Virio

Big career update: I’m excited to share I’ve been promoted to Chief Comedian Officer (CCO) at Virio! When I joined last fall, I didn’t realize how quickly I’d be able to make an impact; but Virio truly rewards exponential career growth if you’re willing to lean in. In this new role, I’ll be focused on scaling our internal metrics: → VQJs (Virio Qualified Jokes) → VQPs (Virio Qualified Puns) Early initiatives already in motion: You can’t spell content without tent → evaluating Virio-branded glamping trips You can’t spell pipeline without line → Virio-branded jump ropes to lead fitness initiatives across SF You can’t spell sale without ale → exploring Virio-branded beverages The mandate is simple: increase laughter per employee while maintaining enterprise-grade output. A lot of responsibility ahead, but excited to help unlock the future of humor-driven GTM. I will still be available to chat about healthtech gtm as well. Huge thank you to Eric Lay and Emmett Chen-Ran for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I won’t let you or the team down.

One week ago, 196 startups presented at YC W26 Demo Day. 14 companies already at $1M+ ARR before Demo Day even finished That's 3x more than W25, and the highest in YC history. The dust is still settling, but so far the facts have been astounding. Average weekly revenue growth across the entire ~200 company cohort? 14%. Also the highest ever recorded. Several startups raised at $100M+ valuations within days. The "default" seed round this batch sits around $30M, roughly 2x the current market average. No batch has come close - maybe bc "cracked" caught on during this batch ;) This cohort is 64% B2B. ~60% AI. 66% SF-based (highest geographic concentration in YC history - YAY SF!!). I went deep on the B2B ones. Some standouts: Proximitty (YC W26) (Wye Yew Ho & Zi Zhang): AI-native loan management for banks and fintechs. $700K ARR in 3 weeks. Working with 4 large banks processing $2B+ in delinquent loans. CEO previously scaled Taptap Send from $75M to $200M ARR. CTO is ex-Bloomberg security infrastructure. 👀 Corvera (YC W26): AI agent workforce for CPG back-office. Went from $0 to $33K MRR in 4 weeks, serving 12 brands, growing 130% week-on-week. Founded by Christopher Kong, Dirk Breeuwer, and Matthew Collins. Raised $2M pre-seed from firstminute capital. 📈 Cardinal (Devi Jha & Jianna Liu): AI platform for precision outbound. Already running outbound for 40+ YC companies, including Corgi, Ordinal Mintlify, Greptile, and Luminai. Selling to your own batch is clutch. Beacon Health (YC W26) (Mark Pothen & Obinna A.): AI employees that double revenue for primary care practices. $5.4M raised from Accel, the largest healthcare raise in the batch by a wide margin. Hex Security (YC W26) (Huzaifa Ahmad, Ahmad Khan & Prama Yudhistira): AI agents that run continuous penetration tests against your apps and infrastructure 24/7. One of 14 companies that crossed $1M ARR before Demo Day. Veriad (YC W26) (Rohan Mahendraker & Anton Muratov): AI compliance officers that automatically check whether content meets brand and legal guidelines so teams can publish 10x faster. Sonarly (YC W26) (Dimittri Choudhury & Alexandre Klobb): AI agent that triages and fixes production alerts autonomously. Your 24/7 on-call engineer that never burns out. General Legal (YC26) (Ryan Walker): AI-native law firm for commercial contracting. Turns around contracts in hours instead of days, saving founders hundreds to thousands per contract. Arcline (YC W26) (Pamir Ehsas): AI-powered legal for startups.Founder is ex-outside counsel to OpenAI. The founders are getting younger and more technical... I applied 6 times! Sheesh! Who did I miss? Drop them in the comments and lmk why.

I built a LinkedIn profile audit skill inside Claude that scores any profile out of 50. Then I ran it on myself. I scored 19. I have 20,000 followers and my profile was actively working against me. - The headline was off but I like it so I am going to keep it 🤣 - The About section pitched a product I don't even sell anymore. ❌ - My Featured section are targeting the wrong ICP. ❗ Here's what the audit checks. 5 sections, 10 points each: 1. Profile picture, does it build trust before someone reads a word? 2. Banner, does it reinforce one clear message? 3. Headline, does the right person immediately know this is relevant to them? 4. About section, does it take the visitor on a journey from credibility to action? 5. Featured section, does it convert attention into the next step? The profiles that score 40+ all have one thing in common. Every section points in the same direction. One goal. One audience. One clear path forward. The ones under 25 almost always have the same problem. The profile is trying to serve 3 different identities at once. I open sourced the full audit framework. Scoring criteria, what to assess in each section, rewrite guidance across 30+ industries, and the exact questions to ask before changing anything. I also packaged it as a Claude skill you can install and run yourself. Give it your LinkedIn URL and it walks you through the full audit with scores and rewrites. Connect with me first and then Comment "audit" and I'll send you both. Virio

