Michael Yan

"If you're relying on AI not becoming 100X better, you're about to get steamrolled." -- Jason Warner, ex-CTO of Github and CEO of poolside How we code and build software is being rapidly transformed with AI. Sitting down with Jason the future looks clearer. Over the next 5 years: 🌏 All 7 billion people can code 🏗️ Search bars will spit out software 🔋 AI will generate its way out of data scarcity 🌩️ Foundation models to become cloud companies I unpack the 5 year frontier of software development in Future of Code: AI-led Software Development https://lnkd.in/gze2QSbu #AI #Software #Code

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𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒𝐀 🇺🇲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐎𝐰𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲 This is a step-by-step short guide based on my own experience building Gala and moving to SF (for fellow immigrant founders) Let’s dive in 👇 1-𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐩 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐔𝐒 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲 For startups the best option is a C-Corp in Delaware. For solopreneurs LLC may be a better fit. But do your own research for your case. You can do all the process through app.firstbase.io or Clerky.com 2- 𝐓𝐚𝐱𝐞𝐬 Contact Fondo or another platform to get your taxes in order. They will help with you federal and state taxes. 3- 𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐚 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐄𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒 To enter the US, you may need a B1 visa to stay there for the first 6 months while you start the process for the visa you actually need, which is the O-1 Visa. Make sure to plan ahead, as getting an appointment at the embassy can take several months. 4- 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐎-1 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐚 You can look into tryalma.ai, lighthousehq.com, or contact an immigration lawyer. (Ask for a referral) This process can cost between $8K and $15K, so you should be financially prepared to cover these expenses 5- 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 The best option is to get a sublease until you establish yourself in the city. You can look into Michelle Fang's guide to find the best places to stay in SF: startertosf.guide TIP: Stay away from the Tenderloin 6- 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲 Uber and Waymo are expensive, so make sure you download the MuniMobile App to get tickets for the public transportation bus. 7- 𝐏𝐫𝐨 𝐭𝐢𝐩 The most overlooked step in moving to the US is actually buying a flight and going there. You’re not truly committed until you land at SFO. 8-𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐬 If you're a spanish top talent student or tech builder looking for an internship in San Francisco, you should apply to https://goexponential.org/ 9-𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to comment here or DM me. Happy to help! If you found this thread helpful, engage with the post to help fellow founders start their journey And if you planning to get fit or lose weight this September, try gala for free here: gala.coach

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Highly recommend this interview from the All-In Podcast summit with Tekedra N. Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo. Great work by Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David O. Sacks, and David Friedberg. Here are some insights that stood out to me: 🚦 Why does Waymo avoid freeways? Freeways are pretty straightforward and Waymo is more focused on denser, unpredictable environments since they help the AI learn faster and better. 🤖 Tekedra referenced the ‘Waymo Driver’ often, which is an interesting term - in a way, they are building ‘one new driver’. 🤝 Will Waymo disrupt and decimate Uber? Well they’re partners so it would be an awkward yes so take this one with a grain of salt. Tekedra said that they don’t want to be experts at everything. They partner with OEMS on the vehicle side, so it made sense to partner with Uber on the rideshare platform side. I buy that.

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Kevin Zhang’s latest piece explores the evolving landscape of AI code generation, specifically the rise of “coding copilots” like GitHub Copilot, Codeium, and Cursor. These tools are revolutionizing the coding process by integrating AI-driven code assistance directly within development environments, promising efficiency gains for developers. Zhang compares these copilots to the earlier IDE wars, where Microsoft’s VS Code ultimately prevailed, driven by strong distribution and an intuitive UX. The question now: who will lead this new AI-powered race? With Microsoft’s stronghold through GitHub Copilot, startups face the challenge of differentiating through user experience, specialized model fine-tuning, and smart distribution strategies. It’s a pivotal moment for AI in software development. Thoughts on which platform will dominate? #AI #CodingTools #SoftwareDevelopment #Innovation

