Latest news with #YC
Business Insider
2 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Y Combinator is looking for DOGE-related startups for its next cohort — and 5 other themes
Y Combinator has opened applications for its fall cohort, and one of its startup themes focuses on cutting government waste. The theme — "Using LLMs Instead Of Government Consulting" — echoes the mission of the Department of Government Efficiency, a Trump administration initiative to slash spending at the federal level. While the famed accelerator did not explicitly mention DOGE, YC said on its website that it wants to fund startups that build large language model-powered software to take over the kind of work that consulting giants like Deloitte and Accenture do for the public sector. "There is political pressure to cut wasteful consulting and spending," YC's Gustaf Alstromer wrote. "The US government spends over $100 billion a year on consulting. As you might imagine, this isn't the most efficient or innovative part of our economy." Alstromer said that "LLMs today are so good that they can already do the jobs of many consulting firms," but startups "can do a lot better" at building software for government use. He added that YC has already backed companies helping agencies get certified to sell to the government or using AI to ensure the legality of new laws and policies. Y Combinator did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. The accelerator's pitch comes as pressure mounts to rein in government spending and fix slow-moving bureaucracies. Earlier this year, the Trump administration asked the federal government's highest-paid consulting firms to justify their spending on contracts using language that "a 15-year-old should be able to understand." DOGE was, until April, headed by Elon Musk. That's just one of six themes outlined in YC's Fall 2025 "Request for Startups," a wish list that signals where Silicon Valley could see the next wave of breakout companies Applications for the accelerator close on Monday evening, Pacific time. Here's what else YC is betting on: AI training for blue-collar workers YC wants to tackle the talent bottleneck — not in tech, but in the trades. While the AI race has focused on hiring engineers and researchers, there's a growing shortage of skilled tradespeople like electricians and welders — the very people needed to build the infrastructure behind AI, including data centers and semiconductor fabs. "We think you could use AI to create personalized training programs to get people job-ready in months, not years," wrote YC's Harj Taggar. "This is where multimodal AI could create opportunities," he said. His examples included a voice assistant that could coach someone through tasks in real time or an AR/VR environment that could simulate the work, with vision models giving live feedback like a human trainer would. Video generation as a core technology YC said video is evolving into a "new basic building block for software." It will unlock new kinds of apps, developer platforms, and real-time experiences. "Video generation models are getting really good," wrote YC's David Lieb. "Soon, you'll be able to generate near-perfect footage of anything, on the fly, for a marginal cost approaching 0," he said. "When this happens, a lot of new ideas become possible." AI-generated video is "definitely going to change media and entertainment" and reshape how we shop and build games and simulations, he added. The first 10-person, $100 billion company The first 10-person, $100 billion company? YC thinks it's not only possible but imminent. The accelerator said it's now possible for small, high-agency teams — or even a solo founder — to build a multibillion-dollar company with just $500,000 in seed funding. New AI tools will "make it easier for ambitious founders to scale with far fewer people," YC's Aaron Epstein wrote. "With smaller, efficient teams at scale, they won't get bogged down with the politics, excessive meetings, and lack of focus that grinds huge companies to a halt," Epstein wrote. "They can just focus on winning with better speed and execution." The best startups in the future will "optimize for one metric: revenue per employee." YC's focus comes after at least 12 AI startups crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold with small teams, Business Insider reported in May. "We're going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in February 2024. "In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there's this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would've been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen." Infrastructure for multi-agent systems A future where AI agents don't just work alone — they collaborate. AI agents are evolving from "single-threaded loops" into "multi-agent systems," YC's Pete Koomen wrote. These systems can break down big tasks, run in parallel, and tackle complex jobs faster than any single model could But they are difficult to build and could introduce new problems that need to be solved at a "higher level of abstraction," Koomen said. YC said it's looking for builders who have "felt this pain in production" and want to create tools to make multi-agent systems easier to build and maintain. AI-native enterprise software Lastly, YC said it sees a massive opportunity in reinventing enterprise tools from the ground up, with AI at the core. Just like how Salesforce and ServiceNow rode the cloud wave 25 years ago, YC said the next generation of tech giants will be built around AI-native software. "Today's incumbents will struggle to rebuild their product around this new technology, giving today's startups the time they need to win," said YC's Andrew Miklas. These startups will have AI "embedded deeply and thoughtfully throughout, and will help employees do their work faster and more accurately," he said. "Think Cursor for sales, HR, and accounting."
