Chamod Gamage

YC is wrong. You don't NEED a technical co-founder. We've helped multiple founders break $10M+ valuations without writing a single line of code. Here's what actually happens when you hire a technical co-founder out of desperation: You're solving a short-term problem (need someone to build) with a long-term commitment (50% equity forever). Most founders think: "I have an idea, but can't code. I need a technical partner." What they really need: a product that is built well and quickly with the right partner. These are completely different problems. The desperation hire always backfires: - You end up giving 50% to someone whose only qualification is knowing how to code over what's best for your product - When you need to pivot or scale, you're stuck with their decisions If they leave, you've lost half your company and have to rebuild anyway. The better approach: Build a focused, low-tech, or AI-built MVP. Prove traction. Get funded. Then hire technical talent when you can: - Pay market rates instead of equity - Choose from the best developers (not just available ones) - Hire for your specific tech stack and growth needs I've watched non-technical founders build incredible companies this way. They stay focused on the customers while experts handle the technical execution.

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A lot of other YC companies simply use 'Cursor for X' as a shortcut for explaining their idea. But at Den (YC X25), we actually did it. Cursor unlocks massive efficiency for SWE. Den unlocks massive efficiency for the other 90% of workers.

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YC has quietly built a parallel tech ecosystem. Not just a network - an entire operating system for startups. Think about it: A YC founder can build their entire stack using only YC companies. Infrastructure, analytics, payment processing, marketing tools - it's all there. At friend-and-family prices. When you launch a product to the YC network, you get something priceless: A group of technical founders who actually understand what you're building. They become your first users, your debuggers, your evangelists. This is why PostHog is now used by 65% of new YC companies. This is why Brex dominated fintech... and why each YC batch makes the next one stronger. A true compounding advantage.

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Everyone in crypto loves to brag that their engineers SHIP But here’s the truth: Crypto is the only industry where you’re rewarded for NOT shipping Teams raise hundreds of millions and never launch. Not because they can’t. But because they shouldn’t. In crypto, hype > product The idea of what you’re building is worth more than the product itself. Just look at Blast Massive hype. Created the points meta. Masterclass on Incentives. Then they shipped 💀💀💀 Or Berachain. Rumored launch on 4/20/24. People thought that was late. But if they had shipped? No one would be talking about them anymore. It’s like that scene from Silicon Valley: "If you show revenue, people ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it’s never enough. But if you have NO revenue, you're 'pre-revenue!' Pure potential." Crypto works the same way—except it’s not revenue. It’s products. Once you ship, the magic’s gone. We’ve rarely seen it play out any other way. Where else do companies with massive mindshare exist without launching or selling anything? Only in crypto 🤷‍♂️

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Hiring a founding engineer is way more competitive than most founders think. You're not just offering equity. You're asking someone to say no to: ⚠️ $400K-500K FAANG offers, or ⚠️ Being the founder of their own project, or ⚠️ The comfort of 9-to-5 and spending $10000 on video games And in return? They get... what? A Notion doc and a pitch deck? The truth is: You're not recruiting talent. You're recruiting belief. At pre-funding, pre-traction, or even pre-product, they're betting on you. Not your codebase. Not your landing page. You. If you don't have: ⚠️ A strong personal track record ⚠️ Sharp narrative clarity ⚠️ Signals like YC, Sequoia, viral waitlists... Then don't expect resumes to flood in. Founding engineers don't join startups. They join founders.

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Too often YC companies move orders of magnitude slower post YC. I felt this myself even after telling myself this wouldn't happen to me. The experience of doing YC feels like you accomplished something. But in reality, there is a lot more work to be done. During YC, its normal to get a lot of traction in such a short period of time but what founders struggle with is onboarding customers for the sake of traction and onboarding customers that truly make a great fit for your product. You might have to take a step back after program to ask yourself if you're really building a repeatable product which can feel very overwhelming. An important characteristic of founders is not allowing these slumps to get the better of you and making tasks feel surmountable in times of uncertainty. This led me back to getting the basics right: - 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁: Reduce that cortisol, you can't crush goals without taking care of yourself. Sleep, diet, and exercise aren't optional; neither is sanity. - 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀: Each challenging task you conquer builds confidence for the next. Momentum breeds momentum. - 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗹𝘆: Big tasks break down into small steps. Small steps are surmountable steps. Slumps aren't permanent. Tasks aren't insurmountable. You've got this.