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Want to invest in startups at the earliest stages? If you wrote a check for $50k, here is the amount of equity you can expect to receive at each valuation cap based on latest SAFE data from Peter Walker at Carta in 2024: Angel, 8M Cap => 0.63% Big Angel, 10M Cap => 0.50% Pre-Seed, 12M Cap => 0.42% Seed, 20M Cap => 0.25% Jumbo Seed, 36M Cap => 0.14% Learn more about how SAFEs and caps work at the YCombinator link in the comments. As always, however, it's not about how much equity you own, but how much it is worth! 😉👍

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July 29 2024 – 5 Notable Articles To Read Article: NVIDIA Partner SMC Raising $950M to Tap AI Server Boom Takeaway: SMC - Sustainable Metal Cloud provides data center capacity to clients, offering them access to Nvidia AI chips and advanced cooling technology. Source: Bloomberg Link: https://lnkd.in/dFXr43uT Article: OpenAI Is Launching Search Engine, Taking Direct Aim at Google Takeaway: Developed with input from publishers, SearchGPT will provide real-time summaries of website information. Source: The Wall Street Journal Link: https://lnkd.in/dSDj5fpA Article: Royal Caribbean Group Raises Its Outlook. Cruise Demand Is Strong. Takeaway: “Exceptional demand for our vacation experiences has accelerated our performance by generating significant yield growth over the past several years,” Chief Executive Jason Liberty said in the earnings release. Source: Barron's Link: https://lnkd.in/dpznkWbS Article: Alibaba Group-backed Baichuan raises $691M as China seeks to catch up on generative AI Takeaway: The business is valued at 20B yuan with the funding round included existing backer Alibaba, along with internet giant Tencent and smartphone maker Xiaomi Technology. Source: PitchBook Link: https://lnkd.in/dmWTKFan Article: J.P. Morgan pitches in-house chatbot as AI-based research analyst Takeaway: Approximately 50,000 employees are using a large language model developed by the bank to enhance productivity. Source: Financial Times Link: https://lnkd.in/dx6Z2sU4 #news #ai #research #business

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Growth engineering is the most important type of engineering that a SWE needs to learn to make it in entrepreneurship. Growth engineering, a technical field pioneered by Facebook about a decade ago, is a technical, and systematic approach to growth. If you know how to use tools like APIs, LLMs, GPT or just a spreadsheet to create and drive growth for a product, service or business then you can be a growth engineer too. One great example of growth engineering comes from the extremely talented CTO at MJV Martyna Paruch who has been working on the use of the Discord python SDK to create a discord bot hosted on a Google Cloud VM to create a questionnaire for our new discord community called Developers R Us: A Community for Developers to Help Each Other Grow Their LinkedIn + Upwork Profiles. The code is below, as you can see discord's python SDK package includes a ton of cool stuff including the ability to create event based decorators that can be triggered through a user engaging with the bot. Comment DEV if you're interested in joining our community!

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Earn royalties for automating troubleshooting steps? See an AI Assistant use your steps to respond to alerts and questions? If you can be in San Francisco on Sat June 22nd, sign up for SRE Day and use discount code KYLE20 so we can provision you a dev environment for our workshop. Link in the comments. I'm also taking volunteers for anyone who wants to race Eager Edgar, one of our AI Assistants, troubleshooting popular Kubernetes-based apps... #sre #devops #platformengineering #whatdoirunwhen

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Created an AI assistant app to connect patients and doctors using Vercel AI SDK, Assistant-UI.com components, function calling, thread suggestions, check it out (Guillermo Rauch, Simon Farshid, Kajari Ghosh)

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Back in 2010 or so I was obsessed with game engines like Unity and Unreal. Sure, they had been around for a while before that, but for me, at that time, these engines unlocked the magical world of game development by taking away the pain of graphics programming, user input, platform deployment (Android Studio, looking at you) and so much more. In 2012 I think I made one game a month for 12 months. Yes, they were all terrible but that's not the point. The point is that it was fun and easy to make games. Remember the mantra, "make games not engines"? The same logic applies to building CAD applications. Developing an application that lets users edit geometry in a robust, easy, and scalable way is very difficult. If you come from game dev, you might think meshes are the way to go. That will seem like great idea until your users want to boolean two meshes that came from who-knows-where. ❌ If you've got lots of extra dollars to spare and you come from the world of engineering, you might consider licensing one of the desktop CAD kernels. Good luck to you! Have fun learning the math behind BREPs for the next couple years let alone shipping that application to paying customers to recover your upfront costs. ❌ At Metafold 3D our vision is to change this. In this talk, our CEO Elissa Ross demonstrates how we developed a personalized medicine application that any clinician could use in less than a week. ✅ Get started today with our #opensource SDKs: https://lnkd.in/gkETXB5k

