Startups: what’s your best feature? Share links, curious to see.

When you go talk to users, don't (just) ask them what features they want. Ask them what problems they have. In the best case this will lead you to think of features they'll love but would never have thought to ask for. And expect to go through multiple cycles of ask-and-build.

I’m begging you, never quit as a founder. It’s 0 for longer than you’ll ever expect. No momentum. Soul-crushing doubts. Nobody seems to care. Even when it looks like it’s working, it’s not. You keep trying new things. You don’t lose hope. Then it snaps to 100. You find the one thing that resonates. You wake up with more customers than you can handle. Everything is breaking. Momentum builds even when you stop pushing. You didn’t get lucky. You just didn’t leave.

YC Startup School 2026 just got going 3x bigger than last year We made this event for first time very technical young people to come to SF and figure out if starting a company is for them Let you in on a secret: it is

We want to back the next $1B student founder. Not from a pitch or LinkedIn, but IRL. So we’re throwing the hackathon of the summer. You’ll have 5 hours to ship something. You’ll get credits, food, prizes, and maybe a first check. If you’re in, let me know what you’d build.

We’re building Silicon Valley outside Silicon Valley.

Don’t be a mid startup It’s true

New from Stripe Economics: The Age of the Solopreneur stripeeconomics.com/p/the-ag…

The best predictor of success for tech companies, at every stage from during the YC batch to public company with billions in revenue, is the rate of shipping new stuff.

Amjad Masad (Replit's CEO) went from $2.5M to $250M in revenue in ONE year. - That's 100x in 12 months - They passed a PWC audit on it - Gross margin positive (rare in AI) - Now on their way to a billion this year 2 years ago when he first came on the pod they were doing ~$3M.

I haven't read this for about 10 years, but I just looked at it after someone linked to it and I was surprised how many of these things are starting to happen. Still no next Steve Jobs yet though. paulgraham.com/ambitious.htm…

.@mntruell launched Cursor 8 times, and nobody cared. Don't give up.

Many founders get stuck trying to find the perfect startup idea before they commit. But the perfect idea doesn't exist in the abstract. The only way to find what works is to pick one, go deep, and get feedback from real customers. In this episode of Startup School, YC's @xuster breaks down how to choose what to build, "burn the other boats," and go deep enough to practically run your customer's business— and why that depth is what surfaces the better idea underneath. 00:59 — The "Perfect Idea" trap 02:42 — Why working on multiple ideas fails 03:21 — How to actually go deep 04:51 — Could you run your customer's business? 06:18 — Build at the edge of what AI can do 08:37 — Aim at the most ambitious version 09:33 — What happens when the idea fails 10:27 — Walk fast in one direction

We’ve released our full interview with @DarioAmodei Watch here: piped.video/x2VHFgyawPE?is=B6ul…

The best marketing campaigns cost almost nothing.

SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire @cursor_ai in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world’s most useful AI models. For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon. We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities

Lots to do together. Excited to be joining forces with @SpaceX to build useful AI.

If you want to find a truly impactful idea, a good place to look is in the trash bin of history. Most of the ideas that have most broken out in the last 5 years aren't new. They're old ideas that got written off too early. examples: 1) AI: When Sam started OpenAI, saying "AGI" got you laughed at 2) Space: Elon started SpaceX after people had written off the 1960s-era dreams as sci-fi 3) Supersonic flight: Blake started Boom after everyone assumed Concorde already proved it couldn't work 4) Nuclear energy: fission and fusion are roaring back decades after ambitious people stopped studying nuclear physics 5) GLP-1's: After the fen-phen disaster, weight loss drugs were synonymous with snake oil. There's a good reason this keeps happening. When a hyped idea fails, there's a backlash. It becomes embarrassing to work on - anyone still working on it is assumed too dumb to know better. So, if you want to work on something like this, you have to teach yourself to feel the tinge of that embarrassment and push past it.

This is a list of 24 startups I've tried to build over the years and why they failed:

How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html

You are far more dangerous to your startup than competitors are. A hundred times more startups die from poor execution by their founders than are killed by competitors.