when we raised our seed round years ago, i actually told investors exactly how we *could* fail. i'm generally a no bs person, so i wanted to lay all the cards out. the pitch had 3 parts: -here's what we think this could become -here's what we know so far -here are all the risks for how this company could fail i told them in a meeting, "you could tell me 5 risks you see. i'll tell you 100, because we've done the work to understand all 100." we raised $4.5m a couple of weeks later, and the journey started. investors aren't stupid. they hear pitches all day, and they can tell when a founder is hiding the downside. so if you're looking to raise: don't oversell the upside, and definitely don't hide the downside. honesty wins. — written with @WisprFlow

Agent swarms are a big unlock. One agent can only do so much. Many together woven together by artifactory-hack-style message board can do a lot more.

Yay, RFS for YC Winter 2027 just dropped...

New essay: andrewchen.substack.com/p/ne… NEW FOUNDER ARCHETYPES IN THE AI AGE Solo founders - Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before - Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress. Maybe you can agentically code but someone still needs to do a million meetings with customers. Maybe coding was never the main bottleneck for startups in the first place? Non-technical founders - Why: There’s elite talent that comes from areas like finance, consulting, who can’t code but are passionate about business. There’s also folks in creative industries who create all day but just not in code. Now they can build - Why not: Why not: Maybe AI makes it easier to build a prototype, but there’s still a big gap between a demo and a reliable product that can scale. If everyone can build the first version, maybe technical judgment becomes more important in deciding what to build, what’s actually possible, and how to stay ahead as the product gets more complex. (especially true for product categories like dev tools/etc) Domain experts - Why: A doctor who works at a hospital understands all the problems they face each day. A real estate broker really gets the subtleties of their markets, their clients. Same with a soldier, teacher, etc. What if they could use software to solve their own problems and build business along the way? - Why not: Hoteliers didn’t create Airbnb and the finance industry didn’t create Kalshi. Sometimes you just need an outsider’s view in order to reinvent an industry, versus building incremental improvements Kids, high schoolers, college students - Why: Young people have already been building products early on. Start with a Minecraft mod, a Roblox game, a Discord bot, and suddenly you’ve learned how to make something that thousands of other people use. Now add AI, and a kid with an idea can build way more, way earlier - Why not: Building something your friends love is very different from building a company. You still have to hire, raise money, manage people, and figure out how to make money. And maybe young founders have an advantage in consumer products because they understand their peers, but much less of one when it comes to enterprise software, healthcare, or other industries where experience and relationships really matter. Sometimes you just need domain expertise Content creators - Why: They’re already creating. So instead of creating videos, maybe the same skills can go into creating software. Plus, they have distribution. They know what their followers care about, how to get their attention, and how to reach them without paying for ads. In the past, turning that audience into a software product meant finding a technical cofounder or hiring a team. Now a creator could build and launch something themselves, and immediately put it in front of millions of potential users. - Why not: Having followers helps with a spike of distribution, but building a sustainable growth engine is something else. The most valuable products aren’t memes - they are long-running, long-growing products that need to be endlessly tweaked and iterated on. Does the DNA work?

Actual traits of successful founders: Good at building. Genuinely interested in the problem. Very determined. Talks a lot to users.

there is no moat

My take: SaaS is dead. Software is charity now, make money elsewhere. No one can make $$ selling the same features for years anymore. Instead: - Use good software to collect user data and sell data. - Use good software to deliver outcome and sell outcome. - Arbitrage tokens under the guise of selling software - buy bulk, sell retail. - Use good software internally to drive your own margin higher for your services/products - Build RSI agent in a domain that has the fastest learning loop so it has the most, latest expertise: e.g. a marketing agent that knows the latest tricks to get viral in X coz it's doing it for others every day and learn and evolve. - Give away all your features for free, it's futile anyways. Open source them. Make money elsewhere.