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Today, Daytona launched DevContainer (https://devcontainer.ai/): an open-source tool that automatically generates an infrastructure-as-code specification just by pointing it to a repository. Check it out! Super useful 🚀

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#search disruption is one of the top topics on the list of #startups to build next of Andreessen Horowitz . Christian J. Ward of Yext talked about his market opportunity at our leadership event last week. The search and find market is fragmenting- consumers are searching for businesses not only on #google, but also on #bing, on #apple devices, on #copilot, on #amazon , on #socialmedia , on #AIbots, on #perplexity, on #maps and many more. Small businesses are left with the challenge of ensuring a strong online presence and transactional capabilities on all these platforms. Easy solved with#digitalONE by localsearch (Swisscom Directories AG) : one solution covers it all. Is your small business worried about #search disruption ? With digitalone it should not be . #disruption #future #online #search #advertising #onlinewerbung Francesco Verrienti Paloma Bosco Robert Ferenc Semir T. Nikolaus Konstantin Pandlowsky Irène Dumas Alain Deville Valentina Parente

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Organizing an intimate meetup for high-growth founders building dev tool / Infra / b2b SaaS, together with Bain Capital Ventures this Friday in SF. If you've either: - Raised at least $2M or achieved at least $250k ARR for your current company - Or, you’re a repeat founder who has raised at least $10M or achieved at least $1M ARR in a previous company - Or, had a previous exit for at least $5M Please comment/DM to get tickets - 5 more spots left

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The genius of the duality baked into the yc application With product-market fit (PMF), Y Combinator questions are blazingly simple; without it, they seem simple but are complex. I’ve always appreciated the simplicity of the yc app questions — but only recently realized it’s occam’s razor-ness. I was having a conversation with someone, explaining why I think Y Combinator is probably the smartest "casino" in the world. They make $500k bets here and there — albeit well-researched w/ deep dives and experience behind them. At its core, it's still prediction, right? What I've noticed is that many of YC’s companies are quite similar—especially in this new ai craze phase, in areas like 'upload CSV data for charts' or 'talk to your data' services. I’ve seen at least three YC companies offering similar, each with a slight twist. But it makes sense—they’re betting that maybe 5–10% will succeed. That’s why they’re betting on similar ideas w/ different teams. On a side note, one of the reasons I enjoy using YC's startup’s services is because they’re always on the cutting edge. You get to work directly with founders, which is a huge advantage. As a founder myself, I get valuable tools and insights for my business, while they gain quick exposure and in-depth conversations with real customers. It’s a win-win. Interacting with a lot of YC companies I realized how well each has it’s own PMF, it might be replicable, and it might be that there are several other startups in YC doing the same, but they ARE THE BEST TEAM to execute it.  And this is where I’ve come to really appreciate YC’s questions. They seem simple at first—like "What’s your unique advantage?" or "What’s a non-computer system you’ve hacked?" For ideas that have found product-market fit, these questions are easy to answer & take just a few sentences. But for those that haven’t, these same questions become a nightmare, and you end up writing paragraph after paragraph, trying to explain it. That’s when you realize the questions are the great filter. It’s like a recursive function—simple on the surface but powerful. I’ve gained a new level of appreciation for these questions & the people who crafted them because they clearly come from a place of deep experience. Applying these approaches to my own work in XR, both in the design of products & conversations with our customers has been amazing. Simple solutions that have taken me a decade to understand, baked into poignant edges of dense simplicity, almost like black hole singularities. So, I just wanted to give a shoutout to all the people who hone their craft & bring simplicity into focus (Have been following Garry Tan with his insightful video & posts). It takes a lot of complexity to get to simplicity. Some cool YC startups I've interacted w/ recently -- shoutout to Raffi Isanians from Modern Realty (ai real estate agent), Marvin Bornstein from Zeit AI (YC S24) (talk to your tabular/csv data), Rez Havaei from Kart AI (YC S24)

