I've reviewed hundreds of cold emails, and honestly most of them are terrible. Here's everything I've learned about how to write cold emails that actually convert.
Super excited to start my new role as Partner at
@ycombinator
, to pay it forward to the next generation of founders the same way YC changed my life 10 years ago.
The upcoming
@ycombinator
batch will be fully remote. And we’re still accepting late applications if you’ve always wanted to do YC but couldn’t move out to the bay area. Now’s your chance!
The next
@ycombinator
W21 batch will be remote, so if you’ve ever considered applying but couldn’t move to the bay area during the batch, now’s the perfect time do it.
Charlie and Jackson build so fast you’d think they’re a team of 10 stacked engineers, rather than just 2 cofounders. Melty’s going to give every engineer their superpowers.
I started a company!
Introducing Melty, an open source AI code editor for 10x engineers.
It's the first editor that understands what you’re doing from the terminal to GitHub and collaborates with you to write production-ready code.
It’s never too early to apply to YC. 52% of the latest batch were accepted with only an idea, and 77% had zero revenue.
Application deadline for the next batch is Friday, so apply now:
Today we're announcing our partnership with
@Microsoft
to give our AI startups Azure credits and priority access to a cluster of ND A100 Azure VMs configured for model training and fine tuning.
Here's my YC application vid from 2019.
This is the idea that got accepted!
Kinda crazy how the thing I'm talking about in this video pivoted into the wildly different thing we're working on today...
Never get too attached to specific ideas.
Keep iterating.
14 years ago I couldn't imagine that filling out a simple form on the internet would change the course of my life.
Tomorrow's the deadline for the next YC batch, so if you're thinking of filling out that same form – just do it. No downside, and it might change your life too.
At YC, we work with founders throughout the life of their startup and beyond, to build the world-changing companies of the future.
And we'd love to work with you.
The deadline to apply for YC W24 is this Friday, Oct 13 at 8pm PDT — apply today at .
No better choice to join the
@reddit
board than
@mwseibel
. I’ve learned a ton from his leadership, and seen firsthand how hard he works to support black and underrepresented communities.
About to go live for day 1 of
@ycombinator
Demo Day! Congrats to the entire S21 batch on all of the hard work, excited for you to share your startups with the world.
Congrats to all the founders presenting at S24 Demo Day today! It’s been one of the most impressive batches I’ve worked with, excited for you to share all your progress with the world.
Super excited for the return of live
@ycombinator
demo day today! Congrats to all the founders on their hard work to get to this point, can’t wait for you to share your companies with the world.
Technical founders and early-career salespeople often think they must act like a salesperson to sell. The opposite is true.
To sell, founders must act like humans — not salespeople. This starts with how you ask questions.
Salesperson: What goals are you hoping to achieve with
Pretty crazy that 15 years ago I filled out a simple form on the internet, and it changed my life. Tomorrow’s the deadline to apply to the YC S24 batch, and it could change your life too.
Apply now:
Congrats to all of the founders presenting at the S23 Demo Day today and tomorrow! What a strong batch, excited for you to share your companies with the world.
Tomorrow's the deadline to apply for the next
@ycombinator
batch, so if you’re on the fence…you should definitely apply! Even just filling out the application can be really helpful as you think through your business.
1/ As a first-time founder with no management experience, I had to quickly learn on the job how to build an effective team. So here’s some advice that I wish someone had given me when I was just beginning to grow and manage a team at
@CreativeMarket
...
Designers, come work with me at YC! If you love design and helping founders, this is a rare opportunity to shape products used by the very best founders in the world.
Listening to
@lil_dill
give design feedback makes it clear why she’s been leading design at some of the best companies in the world, from
@stripe
to
@Airbnb
. Easily one of my favorite episodes yet, thanks for joining me and sharing your advice with YC founders Katie!
In the early days, founders often feel they need to act bigger than they are, thinking that’s the only way to land big deals. I made that mistake when we started
@VendrHQ
.
Instead of pretending to be a bigger company, embrace the garage phase.
I call it "take-a-shot sales" —
Pretty exciting news from YC: we now invest $500k into every company in the batch! If you’ve ever been on the fence about applying before, it’s a total no brainer now.
‼️ Introducing 🤯
Conduct a mock YC interview entirely done via AI
Built with
@vocodehq
, voice cloning provided by
@play_ht
, recognition via
@AssemblyAI
and of course, hosted on
@Replit
!
Check out our repo for more info:
Spot on. And another positive pattern of successful second time founders I’ve seen is optimizing for revenue-per-employee in their next startup. They’re burned out on big inefficient teams, and want to do it again with a much leaner team.
Talking to second time founders (especially v. successful ones), I've realized they tend to make the same mistakes. In fact, I made these myself in my brief attempt to start a second company after Scribd. The three most common ones:
By popular demand! A new episode of Design Review is out focused entirely on mobile apps. Special thanks to
@dvdsgl
from
@glideapps
for joining me and sharing a ton of great design advice.
Watch here:
Just released a new episode of Design Review! YC Group Partner (and former
@Optimizely
co-founder)
@koomen
joined me to review website conversion flows, and share tips to improve conversion rates.
