Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Followers
49K
Following
17K
Media
143
Statuses
2K
founder, techno-optimist, college dropout, partner at @ycombinator.
San Francisco
Joined April 2007
Yesterday we hosted 400 top university students at the YC Summer Conference - a fun day of talks about startups. Talking to the students afterwards, I found myself giving a lot of the same advice. So in case it's useful to others, here is my startup advice for students.
42
245
2K
Zepto’s story blows my mind every time. Started by 19-year-olds, and in 4 years they’ve built one of India’s most operationally excellent company. That’s rare anywhere in the world maybe only Zuckerberg did it that young(his company involved way less ops/humans to deal with!)
We've just closed this financing, although it still feels like Day 1. We have a lot more execution to go before we build a generational company for our customers and shareholders. Back to work :) P.S. - We have built an excellent selection of Gold and Silver coins for customers
34
40
962
The YC community is better than I ever could’ve imagined. People love to shit on YC and act like we’re all like the loudest among us online, but thats not representative of the group. The willingness to help each other and the immediate connection when you meet another YC
45
42
351
in case this was ever in doubt, @ycombinator is still unequivocally the best way to do a startup
Dedalus Labs (@dedaluslabs) is building the infrastructure layer for agentic AI—the simplest way to build and deploy complex agents across any model and any tool. Congrats on the launch, @itsCathyDi & @WindsorNguyen! https://t.co/vxjzXtA6tA
15
6
133
Gail Slater is the Assistant AG for the Antitrust division. Happy to see the administration is taking this seriously.
👀 🇺🇸
1
1
8
College seniors - For decades your fall has consisted of running a gauntlet of career fairs, info sessions, and recruiting dinners to lock-in a plum post-grad gig at a big name. Now there's a new option: Bet on yourself. With YC Early Decision you apply to YC this fall, get
Introducing Early Decision. For students who want to do a startup but also want to finish school first. Apply now, get funded the moment you're accepted, and do YC after you graduate. https://t.co/YQbvZj0AJm
14
11
180
On why you should unequivocally do @ycombinator if you're a start-up (even if you already have a product, users, or revenue) The math is simple: winning = fun YC helps you start winning. It helps you find customers, increases your surface area for luck++ Blog in 🧵
14
11
139
In 2023, I listened to a YC talk at HackMIT and decided to submit an application. Yesterday, we returned to MIT to give that same talk with YC. Crazy to come full circle.
22
17
298
If I were starting an ML startup now, I would do YC just to get to work with @GuptaAnkitV.
We’re excited to welcome Ankit Gupta as YC’s newest General Partner. Ankit founded Reverie Labs (W18), a biotech startup using ML for drug discovery that was acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks, and has published research at ICML. Now he’s bringing that experience to support YC
10
11
167
Congrats to Parahelp on their Series A led by my friend @jaltma. The Parahelp founders are obsessed with building the best AI customer support agent. It's worked, and the way you know is that the top AI companies - Perplexity, Replit, Bolt, HeyGen - all use them.
@parahelp_ai Read our full announcement here:
6
7
85
The FDE strategy is to do things that don't scale - at scale. The biggest question startups ask me nowadays is whether to build an FDE team. Great to chat with YC's Lightcone Podcast about the early days of Palantir! https://t.co/sLZQZaxfMl
7
12
179
The Forward Deployed Engineer model has become the default playbook for the fastest growing AI startups and no one understands it better than @bobmcgrewai, an early leader at Palantir and OpenAI. We went deep into the details with him on how to apply it correctly.
Bob McGrew (@bobmcgrewai) helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. He was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir—where he helped pioneer the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model— and was recently Chief Research
11
33
243
Congratulations to @happyrobot_ai on raising $44M for their Series B less than a year after their A and 10x their revenue! 1/8 story of how @pablorpalafox , @jvpalafox, @PaarupLuis started and pivoted right at Demo Day while walking away from an idea that had made $70k in ARR
8
17
172
If you tell your friends you're burned out, they'll always prescribe the same thing: "You need to take a vacation". But it never works. Burnout is completely misunderstood. This new article by @bscholl is the best explanation I've seen.
103
151
2K
You can train a SOTA OSS model for less than YC’s seed check. In fact for about half the compute credits every YC company gets. Sounds like it’s time to see some startups compete.
also to everyone dunking on oai for pretraining supposedly costing a bajillion dollars compared to deepseek, please read the gpt-oss model card gpt-oss-20b cost <$500k to pretrain
14
23
172
If you imagine every job function and workflow will have an AI Agent counterpart to automate work, it’s clear we’re in the earliest stages of the AI wave. Every vertical and line of business represents a new market category and brand new TAM that didn’t exist before.
46
79
410
A great description of the startup playbook that is consistently working now.
There’s a window right now where AI agents will get built for every vertical and domain. The playbook is to go deep on the context engineering required for the vertical or particular space, figure out the right UX that ties into the existing workflows naturally, and connect to
19
17
250
Subscribed.
I'm going to try writing more—so I started a Substack (link below). What things would you like me to write about?
2
0
22
This post should be required reading for hard-tech founders.
Boom is low-key famous for pre-orders and LOIs. The most common question I get from founders is: how did we do this? So I wrote up what I've learned and why I think pre-orders are critical for hard-tech. Thanks to @celinehalioua and @snowmaker for reviewing drafts of this post.
5
3
124
Working with the summer YC batch has made me more certain than ever that it’s the greatest time to start a startup. If you have any questions about applying for the fall batch, my DMs are open this weekend. DM me and reply here letting me know
The deadline to apply for the YC Fall 2025 batch is this Monday, August 4th. All you need is an idea: https://t.co/OnqI05W53Z
38
27
268