Marty Kausas’ Post

> Most people then basically ignore this advice, which is fair enough, each to their own. The best founders, including Brian Chesky, are coachable, not obstinate. My fellow YC alumni act upon advice from believable people ferociously and immediately. Interestingly enough, I am regarded as believable. > But the frustrating part, is many of them then try to insist I spend more time reading about their IDEA! There are many materials from YC, readily available on the Internet, that say that they don't feel qualified to assess the idea and that, historically, the idea almost always changes. Including this one: https://lnkd.in/giK_wNb7 These materials are freely accessible and, if you consume them, you will have the knowledge to maximize your shot of getting into YC. And these are not just great practice for getting into YC; they are great practice for your startup period, which is why YC is, by a large margin, the winningest startup accelerator in the history of startups.

Founders - as the deadline for Y Combinator's Summer '24 batch is nearing, I'm excited to announce that we're hosting 'MagicBall Insights: Crafting the Perfect YC Application - Insights from Former YC Founders.' 🚀 This virtual event will feature an in-depth panel discussion with ex-YC founders, followed by a session where they'll review your applications one-on-one. Join us on April 10th to: - Learn best practices from former YC founders. - Get actionable tips to craft the perfect application. - Understand common mistakes most founders make. - And learn how you can increase your chances of being accepted into YC. RSVP on the link in the comments👇 See y'all on April 10th! 🙌 P.S. Make sure to share this post with founders whom you know are applying to YC soon! 🎉 Nikhil Kapur Siddharth Verma Geetika Mehta Anand Krishna Chinmay Bharti Amartya Jha Neel Balar Rohan Sood Vellanki Sriharsha Kiran Babu Aditya Chebbi Cherish Santoshi Nihal Kashinath Paul Ravindranath G Anuj Duggal

Attention all Startup Founders, Are you making a plan to pitch your idea to Y Combinator? Look no further than this post - Grayscale Ventures, the creators of India’s largest AI community MagicBall AI has organised a virtual session with a panel of Y-Combinator backed founders, exclusively for you. This virtual event will feature an in-depth panel discussion with ex-YC founders, followed by a session where they will review your applications one-on-one (you DONT want to miss this!). The live session will feature : - A 1-hour panel discussion featuring ex-YC founders, where they'll offer invaluable tips for crafting a standout YC application. - the opportunity to have your application reviewed one-on-one by the panelists. (Optional) RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/gqSP-ab5 Ping me or if you have any queries :)

Your tech stack might get you rejected by Y Combinator; let me explain why. When I first saw this question on the application, I was confused. I know YC puts a lot of consideration into each question, but I didn't think they cared about my tech stack. As I thought more about it, though, I realized that a tech stack can make or break an early-stage company, and YC knows that. Your tech stack tells YC 3 things. 1️⃣ Can you be more than just an engineer 2️⃣ What are you focused on 3️⃣ How much do you understand your customers 1️⃣ Can you be more than just an engineer Being a good engineer is important. Startups have a lot to build and building fast is often how you win. YC, however, cares more about your ability to make good business decisions and your tech stack is a business decision. Your stack can determine the quality of your product, how fast you can ship it, and how easily you can hire and onboard onto your team. YC is looking for good technical founders who make informed tradeoffs about the tech stack they choose. 2️⃣ What are you focused on YC isn’t looking for teams that can make something in the coolest way possible; they want teams that can make something people want. If your tech stack is over-engineered at an early stage, it shows that your priorities are off. 3️⃣ How much do you understand your customers Some companies will need to shape their tech stack around customer needs. Seltzer is 100% Typescript because we sell internal tools to companies who use Typescript. Some companies will need things like Rust or Kuburnetes to provide value, but most wont. Knowing what stack you need will save you a lot of headache in the future. At Seltzer, I use the T3 Stack (Typescript, TRPC, Tailwind) with Replicache (local first library). I chose this because... 1. I can ship very quickly with it. 2. I’m building for typescript developers. The best way to ship typescript tools is typescript. 3. The hiring pool is bigger; most people know or can pick up typescript 4. Local first makes the experience better. However, most new features are built without Replicache at first. I will make a deeper dive of my stack as a part 2, so hit the follow button and stay tuned!

Being able to Pitch an Idea is as important for founders as it is for intrapreneurs and business leaders. This session that Rohan Sood and team are organizing I am sure would have several great insights for all as YC's application is the top notch pitch format you could look up to. Do register and be part of the session to learn key insights.