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Founders should pay themselves less than junior engineers until Series A. That’s the rule we follow at Keywords AI (YC W24). Andy, Raymond, and I only pay ourselves enough to cover rent, food, and basics. Meanwhile, our interns and early engineers earn more than we do. That’s by design. Why? Because they took a bet on us. They could’ve gone to big tech for stable pay. Instead, they chose to join a small team building something that might fail. If they’re taking that leap, they should be rewarded more than we are. I’ve seen the opposite. Founders take market salaries while early teammates grind for pennies. It kills morale, burns runway, and sends the wrong message: that the founders value comfort over survival. For us, every dollar saved extends our life as a startup. Every extra month is another chance to find product-market fit. This isn’t about glorifying struggle. It’s about fairness, alignment, and leadership. If you want to pay yourself more, first build something people love. Make the company grow, then share in the rewards. Until then, stay leaner than the people who bet on you.

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The smartest YC founders I know are NOT raising VC money. Here are FIVE unique things they're doing instead: 1) Firing their least technical co-founder. 2) Importing/exporting used Herman Miller chairs. 3) Selling their YC office hours on Craigslist. 4) Auctioning screenshots of their Stripe dashboard as art. 5) Using Central to eliminate nonsense HR/finance work and focusing on profitability - centralhq.com What else am I missing?

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Ok, time for a rant. 90% of "AI Startups" aren't even AI. I've seen founders that use LLMs or have a chatbot somewhere on their site and call it an "AI startup". I've seen people who vibe code or use Cursor/Lovable and then say they have an "AI startup". I've seen people continue to build ChatGPT/Claude/Llama wrappers and call it an "AI startup". If you haven't build a custom model or used meaningful proprietary data then you aren't an AI startup, you're AI Enabled. AND THAT'S FINE. You don't have to be an AI company to solve a problem. So many companies and VCs are going to have poor performance because they have little differentiation and have claimed to build/invest in "AI Companies" and we will soon learn they are not really "AI".

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Everyone laughed when YC gave us this advice. Turns out, it was genius. "The idiot and the genius usually end up saying the same thing. The midwit is the one who gets lost." Take feature decisions as an example. Idiot: “Just ask the customer.” Midwit: “Let’s do a 20-slide deck, market analysis, user surveys, competitive benchmarking, and pick the perfect framework.” Genius: “Just ask the customer.” When you start learning, overthinking feels like progress. You want to use everything you’ve picked up. But the more you pile on, the further you drift from the only signal that really matters: what your customer wants. YC calls this “midwit behavior.” The hard part isn’t complexity. It’s having the restraint to keep things simple, even when you know enough to make them complicated. The best founders I know don’t sound sophisticated. They sound obvious. Because keeping things simple takes more discipline than making them complex.

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Martin Eberhard played a key role early at Tesla and even brought in Elon Musk. Then he was pushed out of the company for pennies. Founders get most of the attention in Silicon Valley, but the ecosystem is built on the people who take a chance and join early stage ventures. Unfortunately, those same people are often the easiest to cut out. Founders can dilute early employees, change vesting terms, and restructure equity with little effort and zero consequences (you can literally do it in Carta in 5 minutes). Daniel Kottke was a close friend of Steve Jobs and helped build the Apple I and II computers. He got no equity (Steve Wozniak eventually gave him a few of his own shares). Brian Acton co-founded WhatsApp and stayed through the Facebook acquisition. When he left Facebook over privacy concerns, he had to walk away from $850 million in unvested stock. There’s more awareness now around how vesting works, what happens during a liquidity event, and how to think about re-ups and dilution. That’s good. But the truth is, if someone really wants to screw you, they can. It still comes down to one thing: trust the people you work with. Or don’t work with them at all.

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Founders think getting into YC means they've "made it." But here's what nobody says: Most YC companies still fail, or you’ve given away a decent chunk of your company for a program that tries to get you to network and attend talks while you’re supposed to be heads down building your company. The best founders I know didn't need someone else's permission or playbook to succeed. They just executed on their vision and built something people wanted.

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YC founders experience a 35% drop in productivity after Demo Day. Here's what's driving the decline: Average weekly output per founder: During YC Batch: 36.3 units Post-YC Batch: 23.6 units 𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗼𝘂𝘁 The intense, nonstop pace of Y Combinator leaves founders exhausted and struggling to sustain momentum. 𝗕𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 YC founders barely see friends or family during the batch. Many go home after the batch to catch up with loved ones. 𝗔𝗱𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱 Handling visas, relocations, and setting up basic ops eats into productive hours. 𝗛𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 Recruiting and onboarding early hires pulls focus from product and customers. 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱 When going through your seed raise, decks and investor calls dominate the calendar. Context switching back to building isn't easy. 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗩𝗮𝗰𝘂𝘂𝗺 Without weekly YC check-ins, deadlines disappear—and urgency drops. 𝗣𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗘𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 Ambition is contagious. Without the cohort, it's easy to slow down. Respect to all the founders going through the post seed raise slump. Founders that have gone through this, any tips to break out of this slump and get back to peak productivity?

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