Daivik Goel

Many YC founders go to Demo Day expecting to fill their round and get back to work. But then reality hits: Lots of them don't raise a dollar. You just don't hear about these stories. You only hear about the successes. YC partners are clear about this: "Don't think that just because you're YC, you'll lift a finger and raise your round." The badge gets you in the room. But you're still competing against 50-100 other startups for maybe 5-10 investment spots per fund. If I were to do YC again, here’s how I’d approach it: Use the $500K to create a 3-year runway and build something people want with a team of 2 in total. I won’t show up to demo day. Just focus on building. I’d forget about: Growth targets. Fundraising decks. Creating a one-liner. 100% focus on profitability. That's how you become default alive and don’t need to beg for money.

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YC is a behavioral training camp for high-agency founders… disguised as a funding program. The real output of YC is founders who operate on compulsion (not permission)   • The funding = It’s enough to survive, not succeed.   • The advice = Great, but a lot available in startup school vids.   • The brand = Powerful - but only if you do something with it. (plenty of static YC startups) So what does YC actually do? It rewires founders to act without waiting.   • Launch before it’s perfect.   • Email partners before you’re “ready.”   • Ask investors for intros before you feel credible.   • Charge customers before you finish the product. This is not just building a startup but learning to move before the world says yes. imo this is the sauce that most accelerators miss… They coach you to build a startup. YC trains you to become the kind of person who builds startups no matter what. It’s founder behavioral rewiring - YC turns people who ask for permission into people who build like it’s already theirs. That’s the asset. The company is just the vessel. PG says it similarly… “𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰 𝘐 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘺 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳? 𝘔𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘐 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘧𝘶𝘭. 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 - 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 - 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘧𝘶𝘭. 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘱 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳.”

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After 15 years of building companies, 2 acquisitions, YC, and playing the VC lottery multiple times, if I had to reduce everything about business into 3 rules for my kids, it would be this. Rule 1: Build something that hurts you personally. Just because AI is trending does not mean you have to build something around AI. Find a problem you have lived yourself. When you are the customer, you already understand the pain without endless research. And when things get hard, you stay because it matters to you. Rethoric started because I was the founder who needed it. I had the desire, the stories, the track record, and zero time to turn any of it into content. I built the solution I would have paid for. I never had to guess whether it was worth pushing through. Rule 2: Grow using customers’ money. I have raised VC. I have done YC. I know the pull of outside money, and I have seen firsthand what it does to your judgment. You spend faster, hire earlier, and make decisions that serve the narrative instead of the customer. A stronger path is simpler: make more than you spend. Charge early. If nobody pays, treat it as feedback instead of hiding the signal with investor money. Rule 3: When profits accumulate, buy things that hold value. Businesses can disappear. Markets shift. Profits should not live only inside the company. Convert them into scarce assets, real estate, equity, gold, Bitcoin and forget about it. Buy and never sell. Boring? Yes. But trust me, you’ll end up outperforming the best traders in the world. Bonus: Be kind and trustworthy. You only have one name, take care of it. These are the lessons I would pass down. Anything I missed?

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YC W17 might be the greatest startup batch of all time. It quietly produced over $45B in enterprise value. And it hasn’t even peaked yet. Here’s what came out of just that one cohort: ▫️ 3 decacorns ($10B+) — Rippling ($13B) — Brex ($12B) — Faire ($12B) ▫️ 3+ more unicorns — Retool ($3.2B) — Solugen ($2B+) — Clipboard Health ($1.3B+) Plus dozens of other startups worth hundreds of millions—or already acquired. That’s ~$50B of value from one batch in under 8 years. And most of these companies are just getting started. Wouldn’t be surprised if W17 hits $100B+ by 2030.

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Having more capital doesn’t fix weak fundamentals. I’ve seen startups raise bigger rounds… only to fail faster. Because money amplifies whatever already exists. If your foundation is strong, capital accelerates growth. If your foundation is weak, capital accelerates collapse. More hires won’t fix a broken product. More marketing won’t fix poor retention. More runway won’t fix a confused strategy. Early-stage founders sometimes believe funding is the milestone. It’s not. Funding is pressure. Funding is expectation. Funding is accountability - to investors, to your team, and to the market. In my journey over 25 years, we fundraised a number of times for multiple ventures. We failed to fundraise many times too. Sometimes it was a decision made not to accept an offer to invest. Reflecting back, I see clearly now how it was a blessing that these transactions did not go through. What matters is not the fundraise. The best founders I know didn’t chase capital first. They chased clarity. Clear problems. Clear customers. Clear execution. They built traction before attention. Revenue before vanity metrics. Discipline before scale. Investors today are looking for exactly this. Growth with resilience. Ambition with fundamentals. It is time for the Camel startup. Resilience, strength and value. Incredible physical characteristics to survive the desert (see https://lnkd.in/gu9rSnUa). In our founders’ community, we see a shift toward founders who want to build sustainable companies. Because in the long run, strong fundamentals attract the right capital. Not the other way around. Curious to hear from founders and investors, have you seen capital strengthen a startup… or expose its weaknesses?

