
YC Visiting Partner, former CEO/Cofounder of Convex (acq by $TTAN), physical and vertical AI, services, & industrials investor. Dad.
San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2026
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The AI infrastructure build-out is short on workers. I've seen it firsthand with former customers building data centers.
@shepherd_si is taking it on. Wiring takes dexterity at the frontier of robotics, and few teams can pull it off.
Thrilled to back them at @ycombinator.
Introducing Shepherd Robotics (YC F26).
We’re building robots for data centers and advanced manufacturing—starting with equipment testing, inspection, and electrical wiring & assembly.
Bring capacity online faster. Increase production.
youtube.com/watch?v=UAw41QkF…
I got to see @FarzaTV up close in P26. Refreshing to see a real builder do his thing. More behind the scenes of how he ships and launches 👇
There’s a misconception that a successful launch video needs to cost tens of thousands of dollars and feel like a high production commercial. But @FarzaTV has a different approach.
Farza is the founder of @heyclicky and previously built Buildspace, one of the largest online schools for people working on their own ideas. He’s been making videos for over a decade, and today his posts regularly get millions of views. Rather than treating launches as rare, high-stakes moments, he’s made them part of the everyday process of building a company.
Farza sat down with YC’s @aaron_epstein to share his playbook for turning demos into stories people actually want to watch. He breaks down how he scripts videos that still feel off the cuff, why founders should launch constantly, and and how to figure out which channels actually convert.
01:44 — Launch Constantly
03:38 — Start Shipping Demos
05:02 — Show the Process
06:07 — The Clicky Launch
07:43 — Write a Hook That Stops the Scroll
10:30 — Why Farza Scripts Every Video
12:04 — Designing the First 10 Seconds
15:15 — Demo-Driven Development
17:25 — You Have to Take a Thousand Shots
20:48 — Farza’s Formula for Videos That Convert
23:01 — Turning Demos Into Stories
24:53 — Show What You're Actually Building
29:11 — Finding Customers on Social Media
31:02 — Which Platforms Actually Convert?
39:01 — Why Farza’s First Hire Was a Filmmaker
40:49 — The Video Stack
45:41 — The 30-Day Launch Challenge
Charlie Warren retweeted
Attended @ycombinator early access event yesterday evening!
AI is making software faster to build. A new generation of startups is building the tools to run, test, and improve it.
Five companies worth a closer look:
Boxes — Cloud computers for coding agents, letting teams run Claude Code and Codex in parallel.
Founders: Nick Bushak (@nbushak) and Drew Regitsky (@drewregitsky), both previously at Gem.
Caveman — Helps AI agents use fewer tokens and run more efficiently, reducing the cost of getting work done.
Founder: Julius Brussee (@julius_brussee).
Rystic — Builds simulated APIs so developers can test software and agents without depending on live services.
Founders: Zachary Kiihne and Evan Whitehouse.
Simulithic — Sends AI users through your app across devices and browsers to find broken flows, without manually writing every test.
Founders: Ryan Ning (@itsnotryan) and Satyam Singh (@KlausCodes).
ObsessionDB — A real-time data warehouse built for agents to ingest and query large amounts of data efficiently.
Founders: Rafael Aviles (@avilesrafa), Marc Höffl (@marchoeffl), and Marc Leuthardt (@marcmacmac).
Also great to reconnect with my friend from Harvard, Charlie Warren (@charliewarren), now a Visiting Partner at YC and previously cofounder and CEO of Convex.
My takeaway: faster development creates demand for better testing, infrastructure, and reliability. There’s room for significant companies across that stack.
Which other early-stage companies should I be following?
Company links in the reply below.
The internet may be melting. But I'm still getting unsolicited texts to sign up for new payroll software before the end of the year. We're gonna be alright.
Charlie Warren retweeted
The top end of growth rates for companies riding an AI tailwind just keeps accelerating.
Biggest change since I started my company in 2017: the "design partnership."
It's the Coach's Award of startup sales. Just ask for a paid contract and get used to 'no'
All businesses will need new websites for agents. @MilesPines has (already) built the best product on the market.
Incredible traction and incredibly happy customers across 10K+ sites.
Small businesses don't need a website builder. They need someone to do their marketing. They need Theo.
@theo_site (YC F26) is the AI agent that builds - or rebuilds - your site, then works 24/7 to get you found on Google and in AI search.
You run the business. Theo does the marketing. Free audit: theo.site
Charlie Warren retweeted
Apply to YC and it will change your life
We grew from $0 to $1M annualized revenue during the batch
What you get from YC:
→ $500K investment
→ A cohort of ambitious founders who push you beyond your limits
→ Partners like @garrytan & @gustaf who have your back for life
→ $11.5M in perks and credits
→ Bookface + alumni founder community (also for life)
→ Demo Day in front of thousands of investors
Applications for the YC Winter 2027 batch are now open!
Apply by November 2: ycombinator.com/apply
Charlie Warren retweeted
*Over $11.5M in perks and deals btw
YC W27 applications are now open
What YC gives you:
→ $500K investment
→ YC partners in your corner, for life
→ Faster launches, growth and customer acquisition
→ Demo Day in front of thousands of investors
→ Over $500K in credits and 100+ perks
→ Alumni include Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash & Coinbase
Truly a life-changing opportunity, one application away 🔸
Charlie Warren retweeted
The percentage of solo founders at @ycombinator went from 3% to 20% in 2 years.
In the age of AI, the right, motivated person is unstoppable.
One of my favorite trends of the current era -- crazy ambitious founders going for the jugular of the SaaS incumbents 🩸
Today, we're launching Sazabi version 1.0.
The reality of shipping software as a team in the age of AI is actually crazy.
Agents merging their own PRs. Hundreds of deployments per day. A codebase that is constantly changing. Junior developers with 10x or 100x leverage. 😵💫
I spent the last year building a safety harness for teams that ship with AI. It's called @sazabi.
The premise is simple:
1. You send us logs.
2. We detect anomalies, investigate them, and send you back rich, actionable alerts about real problems in your app.
Sazabi helps you find issues before your users notice.
No monitors or noisy alerts. Just pure signal.
And today we're making it available for anyone to use.
People forget that TTAN was one the first SaaS IPOs after the ZIRP correction. It was good, too!
My favorite quotes of the week:
1. “The SaaS era started with the IPO of Salesforce and ended with the IPO of ServiceTitan.”
2. “You should tweet that only 3 VCs matter.”
3. “Fee compression is going to kill most asset managers. Anyone with a brain should assemble a bunch of direct capabilities across asset classes and charge big pools 1% and 5% for a full direct portfolio.”
Charlie Warren retweeted
It’s pretty clear to me that the internet is headed toward a new business model that we may not have figured out yet.
Consumers will increasingly outsource tasks to agents, and agents will work around the clock to execute them on their behalf. These tasks require inference spend.
The most obvious way to cover these costs is by passing them through to the user. Users pay a monthly subscription or simply pay for credits that get deducted as inference gets spent.
But with the cost of inference dropping over time, this will ultimately be a race to the bottom. Pass-through pricing will get commoditized and won’t be able to sustain margins. So startups and incumbents will have no choice but to offer a different business model.
Paying for task-based outcomes is an obvious iteration. You can imagine customers paying agents when they achieve certain goals, such as successfully booking an appointment or executing a refund the user wouldn’t have taken care of on their own.
But most tasks aren't worth paying for one at a time. The most scaled business models on the internet let everyone participate, even when they can't pay directly. This is why advertising dominated as the primary business model of the past 30 years.
Incumbents will subsidize usage dramatically over the next few years to onboard as many customers as possible. We’re already seeing this with Muse.
But the question is, how will this work get paid for long-term? Can agents adopt a form of advertising that covers the cost? Or do we need a completely new model where the few big paid outcomes subsidize everyone else's usage?
We may be headed toward a new world of haves and have nots. Or a world of abundance where everyone can get anything done at any time for free.
Charlie Warren retweeted
We’re launching OpenSEO, the open source alternative to Semrush.
It started as a spite app, but now we're on track to build the best SEO tool for AI agents.
We just shipped our AI Visibility Beta for GEO too.
Hope you support!
Charlie Warren retweeted
On our quest to take down Semrush, we’re open sourcing AI Visibility.
Getting mentioned by AI shouldn’t require another subscription.
All of OpenSEO’s features for SEO/GEO are available for $10/month.
I linked a demo video in the comments. Hope you try it out!
This also makes me bullish on the many great startup teams competing with Onshape
Schneider Electric nears deal to buy software group PTC for $20bn ft.trib.al/oHqBhn2




