Give it a watch:
Excited for W24 Demo Day today! It’s so energizing to see the months of progress and hard work behind these 60 second pitches. Congrats to all of the founders presenting!
On top of being a really great person, Pete has a rare combination of strong technical, sales, and fundraising experience – YC founders are lucky to get to work with him!
I’m thrilled to announce that today I’m joining
@ycombinator
as a Group Partner.
This is the second time that YC has changed the course of my life.
(🧵1/10)
A new episode of Design Review just landed on the YC YouTube channel –
@garrytan
joins me to break down design lessons from AI startup websites, check it out!
“How do good leaders stay in the detail and run great companies at scale? Are there areas where founders really do have a persisting advantage? That’s what I want to explore”
Must read from
@t_blom
, defining Founder Mode from his experience building 2 unicorns.
What is "founder mode"? 🤔
Leaders must stay connected to the details of their product, have an incredibly high bar for quality, manage for output, and delegate only to the extent that people have earned your trust.
I’ve been lucky to learn from
@mwseibel
and his leadership at YC. He does so many things behind the scenes to help founders that most people aren’t even aware of, and he’s a huge force for good in the world. Here’s to 10 more years!
Incredible progress from
@AndyLapsa
and
@stoke_space
in just 2.5 years since the YC W21 batch. Second stage prototype test complete, on the way to fully reusable rockets. 🚀
Today’s an exciting day for
@CreativeMarket
! Introducing Creative Market Pro – a curated design asset subscription built to help creative professionals and teams do great design work fast.
Been an incredible run for
@gralston
leading YC, end of an era! And no one better to take over than
@garrytan
– he was the first one to help us before our YC interview in 2009, & has helped countless other founders in the decade+ since. Welcome back Garry!
.
@CreativeMarket
+
@Dribbble
= a massive opportunity for independent creators around the world! Excited for all of the great things to come as a combined company.
I’m excited to welcome
@dflieb
,
@EdrizioCruz
, and
@umurc
to YC as Visiting Group Partners this batch, and especially for
@sdianahu
to join as a Group Partner! Founders will be lucky to work with them.
Far and away the biggest and best
@ycombinator
Demo Day production yet, and
@domoniquefines
just knocked it out of the park on the planning and execution!
.
@ycombinator
has the largest and most interesting data set on startups, and we’re hiring a data scientist to help pull out the most valuable insights. Sound interesting? Apply here:
Excited for Merse to launch: Netflix for audio-visual comics, where you can hear character voices and sounds.
@markrachapoom
and
@kumareth
have made modern comics for the digital age, and it’s super cool:
I stacked 13K users on the
@argildotai
waiting list, got accepted to
@ycombinator
How did we do it? What is our secret sauce?
In October, we pivoted the current version of Argil AI (the first one was a completely different product)
Instead of rushing to build an app wrapping
First ever Bluetooth connection to space! It seems inevitable now that
@hubble_network
will actually pull it off and build the first global battery-efficient network.
🚀 We just did the impossible: the first-ever Bluetooth connection to space! This milestone is a crucial step in our ongoing efforts to build the world’s first truly global, battery-efficient, and cost-effective network.
On Friday, I had the chance to speak with the current
@ycombinator
batch (S24) about founder sales and my story building
@VendrHQ
. Sales is a simple thing that most founders complicate.
Here are my sales beliefs:
-There are only two outcomes in sales, people buy or they don’t.
I just finished the
@ycombinator
retreat, which was pretty amazing! Thanks to all the organizers and partners for this amazing event!
I want to give a special mention to Erlich Bachman, who's building Aviato 2.0 👀 I saw a sneak peek; it's amazing!
🔥 Spline Alpha Release is here!
Today we introduce 3D vector editing, a paradigm shift for 2D design, and a step towards a 3D-first design tool.
✍️ 3D Vector Editing
🐣 New Interactions
📸 Post-processing
👋 File Sharing
💻 Apple Silicon Support
Does your startup's website pass the first impression test?
In this episode of Design Review,
@zack415
, former CEO of Dribbble, joins YC's
@aaron_epstein
to review user-submitted websites in under 10 seconds and share their first impressions + advice.
*BIG BIG news*. I'm SO proud of this. Chase Payment Solutions has picked Gusto Embedded to build their payroll product. And it's going to be a massive win for small businesses.
Congrats to
@hunterwalk
and
@satyap
on their new
@homebrew
fund! A lot of investors talk about being value-add, so let me give you an example of how Hunter and Satya actually are.
Surbhi has one of the most inspiring founder stories I've heard – from a cancer scare, to racking up hundreds of no's, to selling her company for $275m.
Give her a follow at
@SurbhiSarnaSF
, and check out her upcoming book if you're into gritty against-all-odds founder stories.
For those of you who haven’t met her yet,
@SurbhiSarnaSF
is one of the newest group partners at YC.
We’re excited to share that her book
#WithoutADoubt
drops on March 7 — and to celebrate, she's hosting a series of online founder firesides. Join us!
The summer YC batch is going to be remote, so if you ever thought about applying but didn’t want to move to the bay area, this may be your only chance to do the batch from wherever you live. Apply now:
More from
@daltonc
: