :)

We usually sell SOC 2 compliance but are excited to announce our new product line

The best problems to solve are the ones everyone else avoids. We picked compliance - the most boring, manual, spreadsheet-heavy industry imaginable - and used AI to automate it. It's been a wild journey so far. And we're just getting started.

A week after moving into our new office, we hosted 85+ builders as part of the Stanford Friends & Family hackathon. No better office warming than this.

year 2 coming to bootcamp. everything might be sore, but there's no other group of people I'd rather go through the pain with. see you all next year!

I get asked all the time whether our billboard campaign actually worked and how we calculated the ROI. So here's exactly what we did:

Something about applying to YC on the minute😅

If you were at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, you might've noticed that the janitors were wearing Delve "Compliance Custodians" merch. I couldn't explain to you how we come up with ideas like this. But I can guarantee you no one pulls off growth hacks like Delve :)

24 hours before our viral donut growth hack, we learned that our custom donut boxes were stuck at Dubai Border Patrol The pic that blew up on Twitter and Linkedin was really just strips of paper taped onto Krispy Kreme boxes at 6am the day of the hack :)

Karun and I left MIT, moved across the country to SF, and went all-in on building Delve. After 5 product re-builds and many months of iteration later, we've grown to several hundred customers. We've expanded to ISO, GDPR, PCI, and other frameworks, and now serve customers like Lovable, Bland, and Wispr Flow. What started as 2 founders in a cramped dorm room is now a team based out of our office here in SF.

Tonight we're hosting an exclusive omakase dinner with @cluely and @getsalesbricks And you know us, we never show up empty-handed to an event Growth hack happening live tonight :)

2025 brought on a ton of lean teams like Cursor, Mercor, Midjourney, and more. Operating lean means getting lots done with few hands on deck—so here's the tools they use to move fast: Engineering: @cursor_ai, @lovable Analytics: @posthog Data science: @hex_tech Customer success: @usepylon, @DecagonAI Compliance: @getdelve

wanted to start 2025 off with a bang so we ran a wild experiment. we flew out our entire team to Hawaii. and the moment we landed we jumped straight into a 48-hour hackathon. most wild 48 hours, updates coming soon

u step into ur dorm and this is the first thing u see. No one beats MIT students at hacking & pranking. I’ve missed this place:)

We’ve sat through hundreds of security questionnaires. And we’ll say it plainly: almost none of them make sense for AI. They were written for SaaS. Today, we’re setting the standard for what comes next.

We're flying in builders from around the world to the Delve office this weekend for the Stanford Friends/Family hackathon. There's going to be $20k in cash prizes. 1st place team gets $10k. DM me if you want to join.

Hosted a startup dinner our first night at MIT! Feat. homemade (dormmade) food and a Costco potluck.

Z Fellows alum night @ Delve office @cory @0baylor

our type of housewarming gift @getdelve 🤝 @rhobusiness

"It’s normal in this city to be a dropout" Link to the full article by @reeyopeeyo in @sfstandard in the comments!

and they care about compliance and security🥵

we were 2 hackers coding out of a dorm at MIT, taking turns alternating between the singular desk and floor because there wasn’t enough space. years later we’re in our SF office automating the future of compliance with an amazing team and incredible customers. It’s been a wild journey getting here, and it’s only the start.

before and after the donuts got inhaled. does no one feed founders??

I would bet on Anna at Paradigm every day. So excited to see this go to the moon.

There aren't many founders who wake up one day and decide to build a startup in compliance. So I'm finally sharing the sequence of events that brought us here.

AI WEEK DAY 3: Fill in any part of the Delve platform with just your voice! Compliance is no longer manual screenshots and spreadsheets. Breeze through tasks with incredibly accurate voice-to-text (in collaboration with @WisprFlow). Link in comments!

And he's back at it again

In the last 12 months we’ve completely rebuilt our product 𝟯 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀. And no, unfortunately this is not a marketing stunt - we’ve built entirely new repos each time. Here’s the 3 lessons I learned When we first started Delve I thought building the product would be straightforward → write code ship features get users Multiple complete repository rebuilds later - I’ve learned it’s anything but that. ⚡ Don’t sweat the small stuff Before launching our initial product, we coded furiously for 1 month We refined every detail, even the glow animations on the buttons When we finally decided the product looked good enough to launch and started onboarding users, we realized we had built a great product but it was the wrong one We were only marginally saving time on compliance for our users 𝗞𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝗮𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳, 𝗮𝗺 𝗜 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴? ⚡ Balance maintenance and vision Our second version saved significantly more time on compliance for users but had quite a few bugs So, we became incredibly diligent about responding to customer feedback. We would fix bugs in minutes and ship features within 4 hours At the same time big feature pushes stagnated because we were busy with daily feature requests Customer feedback is 100% important. At the same time, you can’t lose sight of the long-term product vision 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗵 ⚡ The pain is temporary Building the product for a 3rd time was painful. We knew people liked what we had, it was good enough. We didn’t think it was something people loved. Don’t be afraid to nuke everything. We had so much feedback from customers and new ideas, it would have taken much longer to refactor the old code 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂 (𝗽𝗹𝘂𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀) 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴-𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺 ___ While we’re still pushing new updates and improvements every day, our product has come a long way It’s exciting to see customers save weeks of their time and win big contracts after getting compliant with @getdelve If you want to experience the product and get compliant, let’s chat → cal.com/team/getdelve/demo

My cofounder took a sales call with another founder who ended up not needing SOC 2 for their enterprise deal So instead, he spent the remainder of the 30 min call helping the founder draft an email response to their enterprise customer's IT department @karunkaushik_ is a g!!

