I went to my first Startup School with @robbie back in 2012. Around 200 founders packed into a room at Stanford. The speakers included Zuckerberg, Patrick Collison, Ben Horowitz, Travis Kalanick, Jessica Livingston, and Ron Conway. The audience was just as stacked. I met the founders of what became multi billion $ companies and future YC partners. Amazing to see Startup School grow to 7,000+ builders today. We want to help the

“I don't believe Claude Code will exist in its current form in six months” @benswerd, CEO & Co-Founder @freestyle_dev, thinks coding agents are moving from local machines to the cloud, where a single task could get the attention of 20+ agents at once. Each gets a complete copy of your stack, production environment included. Each can spend a week testing and refining its approach. You compare the results and take the best one forward. The economics aren’t there yet. Ben expects cost per task to fall another 99% over the next four years, making that level of parallel work practical. Freestyle builds the computers for it: full Linux VMs for tasks that run for hours, days, or weeks. Clone a running machine, memory included, and let agents pursue different approaches from the same starting point. Pause and resume with their state intact. Inside Freestyle, Ben already gives agents a week to find improvements to its VM technology. Roughly 700 tests and 90 metrics help the team judge whether the work made things better. He calls this goal engineering: define the outcome clearly, give agents time to work toward it, and measure whether they’re making progress. "Full Linux VMs for AI Agents" Built for complex tasks that run for hours, days, or weeks 🎙️ @benswerd, CEO & Co-Founder, @freestyle_dev on @Fondocom @thestartpod 00:57 Why coding agents could move from local to the cloud 02:22 From harness engineering to goal engineering 03:08 Giving agents a week to improve measurable results 04:13 Why defining the problem becomes the bottleneck 04:48 How early access to o1 changed Freestyle’s direction 05:51 Why frustrated sandbox users revealed a bigger opportunity 07:28 Giving agents a computer instead of building custom tools 08:12 Getting into YC  11:17 Snapshotting VMs and running agents in parallel 12:24 The economics of letting multiple agents attempt every task 13:26 How GPU supply could drive down agent costs 15:09 Try Freestyle and follow Ben

TRENDING 📈 @davj shares the email he says helped @fondocom raise an oversubscribed $7M round: Hook → Traction → Social Proof → a time-bounded CTA

A $50M ARR company can be a great business. And still be an easy “no” for a VC. Not because it will fail. Because the fund math demands something bigger. @collinwallace Partner @lobby_vc on @fondocom START Learn more: fondo.ai/4y8Vovu

Investors do not all write checks for the same reason. Know the incentive. @TurnerNovak Founder & Solo GP @BananaCap_ on @fondocom START Full ep here: fondo.ai/4heg8dI Learn more: fondo.ai/3TgHN62