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Meet Brice Douglas the Co-founder of Zaymo (YC W24) 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 After graduating from Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, Brice and his team (Santiago Gomez Paz & Daniel J.) at Zaymo (YC W24) have successfully raised $1.5 million in funding . Zaymo (YC W24) is revolutionizing email marketing by embedding interactive shopping experiences directly into emails, allowing customers to make purchases, leave reviews, and manage subscriptions without leaving their inboxes. Brice’s journey began at Brigham Young University, where he co-founded Zaymo and participated while working with Peter Harris at the University Growth Fund. The team’s innovative approach earned them $875,000 in investments after securing third place at the 2023 Rice Business Plan Competition . With features like one-click upsells, in-email reviews, and subscription upgrades, Zaymo is setting a new standard for e-commerce email marketing. Their interactive emails have led to significant increases in customer engagement and sales, including a 27% boost in revenue for some clients . Brice’s vision and leadership are truly inspiring, and it’s exciting to see how Zaymo is transforming the way brands connect with their customers. Check out their innovative platform. #LeadersOfSiliconSlopes

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YC is a powerful launchpad. But things don’t magically change after you get into YC. YC gives you capital, a brand stamp, a shortcut to investors, and a tribe of doers. But if you think getting in is the finish line or that your biggest problems will disappear, read this first. Here are some realities that don’t change even after YC, and sometimes, get more real: 1/ You’re still not guaranteed product-market fit. That magic moment when users love you and pay you… YC can’t manufacture that. You still have to grind through the same user interviews, dead ends, and pivots. 2/ The loneliness of being a founder doesn’t go away. Yes, you’re surrounded by 300+ others. But when it’s 2AM and you're unsure if you should rebuild your core feature or fire your cofounder, it's still your call. No partner will do it for you. I personally felt lonely during my batch. 3/ Most VCs still won't get it. Even with the YC logo on your deck, most investors won’t lean in just because of that. They’ll still look for real signs of product-market fit, either strong traction or a proven track record in the vertical. YC can open the door, but what gets the deal done is still the same: real usage, retention, revenue—or undeniable founder-market fit. 4/ Your default state is still: dead. Nothing about YC guarantees survival. Every week, even during the batch, companies quietly drop out or stop building. You have to earn your way through every phase. 5/ Fundraising is 10X easier—but now you're being watched by 10X more people. You might raise a round, but expectations rise. You’ll feel it from your investors, your team, and even yourself. Every monthly update becomes a scoreboard. 6/ You’re still the bottleneck. Whether it's hiring, prioritization, or vision, if you're indecisive or unclear, the startup stalls. YC doesn’t remove that burden. It just puts a spotlight on it. 7/ You will still doubt yourself. With YC valuation bump, the stakes feel higher, not lower. You’ll compare yourself to other YC companies. You’ll wonder why someone else is blowing up and you're stuck at 5 paying customers. Imposter syndrome scales. YC is a force multiplier for founders who already know how to build, listen, iterate, and persist. So defenitely apply. But apply knowing this: Getting into YC won’t change who you are as a founder. It’ll just reveal it faster and maybe louder. ____ · Join my newsletter for more content by me - https://lnkd.in/gK67Fw_u

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YC founders are pivoting more & faster than ever, because AI makes it so easy to ship. But it's created a disease that's infecting products & agents. When you're testing new features, many of them don't drive impact. Sometimes they don't mesh with new directions. This bloats products, making them hard to understand. More product bloat = poor LLM performance, especially for long running agents: your prompt is still trying to serve a use case you added 2 months ago. More product bloat = more complex codebases, making it higher effort to ship reliably. Our solution: internal agents that automatically clean up as we ship new features & ramp old ones down.

