Startups

I meet a lot of founders who are worried by the rapid rate of technological change. They shouldn't be. It may feel uncomfortable, but techno-turbulence is net good for startups. They're much more likely to adapt successfully to some big change than incumbents are.

Sometimes when a startup wants to escape from a bad organization that has some claim on their IP, it's worth rewriting their software from scratch in a "clean room." AI-assisted programming will make this much easier.

Someone asked what's the most underappreciated quality in startup founders. I realized I could answer this by asking what's the most underappreciated aspect of startups. That's easy: how hard they are. So the most underappreciated quality in founders is sheer toughness.

Frame․io is falling apart. I wanted something better. Something simple, fast and reliable. I'm excited to introduce lawn․video, an open source video review platform. It flies. This video is not sped up at all. 100 gigs of storage, unlimited seats, $5/month.

Anthropic has acquired @Vercept_ai to advance Claude’s computer use capabilities. Read more: https://anthropic.com/news/acquires-verc…

Congrats to @encord_team on their $60M Series C! Encord is building the AI-native data layer powering physical AI, helping 300+ teams manage and align massive volumes of multimodal data as robots and autonomous systems move into real-world deployment.

Feels like Cloudflare also cannot resist the temptation of growth hacking. Their launch post states that vinext has been deployed to prod, and later in the post, they backpedal to admit it's not production-ready. Disappointingly disingenuous from Cloudflare

"There’s at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity." Stripe CEO Patrick Collison: "There’s been a phase transition in 2025." "There are many more businesses getting started and the average, the median business is in fact performing better." "Looking at real purchasing behavior on Stripe… end of ’25, beginning of ’26 is when I feel like we’re really starting to see it." @patrickc with @collision on @tbpn

.@GenAstronautics builds autonomous robotics for space. In microgravity, proteins crystallize without defects and semiconductors form without flaws, but astronaut time is scarce. They are enabling scale for the work that can't be done anywhere else. Congrats on the launch, @BramSchork and @ShiboZhou! https://ycombinator.com/launches/PY8-gen…

For the foreseeable future, everything about starting a startup, both good and bad, will be accentuated. It will be even harder to figure out what to do, but the founders who get it right will be able to create amazing things even faster than they could before.

2026 has been a generational year for us at Menlo already. — Anthropic is the fastest growing company of all time adding $4.5B run rate in 42 days after the $380B round. We put ~$1B into it starting from the Series C — Suno reaches 100M users and $300M ARR — Lovable is the 5th most adopted and 2nd fastest growing AI vendor, going 0 to $200M in a yr — OpenRouter grew 2.5x in 1.5 months. On track to 1 quadrillion token annual run rate. — Higgsfield hits $200M run rate with creative tools and a $1B+ valuation. — Wispr Flow continues to grow 40% MoM with a 70% 1 year retention and wins some massive enterprise contracts — Clerk becomes #4 fastest growing vendor in the league of Google, Atlassian and Replit — Inception launches the first and best reasoning diffusion model that is the fastest for its intelligence at 1000tokens/s — Goodfire, Anthropic's first direct investment, hits $1B+ val and discovers novel biomarkers for Alzheimer's Most VCs don't believe in this model of being picky, low volume investors. We do very few investments (up to 2/partner/yr) and we go early. 5 of these were partnerships since the Seed. It's been working for us so far (even though we've missed a lot too!) It's an privilege to work with founders who run through walls and take on so much risk to bring new things into the world. And we're very lucky to play a small part in that! Still a lot of work to do.

SpaceX has acquired xAI, forming one of the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engines on (and off) Earth → http://spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spac……

I'm joining @OpenAI to bring agents to everyone. @OpenClaw is becoming a foundation: open, independent, and just getting started.🦞 https://steipete.me/posts/2026/openclaw

Anthropic’s social media manager after hitting “Post” just to make stocks crash and families fall apart.

Am i the only dork who still loses money on this xD https://trustmrr.com/special-category/op… Then again can't complain in my new role as OpenAI troublemaker. 😅

.@ResslAI deploys AI employees at field ops businesses to automate their office work - responding to leads, booking jobs, sending estimates, etc. Their agents sit on existing software and increase operating margins. Congrats on the launch, @arushi_ressl and @AbhishekEswaran! https://ycombinator.com/launches/PXv-res…

ShortKit lets every app roll their own TikTok-quality feed. Built by a former YT infra engineer, ShortKit's managed SDKs and video infra lets teams roll best-in-class short form video experiences, without needing their in-house video eng teams. Congrats on the launch, @neilbhammar and @michaelmahersel! https://ycombinator.com/launches/PXQ-sho…

Claude's consumer users have grown 2.2x in the last 6 weeks! At 79M weekly visitors, it's still 7-17x smaller than Gemini (539M) and ChatGPT (1.3B), but it is growing 3-6x faster. The lines between which labs do enterprise and which do consumer are slowly blurring.

.@OneRobotHQ builds world model-based simulations that are realistic to see and realistic to interact with, so robotics teams can train and evaluate VLAs without being bottlenecked by robot time. Congrats on the launch, @hsarabu_ and @eltonbear6996! https://ycombinator.com/launches/PWj-one…

the future of building saas this is how 3-person teams build 100m companies: 1/ start with a sub-niche inside a big market 2/ map their daily workflow end-to-end 3/ identify where money changes hands 4/ spot the repetitive mechanical steps 5/ quantify the cost of those steps 6/ create scroll-stopping content around that workflow 7/ study which posts get saves, replies, and dms 8/ double down on the organic angles that convert 9/ run paid ads on proven organic winners 10/ capture emails from day one 11/ manually perform the workflow yourself 12/ document every step precisely 13/ separate judgment tasks from mechanical tasks 14/ turn mechanical tasks into structured agent workflows 15/ design agents to complete full tasks, not suggestions 16/ connect to real tools: email, slack, notion, crm, stripe 17/ add orchestration, retries, and verification checks 18/ store user preferences + long-term memory 19/ launch narrow with high-touch onboarding 20/ publish measurable proof: revenue, hours saved, errors reduced 21/ move pricing from per-seat → per-task 22/ shift to outcome pricing tied to revenue created 23/ increase pricing as value compounds 24/ expand into adjacent workflows within the same niche 25/ orchestrate multiple agents across the full lifecycle 26/ build switching costs through data + memory 27/ turn power users into public case studies 28/ hire operators from inside the niche 29/ reinvest profits into distribution + product depth 30/ become the default execution layer for that sub-niche