Business Insider
4 days ago
- Automotive
- Business Insider
Elon Musk is going founder mode on Tesla's $16.5 billion chip deal with Samsung
Two particular lines in Elon Musk's posts about Tesla's new chip deal highlight just how far his "founder mode" approach extends. In this case, right down to his stated terms of Tesla's manufacturing agreement with Samsung. In a $16.5 billion deal, Samsung will produce Tesla's new AI6 chip from the manufacturing plant it is building in Taylor, Texas, which is expected to open in 2026. Located outside of Austin, Samsung's plant is close to where Musk moved in 2020, and where his company Tesla later moved in 2021. In an X post, Musk wrote that he would personally monitor the plant's activity. "This is a critical point, as I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress," Musk wrote. "And the fab is conveniently located not far from my house." In other words — "founder mode." Musk also wrote that Samsung "agreed to allow Tesla to assist in maximizing manufacturing efficiency." The Tesla CEO wrote that the deal, which Bloomberg first reported, was one of "strategic importance" for the automaker. Neither Tesla nor Samsung responded to a request for comment. Musk has long been known for taking a founder-mode approach to running his companies, an in-the-details entrepreneurial mindset that has flourished in Silicon Valley. He famously slept on the factory floor during Tesla's Model 3. He personally renamed and reorganized an entire company when taking over Twitter, now X, and he set up shop in D.C. during his DOGE era. The term "founder mode" itself, though, is newer. Its origins stem from a 2024 talk that Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky gave for the startup accelerator Y Combinator. In it, he advised against the common principle that leaders of large-scale companies should hire good employees and give them space to do their job. In a September essay titled "Founder Mode," YC cofounder Paul Graham reflected on Chesky's talk, writing that there are "things founders can do that managers can't." Graham coined the term "founder mode," describing leaders of big companies who work on the ground across the company, delving into the details at a granular level, and not just via their direct reports. Chesky later embraced the mantra named after his talk, along with much of Silicon Valley. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke wrote on X that "we need founder mode companies in all industries." In his essay, Graham thanked a variety of tech leaders for reading early drafts, including YC CEO Garry Tan, venture capitalist Ron Conway, and Musk himself. While the terms Musk describes for Tesla's manufacturing deal and his plans to personally walk the Samsung assembly line are very "founder mode," he's not the only CEO keeping a close eye on a company's supply chain. Tim Cook rose through the ranks at Apple before becoming CEO by closely managing Apple's supply chain. The iPhone giant famously keeps a very close eye on its manufacturing partners, many of which are in China. A United airport sign photographed in 2019 and confirmed to be legitimate by the airline revealed that Apple was buying 50 business class seats a day for its employees to travel from San Francisco to Shanghai, a travel hub connecting to Zhengzhou and Shenzhen, which have been called " iPhone cities." The iPhone maker is also known for having a broad team of operations overseers. Samsung's new chip deal with Tesla marks a major win for its foundry business. As of 1 p.m. in New York, the company's stock price was up 6.8%. And while Tesla's assembly line workers have experienced Elon Musk's founder mode approach, it sounds like soon Samsung's will too.
Forbes
7 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Five Lessons From Scaling A Fintech Platform In A Regulated Industry
Kevin Meyer , Founding Engineer at Pure (YC W23), a fintech platform for precious metals. Dual degrees in CS & Economics. getty In fintech, speed is often treated as the ultimate currency. But in regulated sectors like physical asset trading, speed without trust is meaningless, or worse, dangerous. Startups entering these markets often underestimate the complexity of compliance, auditability and institutional expectations. Moving fast is easy. Moving fast safely is where the real challenge begins. Over the past year, I've helped build a trading platform for physical precious metals—a niche where compliance isn't optional and infrastructure must be bulletproof. The platform has since processed over $200 million in transactions and serves more than 3,500 businesses, ranging from individual traders to institutional clients. Along the way, we've learned what it takes to move quickly without breaking the trust that's critical in regulated environments. Here are five lessons that may serve other engineers, founders and product leaders building in similarly high-stakes spaces. Startups often treat compliance like a tax—something to pay later. In regulated industries, that strategy fails. Compliance must be designed into the product architecture from the start. For us, that meant implementing real-time identity verification through a KYC/KYB integration using Footprint. It also meant building a fully automated ledger system from the beginning, so that every transaction was auditable, compliant and reconciled, without manual intervention. Those early investments saved us hundreds of hours in operations and eliminated regulatory blind spots as we scaled. Takeaway: If compliance is blocking your roadmap, it's already too late. Build it in; don't bolt it on. 2. Speed is worthless without stability. Shipping fast is meaningless if your platform can't handle real-world complexity. Too many teams confuse velocity with fragility, pushing features quickly, then burning time fixing avoidable outages. We invested heavily in core infrastructure, cutting query times by 60% and tripling system throughput. These improvements enabled us to scale transaction volume from $7 million to $22 million per month in just five months, without sacrificing uptime or responsiveness. Takeaway: Move fast, but only on systems engineered to hold the weight. 