AI WEEK DAY 4: Fix compliance issues with step-by-step instructions custom to your company! No more banging your head against a wall when you get a compliance alert. Delve gives you instructions custom to your tech setup to help you fix any compliance issue. Link in the comments!

Friday nights in the Delve office

Then we hit a massive roadblock: HIPAA compliance. It took 6 weeks, tens of thousands of dollars, and endless back-and-forth with lawyers, DevOps contractors, and a team of 15 MIT engineers. The whole experience was painful, complicated, and time-consuming.

Here's how @WisprFlow went viral with 2M views in 24 hours and hit #1 on Product Hunt (while spending $0 on their launch video):

This Wednesday, @getdelve and @brexHQ are hosting a Halloween party! We'll have founders sharing startup horror stories, tarot card reading, and a costume contest with prizes. Link to register in the comments.

basically, you: → start with the direct answer → branch into context only if they don’t interrupt → loop back and close cleanly

hey we're just passionate about b2b saas okay??

So, we decided to brainstorm product ideas - with no intention of ever building a startup. Every night for a month straight, we headed to the 5th floor of the Student Center to whiteboard ideas. This was right before ChatGPT came out, and we were dreaming up AI tools that felt impossible at the time.

We're looking for engineering firepower to come hack w us for a weekend in SF If you want to help 100+ companies through compliance and set the guardrails for innovation, shoot me a DM

That year, Karun and I started building an AI medical scribe that could record doctor-patient conversations and auto-generate notes. We were coding 24/7 from our dorm rooms and living off of free food we found on campus.

Amazing speaking with Camilla (COO of @brexHQ!) at the Delve office yesterday. Great community of female founders, leaders, and executives that were over at the office. Reminds me just how special of a city this is :)

we sponsored @MorningBrew over the weekend. what newsletter should we sponsor next?

In 2024, we applied to YC. We spent an entire day in Karun's dorm speed-typing up the application and filming videos. We hit submit at the exact minute of the deadline. Our application was accepted, but it turns out they weren't interested in our medical scribe at all. When we got to the interview phase, what they actually wanted to hear about was how we had automated compliance for ourselves. That was our tipping point.

39 days until launch 2.0! The @ycombinator W24 batch came to a bittersweet end today. I still remember moving out of my dorm at MIT, saying bye to all of my friends during finals, and moving to SF MIT was amazing but the joy of working on @getdelve has been unparalleled

if you want to join amazing customers like @lovable, @usebland, @WisprFlow and 100s of others using Delve for SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO, and more, DM me!

Made it onto the front cover! Huge thanks to the Genes in Space family for the amazing journey it’s been:)

This is what my Slack looks like right now. And I wouldn't change a thing. That's 1,141 chances to hear directly from our customers on what's working across product, sales, and marketing. We love our customers at @getdelve :)

But what stuck with me was the realization that if we struggled this much with compliance, what about every other startup? Plus, as AI people, we had so many ideas on how to automate the compliance work we had done. Our medical scribe wasn't the problem at all. The problem was that compliance was (and still is) a black box that blocks deals and holds back growth.

Every book I've read since April along with my notes, insights, and takeaways from every single one Featuring Zero to One, the Lean Startup, Crossing the Chasm, and a bunch more Lmk if u have any must-read recommendations that I missed main.d1i8zmsmbcykms.amplifya…

hiring for engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, you name it. apply ASAP!

AI WEEK DAY 1: Launching AI to Autofill your Security Questionnaires! Any questionnaire file format. Incredibly accurate answers from whole company context. Direct export from Delve. Link in comments!

Update: we brought custom chopsticks for everyone that said "Sushi without chopsticks is like compliance without Delve." definitely an interesting conversation starter... thanks to our co-sponsors @cluely and @getsalesbricks!

For everyone out there still waiting to hear back, just keep grinding. Build as if you’ve been rejected and you might just be pleasantly surprised. I’m also always here to help w mock interviews/give advice! We’ve helped a handful of friends through the YC app process and are always here to support other founders!

We hit "submit" on our Z Fellows application at 4 in the morning and then blasted music at full volume from our dorm back in May. Flash forward and the Z Fellows cohort begins this weekend. Thanks @cory for making this possible and @karunkaushik_ for the DJ'ing.

AI WEEK DAY 2: Launching AI Code Scanning! The same AI code scanning that caught (and fixed) several vulnerabilities in opensource repos, now made available to you. Link in the comments!

Incredible time at the @IEEEorg Privacy Conference in NY this weekend. Lots of amazing faces, some old and some new. See you at the next one!

Delve is live on YC! Let's get compliant :)

you don't need to be in the top 1% to get in. you just need to avoid the "not good enough" pile. and the Pyramid Principle helps you do just that!

My co-founder @karunkaushik_ and I met during our first week at MIT. We had the same academic advisor and kept running into each other at AI and healthcare events. Pretty quickly, we realized we both loved hacking and building things.