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Too often, we get caught up in pursuing perfect outcomes, forgetting that innovation is a journey of trial and error. Check out my full Dialog interview with Mourad Zerroug, CTO at Splash (SplashThat.com): https://lnkd.in/eMgEyBt9

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20 meetings w/ investors and startups in 3 days around SF/Bay Area. Here's what’s happening in hiring right now: 1) Elite engineers demand elite offers. Early-stage startups are winning top talent by paying up (sometimes as high as $250k-$300k + equity). 2) Startups are prioritizing candidates with brand names, interest in startups, history of solving complex problems, ambition, higher ego (not too high). 3) The best candidates have clarity on career direction. Some good questions I heard founders ask, “Where are you going?” and “How can we help you get there?” 4) Despite early funding surges in Q1/Q2, investors are becoming more selective - especially in AI.  This creates an opportunity for startups to hire from struggling shops with top talent. Invest now before the market shifts again.

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Pathways to Tech Week #2 at  Headstarter: Being surrounded by people who are building amazing software and companies is a truly inspiring experience. My favorite speakers were: • Tariq Ahmed: First Engineer at AppLovin ($30Billion IPO) • Julian Alvarez 🚀: CEO of Wisdolia • Hamza Ali: CEO of Olostep  Here's what I have learned from them: 𝟭- "𝗙𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗶𝘃𝗼𝘁" Tariq, one of the first engineers at AppLovin, shared that AppLovin tried several things in their early stages that failed. However, the company had incredible success when it pivoted to mobile advertising; They didn't have expertise in the field. Today if you've experienced in-app advertising, AppLovin was likely behind it. 𝟮- "𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻." Julian runs Wisdolia a startup aimed at helping college students actively study. By simply asking what types of students they were. His team found that medical students were the ones the ones who converted the most into paying customers. It seemed evident because they were the most overwhelmed by the amount of information they had cram. But the evidence in their face was a lightbulb moment for Wisdolia. 𝟯- "𝗦𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘄𝗲'𝗹𝗹 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗳𝗮𝗿." Hamza, CEO of Olostep, describes his company as "a company that enables AI agents to browse the web just like humans". I was fascinated when I heard that, and as the Olostep team acquires more customers they value scrappy and people that initiative on board. Those qualities set engineers apart when building successful products.

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Last night I had the fortune of representing LaunchDarkly at Sourcegraph's CodeAI Summit NYC. An important theme I took from last night's event? Context. Models like specifics. Computers can't read our brains or know what we want to achieve. Technology is kinda useless without the right context. As we move forward in this increasingly AI-generated world (for better and for worse) let us not forget the importance of adding context to the equation. Whether that's providing context to a dataset through how it was collected, sharing context of your repo to better aid a code assist tool, or simply providing context behind the why of our decisions. It's an interesting (and important) place to keep in our minds. #AI #MachineLearning #DeveloperAdvocacy #DeveloperEvents

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What I’ve learned in working with a 10X’er engineering team — A high performing engineering team operates like an R&D lab that focuses on inventing and bringing new products to market. This is in contrast to teams that are focused on building features from a conveyor-belt like backlog. Here’s the DNA of a highly talented team: 1. Great engineers are passionate and curious about inventing new technology. 2. They get a kick on solving valuable problems that no one has solved. 3. Owning a product and having customers use it and see value. 4. Small teams of 10xers out-invent and out-build much larger teams. 5. Talented engineers are some of the most creative people I know; They take an almost playful and curious approach when building technology. Here’s what to be careful on: 1. Too much process around Scrum, JIRA, story-points, and backlogs. 2. Don’t outsource inventing new technology; keep it with the core team. 3. Understand why and how the new invention will create value for customers. 4. Don’t be an overlay or nice-to-have app, solve a hard problem in a new category. 5. Don’t just connect data with API’s. Work at the value layer — making data actionable.

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