3. Transparency beats hand-holding. In high-value markets, users don't want to call an account rep to ask about fees. They want clarity upfront. So we built a tier-based pricing engine with live updates, letting customers see real-time rates based on their account level. That reduced friction in onboarding and built confidence among institutional users. Transparency isn't just a UX detail—it's a trust multiplier. Takeaway: In regulated environments, clarity is more valuable than persuasion. 4. Developer speed starts with good architecture. Compliance demands don't have to kill agility, if you get the architecture right. Applying large-scale engineering practices (inspired in part by my time at Google) helped us move quickly without skipping testing, observability or documentation. We cut development time by 30% while increasing platform reliability, not through heroism, but through systems thinking. Takeaway: Fast teams aren't reckless. They just operate on better rails. 5. Compliance can be a competitive edge. Treating compliance as a feature, not a burden, became one of our greatest advantages. It helped us win institutional clients, pass diligence with ease and maintain a high-trust posture as we scaled past 3,500 organizations and $200 million in volume. Many platforms avoid regulated markets because they seem slow. But with the right mindset, those same constraints can become defensible moats. Takeaway: In fintech, trust compounds, and trust starts with infrastructure. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
New Indian Express
25-07-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Complaint against actor Vinayakan
KOCHI: The Youth Congress (YC) Ernakulam unit has accused actor Vinayakan of making offensive remarks about Mahtama Gandhi and others in a social media post following the demise of late chief minister V S Achuthanandan. The complaint by YC Ernakulam district president Sijo Joseph was addressed to the state police chief with a copy attached to the Ernakulam Town North police. Sijo alleged Vinayakan's Facebook post was deeply offensive and hurt the conscience of readers. He alleged it contained insulting references to Mahatma Gandhi, former PMs Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, among others.
Hindustan Times
10-07-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Indian-origin woman featured on Forbes exposes shady startup stories of fraudulent ‘desi' founders
An Indian-origin woman's claims about 'desi' founders' fraudulent behaviour in San Francisco's startup ecosystem have gone viral. Ash Arora, a LocalGlobe partner featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 (Europe Finance) list, alleged that she met two Indian founders who were inflating metrics and making false client claims. Indian-origin Ash Arora, currently living in London, exposed two shady startup stories. (LinkedIn/Ash Arora) 'Have met two founders in SF this month. Both fraud: 1. Is subletting a rented apartment and showing that as revenue for his startup. 2. Is claiming Amazon and Google are clients who have signed LOIs when they have never even heard of them,' Ash Arora wrote. 'What's common among them? Both desi men Beware of these people!' she continued, adding, '4 VCs have pinged me correctly guessing both these founder names. Is this Soham Parekh 2.0? We need a BS radar community out here.' Take a look at the post: What did social media say? An individual suggested, 'Agent to detect and keep a LIVE list if the company's fundamental patterns indicate that it's a fraud.' Another remarked, 'A sample of two. What's the point of including their race?' Arora replied, 'Because it breaks my heart that Indians are doing this and ruining the reputation of my country.' A third posted, 'The 'desi men' part is a spicy take, but honestly, the patterns of fraud in SF are pretty universal. Desperation or greed, it always comes back to the same stuff.' Arora responded, 'Idk, man, maybe my network, but both of them being Indian, above 30, mid backgrounds and extremely arrogant threw me off. I didn't see it coming. Even 2 years ago when I met a YC startup that was completely fraudulent, and after our diligence, even YC threw them out - a desi male founder. Why this pattern.' A fourth wrote, 'Even in crypto, people avoid projects who have desi founders. That is the sad reality and we all know why.' Who is Ash Arora? According to a Forbes report, Arora rose from a Delhi refugee colony. As per her LinkedIn profile, she is an alum of Lady Shri Ram College For Women in Delhi and started her career as an associate at a bank. Over the years, she assumed various roles in different fields associated with trading and blockchain. She is currently staying in London.