Super excited to finally share what we are up to! So much of making progress is about finding the right person at the right time. Happenstance 🍀 exists to create 10x more of this kind of luck in the world. Backed by Garry Tan and Elad Gil, we've built the world's best AI person search by a wide margin. No more keyword search; just describe the kind of person you're looking for. You can use it right now at www.happenstance.ai. The old way of finding people is insanely inefficient. Often it involves finding the right corner of the internet and shouting into the void and hoping the right person happens to hear it. In a world with LLMs, we can do so much better. If you have an extensive network, and your job involves leveraging that network, it's time to let the LLMs help you. You can AI-search the professional profiles of your 1st-deg connections (LinkedIn, Gmail, and X) right now. And of course leveraging the connections of your teammates (or letting them directly search your own network) is even better. For that you should make a Happenstance Group, where members can search each other's connections. www.happenstance.ai/group Professional communities have a particularly large opportunity to create luck between their members. If you are a leader at one of these, I'd love to chat. We have several tricks up our sleeves just for you. For example, you might want to make the professional profiles of your community members AI-searchable. "Who here is an expert in Y?" "Did anyone here work at Z?" If you see that sort of thing a lot, you need a Directory. https://lnkd.in/ggdagbeE Or you might want a Happenstance bot in your chat forum, where you can just tag the bot in response to a community member's ask. These seem especially effective. We're already used by quite a few communities, including YC (with over 1000 YC alums already signed up), and Barak Kaufman and Shlomo Dalezman's wonderful Post Exit Founders community, which provided me with a big chunk of the original inspiration for Happenstance. We're hiring! Especially: Design engineers and AI backend / infra / prompt engineers. Our team is small & elite. We aren't aiming for the much-discussed single person billion dollar company, but I wonder if we can keep it <10. Expect intense work and extra large ownership.

“Do things that don’t scale” is advice that sticks with many Y Combinator founders, but it means more than simply rolling up your sleeves. Early on at Simplifine (YC S24), we chose to work directly with researchers—getting on calls, testing workflows, and uncovering their specific challenges. Those hours spent in detailed conversations and hands-on support weren’t efficient, but they gave us insights data alone couldn’t provide. This approach may seem counterintuitive, yet it’s helped us understand the deeper, often overlooked needs that drive our product direction. Taking this non-scalable route has led to surprising breakthroughs. By focusing on direct feedback and support, we’ve identified critical patterns and quickly adapted our platform based on real-world use, rather than assumptions. This clarity in direction means we aren’t investing in features or workflows that don’t have real impact. Instead, we’re building exactly what researchers need, helping us keep Simplifine focused and practical. Ultimately, our commitment to “doing things that don’t scale” is more than just a startup tactic; it’s our way of staying aligned with our users. The temptation to grow fast is real, but by choosing to engage personally with researchers, we’ve grounded Simplifine in what truly matters. These early, authentic connections have shaped our product and guide us as we scale—ensuring that Simplifine continues to serve the research community in ways that are both meaningful and impactful. #dothingsthatdontscale

𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗽 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝗖𝗼𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗨𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲: 🌱 Sometimes, things don’t unfold as planned. After much reflection, we’ve decided not to open a case study cohort as initially envisioned. Our goal was to validate the 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 and 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 of our business model, and we are deeply grateful to the companies who showed interest. While our framework didn’t quite align with their needs, each conversation helped us grow. 🙏 As career transitioners, we envisioned a model where talents are fairly compensated, and startups can validate their ideas. Balancing these proved more challenging than expected, and we’ve yet to find the right fit. 🎯 In true TechLeap spirit, we’re embracing our scrappy, iterative approach. 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱: 💡 𝗦𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝘀: It’s okay not to have all the answers. Gathering evidence and refining along the way is key. 💡 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲: It’s about more than speed—what we build must resonate with real needs. 💡 𝗦𝗲𝘁𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵: Every challenge has brought us closer to clarity and success. A special thanks to our mentors for encouraging us to build confidence and gather evidence. Your support has been invaluable. 🙌 Though our current offering isn’t quite there, we remain committed to our goal. Stay tuned as we share our journey applying to Y Combinator in the next post. 🚀 Thank you for being part of our story—we couldn’t do this without your support. ❤️

SOLVE A REAL NEED Y Combinator recently completed their Demo Day, where 234 companies each had 1 minute to present. "Make something people want" is YC's most famous piece of advice for founders. Whatever you do, solve a real need. The best way to do this:  Design from the experience you’ve had. This will make you uniquely positioned to understand the challenge, the alternatives, the pitfalls, and the tangible AND intangible needs of the audience because of one simple reason: The audience was you. Feel a pain (deeply). Dig into the heart of that pain (curiously). Solve for that pain (uniquely). Then, don’t stop. Keep solving. More will reveal itself. Be ready for it. Be open and aware of what unfolds. Keep learning. Keep solving. Keep building. Keep reinventing. The journey is the reward. No one tells you, but life is just problem solving. It doesn’t get easier, you just get better. And no one really has it all figured out and no one ever really has it made. They’re problem solving too. They just have pattern recognition that you don’t have yet. And those people are examples of the Paradox Of Effort: It takes tremendous effort (and experience) to make something look effortless. You’ll get there. Someday. Keep going. #life #work #problemsolving We Are Bill 📸: To me, architecture is especially always about problem-solving. 📍 Bordeaux, France 🇫🇷 with Alison Morris Roslyn

Y Combinator's Demo Day is coming up on April 4th. I did YC in 2019 and 2014 and I've helped 100+ founders apply to YC. I still think my biggest takeaway from YC is the importance of speed. Paul Graham explains: "Launch fast. The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you're wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users." YC does an incredible job getting founders to meet ambitious goals on short time horizons. It teaches you to move fast. And this is a skillset that sets you up for life.