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How to get into YC (Advice from a 2x founder) 1. Everyone says YC invests in people. YC doesn't invest in people, it invests in narratives. Your application to YC has to tell the first chapter of a great founder's biography. If you're wondering why you got rejected from YC, it's probably because when the reviewers finished reading your application, they didn't feel compelled to turn the page. 2. Have an idea, make a logo, make a web landing page, make an MVP, and find someone willing to pay you to use it. Everything else is not essential. 3. Get referrals. It matters less how many referrals you have, and more what they're saying about you. Your referrals need to reflect the same narrative that you sell in the application: "This person is, for some reason, special." Referrals don't exist to back up the idea that you're accomplished (that's what your resume is for). Referrals support the idea that when your peers look at you, they see someone they believe can build a great company. 4. Do something substantial, and put it in your application. Hundreds of thousands of people went to top schools and then worked in big tech. This is not substantial. Your application has to reflect the idea of what you are capable of breaking this mold in some considerable way. DM me if this was helpful, and I'll send you a full guide.

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Meta's new magic number is 49%. First it wrote a $14B check for 49% of Scale AI, poaching CEO Alex Wang. Now the same playbook hits venture land: Meta is offering to buy up to 49% of Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross's $1.1B NFDG fund - and hiring the duo to run its shiny new AI lab - letting early LPs cash out at a 4x markup while still calling the fund "independent". Antitrust alarms? Snoozing. All thanks to that cute little missing 1%.

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There are many creative ways to procrastinate and not get started. One of the least imaginative and industry-endorsed is burning too many cycles looking for a co-founder. Co-founders can be amazing. Our community ODF has helped great co-founders meet and start companies like Traba and Contra. But far too often people use a lack of a co-founder as an excuse to not get started. Worse, they sometimes settle for co-founders of convenience that are a ticking timebomb. A lack of a co-founder gating your progress is an especially poor excuse nowadays with the remarkable amount of leverage one high agency person can get using the latest tools. What’s the optimal stopping theory for finding a co-founder? Our opinion: never settle, and try to make as much progress on your idea as possible in parallel. You can dedicate six months "looking for a co-founder" and never actually make progress. Instead, do the opposite: build, talk to customers, ship experiments, and let traction and momentum attract collaborators or a future co-founder. If you have to choose between another month of looking or another month of building and talking to customers, do the latter. Once you get going, you will discover you can do far more solo than most believe. --- Additional commentary on making progress without co-founders: Rahul Sonwalkar from Julius AI: "One of the biggest blockers for new founders is thinking, ‘I have an idea I'm excited about, but I need a co-founder.’ I've met people who are still looking for a co-founder six months later… It's a giant waste of time. If you truly believe something should exist, you can make so much progress without a co-founder. With AI, even if you're non-technical, you can build a prototype, talk to customers, and do initial sales, marketing, and validation. As you make progress and gain momentum, it becomes much easier to attract people—a founding team, a co-founder, or investors. Without that momentum, when you're starting with a blank slate, the space of exploration is infinite… That should not be a blocker to starting a company. Get started, make progress, and if you meet awesome people along the way, bring them onto your founding team.” --- Paul Klein IV from Browserbase: Having a perfectly aligned co-founder is a superpower. But most people don't have that. So should finding a great co-founder be a blocker? Not necessarily. Get started, make progress, and if you meet awesome people along the way, bring them onto your founding team. --- Charles Hudson from Precursor Ventures: “I often ask people: What do you think you're going to get from a co-founder? Are there other ways to get those things?” This is expanded commentary on “Lesson 7” from 25 Lessons from the first year of Solo Founders. Comment for the link to the full list.

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"How’s YC going as a manufacturing startup?" I get asked this almost every day. My answer’s the same always: it’s been awesome. Their request for startups for techno-industrialists was a call to arms for the next generation of factory builders. Build the machines. Build the factories. Build the infrastructure that keeps the country standing. YC is world-class at scaling software startups. But applying that same mindset to building modern factories is how America wins. Leverage technology, run lean, move at warp speed. This is what most people miss about YC: the principles that let a SAAS company go from zero to global can, and should, be applied to physical production. We’re behind on sheer output, so we have to be 10x better than the incumbents. That’s only possible with technology-driven manufacturing. Also we need to fix the generational cliff in this sector. That means pulling younger talent into factories, not by nostalgia, but by funding new companies worth joining. Which will result in a ripple effect amongst the country. More personally, YC has been a great experience for me for a few reasons: >team (great people, super smart, super helpful) >learning from past YC founders >network >megaphone >fundraising *dont mean to sound generic here but these have all been wildly impactful* After an interaction with the YC team, I'm usually left thinking "damn I should have thought of that"... but it has taught me to think better about GTM, product building, and our internal team. YC is showing me how to take the speed of code and apply it to the weight of atoms. Operation warp speed American manufacturing is a go.

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