Virio's first hire was a 5x failed founder with no exits. It sounds insane, but she is one of the biggest reasons we're adding $1M ARR/mo. Meet Grace our first hire at Virio: 8 months ago at Virio, there was no title or playbook. Just a high give-a-sh*t meter and a willingness to do whatever it took. She's now the backbone of the entire company, and most people here joined because of her. Rarely do early hires grow as fast as a hyper-growth startup demands. What Grace did that very few people I've seen be capable of: 1. The wearer of all hats. CS. Content. Client relationships. EA. Outbound. Social media. Event planning. Marketing. Coordinating our launch. She's literally done any role, any task in the company you can think of. → Ambitious people are thinking about how to put points on the board for themselves. Grace is purely focused on points on the board for the company. 2. She became our best recruiter. We tried giving her a formal sales role, but she wasn't very good at it (she'll tell you that herself). But put her on a recruiting call talking about Virio from her own experience? She becomes a completely different person. The energy, the fire - you can't fake that. → It comes from having seen it all. Grace has been there in highest highs and the lowest lows. She rode the whole roller coaster and she's still here. That's what candidates feel. 3. She went from someone I was coaching day-to-day to someone I just hand things to. From day one she was enthusiastic, proactive, down to learn, even when there was a lot she didn't understand. Now I give her something and it gets done. → The entire office search - 50+ listings filtered, parameters set, logistics handled. She took it all. I'm a big believer in give a sh*t meter over credentials. When you're early, you need the most adaptable people you can find - people who can deal with the chaos and wear every single hat, because the role you hire for will never stay the same. Find someone with that. Everything else you can teach.

HUGE shoutout to the team for a record-breaking March! 🖤🎉  1. Hit 261,011 LinkedIn followers team-wide 2. Added another $1M+ ARR per month (first month our sales team out sold me) 3. Onboarded multiple $3B+ ARR clients 4. Crossed 18 full-time team members (soon 23) 5. 15x revenue growth in last 4 months 6. Got a private chef for the Virio team 7. One of our clients closed a Fortune 100 deal from our content 8. Expanded the office (took the whole floor) 9. Onboarded 2 new content engineers 10. Upsold 10% of our current client roster What made this work: → Service-as-software model (human-in-loop judgment at scale) → Pipeline from LinkedIn content + referrals (no paid ads) → 100% in SF (the greatest city in the world) → Team of "animals" that will run through walls to deliver great work Special shoutout to the clients who trusted us with their LinkedIn... your wins are our wins. "We booked 8 meetings with Banking leaders through LinkedIn this week. I was not expecting this much" "I'm such a fan head, the content was so good." "We generated 2.5M in Commercial Real Estate pipeline last month alone" "I had reporters pinging me, and the main executive reposted my post. He is the main publisher, the main writer in the gaming industry." "Great work with last batch of content, our CEO was super impressed" "We have gone up... by 666% in terms of the impressions since we've started posting. 951% increase in members reached!!" "I was really impressed with the metrics this week." "We just closed a Fortune 100 client in our industry through an ABM post."

Y Combinator's W26 demo day was 15hrs ago. and reportedly, 14 are already at $1M+ ARR... The crazier part is that Rebel Fund, which has ML-scored every YC batch since 2013, said 35% of W26 companies rank in the top 20% of every startup they've ever evaluated. No batch has come close to that before. The whole distribution shifted, not just the top few. -- Here are 32 top performers -- 1. Pocket (YC W26): Akshay Narisetti & Gabriel Dymowski shipped 30,000+ hardware units in five months. They hit $27M Annualized Run Rate at seed stage with 50% MoM growth. That's Series B traction from a batch company. 2. Synthetic Sciences (YC W26): Ishaan Gangwani and Aayam Bansal raised $1.4M before YC even started. They are building "Claude Code for Science." Youngest founders in YC history with that level of pre-program funding. 3. Cardinal: Devi Jha & Jianna Liu already has 40+ YC companies as paying customers. Their founders are 2x YC alumni. Selling to your own batch is one of the strongest early signals that exists. 4. Beacon Health (YC W26): Mark Pothen & Obinna A. raised $5.4M from Accel. Largest healthcare raise in the batch. 73% of the batch is SF-based. Highest concentration in YC history. 14% is hardware - moon hotels, tankless dive gear, cattle-mustering drones. Here are some more standouts (comment if I missed any): 5. 21st (Sergey Bunas): Infrastructure for AI agents 6. Zatanna (Rithvik Vanga): APIs for AI agents 7. OpenSpec (Tabish Bidiwale): 27k+ stars, spec framework for coding agents 8. Patientdesk [.] ai (Oncel Ozgul): AI OS for dental clinics 9. Alt-X (Ryan Samadi): AI agents for real estate underwriting 10. Remix (Sam Kaplan): Auto-generate social content 11. Fenrock AI (Charu Sharma): Back office AI agents for banks 12. Haladir (Joseph Tso): Building Operational Superintelligence 13. Human Archive (Raj Patel): World's largest multimodal robotics dataset 14. GRU Space (Skyler Chan): The Moon Factory 15. HLabs (Paul H.): US-made robot actuators 16. ZeroSettle (Gabe Roeloffs): Skip App Store fees, direct billing 17. Avoice (Chawin Asavasaetakul): Harvey for Architecture 18. Asimov (Lyem Ningthou): On-demand human intelligence for robots 19. Perfectly (Zhuang Luo): AI career super-connector 20. Menza (Qasim Munye): AI data team for brands 21. Valgo (Robert Moss): Risk quantification for physical AI insurance 22. Noetic (Tony Gao): Vanta for hardware 23. Ventura (Swen Koller): AI Teammates for Industrial Distributors 24. Mango Medical (Adrian Kilian): Agentic planning for orthopedic surgeries 25. Payna (Aaron Chen): AI Licensing for regulated companies 26. Palus Finance (Sam Lushtak): Better yields on idle cash 27. Doomersion (Mostafa Afr): Learn languages by doomscrolling 28. Rubric AI (Pragya Saboo): Reasoning for AI agents I'm beyond hyped. Let's build.