Dalton Caldwell
@daltonc
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Founder and Partner @Standard_Cap, Partner Emeritus @ycombinator
SF Bay Area
Joined September 2007
After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator. YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul,
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Spending money to make a product be perceived as authentic/cool is much harder than people expect. The expectation mismatch exists at least in part because of how many vendors sell the dream that they can make it happen. It’s more random than a vendor would want to admit.
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Today we’re announcing the most significant partnership in Brex’s history. Brex is becoming the corporate card for tens of thousands of Fifth Third Bank’s commercial banking clients, unlocking $5.6B in commercial card volume and access to 8% of the US commercial banking
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Some advice for pivoting founders
@aryavibecoding force yourself to work on an idea for long enough such that you dig in deep and learn something interesting/unexpected, otherwise you will keep pivoting and likely only learn shallow things
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A lot of human infrastructure operates on a sort of clock speed tied to holiday calendars.
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1/ Introducing Agent Mode in @magicpatterns. Our new architecture designed for building production interfaces. It combines best-in-class UI generation with best-in-class intelligence through Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro (see benchmarks in 🧵) The designs speak for themselves:
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Producing high quality music went from something that required access to a recording studio to something any teenager with a laptop could do. But 10x more accessibility to tools didn't mean it was 10x easier to be a commercially successful musician. The hard part is elsewhere.
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Slowly and then all at once
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Really enjoyed this convo that @itsjeffan and I had with @daltonc Here we discuss the founding of Momentic (back during buildspace it was called Screenwriter), the future of engineering, and our vision for the company Just realizing I'm permanently hunched 😆
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Kids not needing to be driven by their parents everywhere in order to do things is probably going to be a bigger deal than any of us realize
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The Jetsons had self-driving vehicles each member of the family could take, even the kids. Soon you will too!
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Watch me fluster during my first ever podcast as we chat about our founding story, traction, and vision with one of the greatest minds in VC!
Standard Capital just led the $15M Series A in Momentic. In the video linked below, I sit down with the founders of @MomenticAI, @wuweiweiwu and @itsjeffan. We discuss the company history, customers like Notion and Webflow, and what the future of vibecoding looks like.
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Standard Capital just led the $15M Series A in Momentic. In the video linked below, I sit down with the founders of @MomenticAI, @wuweiweiwu and @itsjeffan. We discuss the company history, customers like Notion and Webflow, and what the future of vibecoding looks like.
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The future of software is AI writing code and AI verifying it works
Today, teams ship AI-generated code faster than they can verify it. AI will write most of the world's code, Momentic will make sure it works. We've raised a $15M Series A led by Standard Capital to build the definitive source of truth for software.
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Proud to say that @Standard_Cap led the $15M Series A in Momentic. As AI coding tools become rapidly adopted, Momentic serves as a customers product quality guardrail. Think of Momentic as the source of truth for how a piece of software works. The opportunity is massive.
Today, teams ship AI-generated code faster than they can verify it. AI will write most of the world's code, Momentic will make sure it works. We've raised a $15M Series A led by Standard Capital to build the definitive source of truth for software.
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Asked a high schooler what his explanation is for this. He didn't say anything about COVID or ChatGPT, just that the kids with good grades are cheating.
NEW: UC San Diego has released a new report documenting a “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of its freshmen. The number of entering students needing remedial math has exploded from 1/100 to 1/8. They’ve had to create a second remedial class covering elementary and
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In which we discuss things founders can do to get better advice https://t.co/82ebJ39oM6
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Gemini 3 is remarkable. We test every model drop, study every prompting guide, this is insane. Dropping in @magicpatterns shortly All one shots.
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