Life update: I'm joining @ycombinator as Visiting Partner 🤩 Software ate the world, and now AI is eating software — the founders building in this shift will redefine how we compute, work, and live. In my new role, I'm excited to find those founders and help them build the iconic startups of this generation. YC backed me when I founded Cron Inc. in 2019, and I'm grateful to come full circle and pay it forward. I'll start reading applications in October, interviewing founders in November, and then pack my battered suitcase in January for the W26 batch 🔥 Follow along here & see you in SF!

We’ve probably all seen Interstellar when it first came out. Must watch again. If you’re a designer, an engineer, a founder, a dreamer — there’s so much creativity & inspiration in that story. At the latest on your next flight, if they have it, go for it.

Switzerland is a big plus 🇨🇭

This “Wall of Products” reminded me of Apple’s “Wall of Apps.” And it makes sense, the explosion of industrial products used to be the frontier of design. Now that the one industrial product that matters is the smart phone, consumer design largely moved up the stack to apps.

.@benthompson says consumer AI has a marketing problem because the average consumer doesn't actually want to be more productive. "Tech companies are like, 'Let us book your flight for you!' I’ve had a personal assistant for 10 years. He does not come within an inch of booking my flights for me. That is crazy talk." "I understand which ones are gonna be delayed. I know which seat I want to be on. So the fact that this is continually a demo is hilarious to me." “Number two: people love shopping. They don’t want to be productive. They want to be entertained. One of the biggest forms of entertainment is shopping.” "Also, there’s so much information on a product page. Companies have spent so much energy focusing on that. You look at apparel as a category. They’re going to tell you what size the model is wearing, and you want to know that, and you want to look at the different styles." "The idea of having a personal agent that’s going and getting some of the information and bringing it back to you, and then you’re like, 'Well, what about this other thing? Tell me about this thing.'" "And you have your eager tech company executive say, “Oh, I have an assistant that can do it for you!" "And it’s like, no. Not only do I want to do it, I want to complain about it. I’m enjoying myself complaining right now, okay? Would you just let me be and live my life?"

Y Combinator's coming to Zürich tomorrow! I'll be joining a panel hosted by Max Rumpf (Founder SID.ai, YC S23) on AI, research, startups & Swiss building between SFBA/Zürich. → Sign up below, only few more seats available: luma.com/c3c8b606

Zürich’s full of good design

Thanks I hate it

We sent a swarm of AI agents to solve Karpathy’s NanoChat benchmark, and they crushed SoTA in 3 days. We built our own harness on top of a graph database to do auto-autoresearch, each iteration learning from mistakes to do research better. The team wrote >15,000 entries. 🧵

# Your only job during YC Demo Day S26 is a month away and we're out here running. The YC batch is probably the highest leverage three months on a startup journey. For many founders it will even turn out to be the highest leverage time of their lives; it certainly was for me when I went through the W20 batch with my startup Cron. Our motto at YC is "Make something people want." You know you are doing that if your startup is growing significantly week-over-week. We share a lot of advice with founders how to do that. But if I had to distill the essence of YC advice down to the activities themselves, it’s this: > Build product; talk to users. It sounds simple, but it's not easy. While it's two activities, they're two halves of a single loop. First, you need something for people to react to. Just showing up and asking questions is an interview, not true customer discovery. People are more likely to tell you the truth about their problems when showing the wrong thing, than showing nothing. Then you take the learnings, rapidly incorporate them into the latest product iteration, and show it to your users again. Back and forth. Along the way you launch; product meets market, and the loop spins ever faster, until the gears hopefully click. Done in earnest, this process takes everything out of you as a founder. You might wonder what this has to do with running. I omitted a third activity that I believe completes a founder's only job: > Build product; talk to users; and look after yourself. This is it. In recent years, PG himself mentioned some version of the third activity. Here it is joined for posterity. You can only spin the pre-PMF loop as fast as required when at your best. And you're only at your best when you're in good mental and physical shape. However you achieve this, is individual. PG's flavor of it might have involved eating healthy (if you know him, rice and beans, likely). My version of it is running, and that's why I've been taking founders on that weekly run from the YC office.

These four lads cooked this summer …

Love it. Consider a third one spanning both desks (Look After Yourself). Then they have all they need!

Model is queen. Harness is king. Computer use is ace. As a designer, my hunch has been that the agent with the best CU model will be the 10x unlock for real-world use cases.

Corollary: Time kills all deals.

FREITAG × AP Instant goated combo 💚 Especially on a SWISS flight Off to the motherland for design inspo

Never forget 🗽

2012: Social networks cutting access to competitive apps 2026: Model providers cutting access to competitive harnesses Silicon Valley history surely rhymes. What's being protected revewals what's most valuable asset de jour.

And that’s a wrap S26! Off to the traditional bar crawl, founders 🫡🍻