With @ycombinator demo day coming up this weekend, I wanted to reflect on what I learned from YC W14, 10 years on + another company in: 1. The 7 minute espresso rule. Our first meeting with @sama lasted just 7 minutes. The batch hadn’t even officially started yet and my cofounder @ryanrrowe and I drove down from Mountain View to the tiny SF YC outpost to meet him. Sam was making an espresso when we walked in. He opened with – “have you launched”? We said no, too many bugs. Our product @kimonolabs made it easy to just point and click to build a web scraper. Our promise was to get you an API in 60 seconds, without code. But it only worked on a handful of sites at the time. Sam pushed us to launched in 2 weeks. We debated. The espresso finished brewing, he picked it up, looked at us and said, “well, you better get going then and fix those bugs”. We left, launched in 2 weeks and learned one of the most important lessons that day - speed matters. Ship something you’re embarrassed by. 2. There are no experts. Ryan and I were not prepared for the rapid influx of user on launch day. It got tons of traffic on day 1 and we didn’t sleep in the next 48 hours bc servers and database kept crashing. We realized we weren’t the experts and needed to hire one. We went over to @mwseibel for advice who smiled and told us that in the early days at SocialCam (Twitch) experts thought the streaming video problem was impossible. The answer wasn’t hiring an expert, but hiring someone young, capable and naïve enough to give it an earnest try. So we opted to just figure it out ourselves. 3. Messages in Pizza Boxes. Startups win through incredible customer service, then through product, not the other way around. Seibel told us how SocialCam’s streaming infrastructure went down while a key teammate was unreachable off-grid in a Tahoe cabin for the weekend. Normal people would have waited until Monday. Not Michael. He called a local pizza delivery place and asked the delivery person to send a large pizza with an urgent message in the box to the cabin. Their infrastructure was back up in hours. 4. The Twinkle can matter more than the TAM. Ambition matters just as much as practicality. Before demo day, we were struggling with the end of our pitch. We knew the value of our product, and had a fanatical and fast-growing user base, but the market size we calculated either seemed so ridiculously big that it was not plausible, or so narrow that it was equally silly. @paulg and @gralston sat with us and showed that us that if we can really pull it off at scale, it would be bigger than Google. PG suggested not talking about market size, but just making sure people could see the twinkle in our eyes when we talked about what you might be able to do with a structured copy of the internet that’s larger than Google’s. 5. You’re always at the Origin. Our demo day was successful beyond our wildest beliefs. Afterwards, Geoff drew a chart for us on a whiteboard. It was a hockey stick. He asked us where we thought we were. It was a rhetorical question. He said we were at the origin. Sam doubled down. When he invested in Kimono, he gave us a Zimbabwean Trillion dollar note (the result of extreme hyperinflation in Zimbabwe), as a cautionary reminder that the fundraising and valuation mean nothing. We have channeled this into our culture @TheArenaAI with our ritual around neon shoelaces and a pair of neon track spikes hanging on the wall to remind us that we’re at the Olympic starting line, but we don’t have any medals yet. 6. High bandwidth discussions with users don’t happen over email. The “Collison installation” is part of YC lore. @collision told us that talking to users live was essential because email and chat conversations were just not enough. We did 100s of Skype conversations with Kimono users + one power user Alex Chung, who I met this way, has become a close friend and even attended my wedding in India last year!

@sg1753 @TheArenaAI Blog: Paper: Github:

RT @Initialized: It was a pleasure to cohost this fantastic panel and event with @TheArenaAI team at their headquarters in New York. Our m…

🚨 We’re hiring in NYC!!! 🚨 We’re looking for curious minds with a dash of explorer and a lot of grit. If you want to work on truly frontier AI (not just an LLM wrapper) and deploy it in some of the most interesting places in the world – join us in the Arena! Apply for open roles here:

@Bosefina @TheArenaAI Love it Bo! See you there

RT @traestephens: Love to see this news from @foundersfund portfolio company @TheArenaAI!

I couldn’t be more excited to announce our collaboration with @AMD. Over the past year @TheArenaAI has developed and deployed Atlas – the world’s first AI hardware engineer at AMD, a leader in high performance and adaptive computing. The AMD team is using Atlas to enhance next-generation GPU performance optimization. Atlas dramatically accelerates time to market for a new chip by reimagining chip development in an AI-native way. Beyond chips, Atlas can provide reliable testing, timing and debugging for any complex hardware. According to AMD’s Chief Software Officer, Andrej Zdravkovic: "Atlas helps streamline the manually-intensive and lengthy process of configurating and testing today's complex GPU technologies, giving our engineers a leg up in maximizing the optimizations for next-generation products." Arena is proud to collaborate with forward-thinking enterprises like AMD, and we are deeply inspired by how our customers use our products to rethink human-machine collaboration for their most critical operations. Read the full press release here: Learn more about Atlas here:

@garrytan @GrowSF Funny running into you at the coffee shop

@bryce 💯

Hard agree

The more AI folks in NY, the better

Love the new digs @ycombinator @garrytan

@Mbounge_ @ycombinator @sama @paulg @gralston @collision @garrytan @mwseibel Ha oh no man, sorry 😅

@IrvinZhan That’s so cool!!!

@johnalxndr @ycombinator @sama @paulg @gralston @collision @garrytan @mwseibel Means a ton. Even 9 years later

@andrewcyu @ycombinator @sama @paulg @gralston @collision @garrytan @mwseibel 🫶

Here’s the full version of our pitch if it’s helpful to the current batch / anyone else:

@nikillinit @kimmaicutler @ycombinator @sama @paulg @gralston @collision @garrytan @mwseibel We were both into no-code before no-code was a thing!