A senior creative team, embedded in yours. Human-led, and engineered for speed.
Joined August 2024
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We set out to make a showreel.
It had other plans.
Somewhere between frame one and the last stop…
this became a whole journey.
Built with projects we’re proud of
and people who trusted us (bold move).
Next stop could be yours → ryzedesigns.com
Or mail us at [email protected]
Same thing we've seen with founders: AI doesn't replace judgment, it just puts it on display.
Super useful breakdown. Founders, this is your weekend reading.
I redid the startup founder signals that lead to top tier VCs investing in the seed / A, after incorporating some feedback.
This added ex-frontier lab and cyber security near the top, IIT as a positive, and educated in China as a negative.
The main changes were;
- extended founding year to 2019-2026, ~2x'd the number of startups
- unified and added some signals
Here are the new signals:
Bookmarked for every founder friend applying this cycle. Clear, kind and useful.
I've read maybe ~10,000 YC applications. 8000 for YC admissions/PG quite a few years ago and anther 2000 informally as an alum.
There's a new and growing mistake and I want to share why it's more important than you think.
By the way - I try not to ever say YC admissions works this way or that way. That's YC's job and they're always changing things and making up their own minds.
But I will share my impression and you can see what you think - YC partners, please chime in as well if you like.
The YC application is fundamentally an evaluation of a founder's potential. And much less an evaluation of a specific business. (Airbedbreakfast transitioning into Airbnb because Brian, Nate, Joe never give up and never stop listening to their customers)
So, in your writing of the application, YOU need to shine through.
This batch, I read ~200 applications.
I'm guessing over half were significantly written, edited, or polished with AI.
That half was easily in the bottom half of my informal rankings, almost every time.
To be clear, most were NOT AI slop. I often couldn't tell at first they had used AI. Founders were pouring their heart and soul into their app - so I what I received was high quality.
But I think the AI really hurt them. Here's why:
Once polished by AI, I as reader lost insight into the personality of the writer.
I love the YC application because the questions are the same questions I would ask in office hours or casually to a friend that wanted help with their startup. It pushes the founder out of their pitchdeck/VC talk style into simple worded questions that can be answered simply as well. And great founders shine through when they just write like they talk. The LLM writing made answers feel more like a corporate cover letter, with the personality drained out.
The AI-assisted drafts also gave me a sense of mid work. The writing itself seemed like zero standard deviations from the mean. The LLMs had lopped off the outlier portions of sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts. Given the YC App is an outlier detector, a writing tool that lops off outlier writing is the opposite of what you want.
And the AI writing was needlessly verbose. Which hurts when a reliable predictor of great founders is that they're deep thinkers and deep thinking shines through in the density of their writing.
So...
I did an experiment. I asked a bunch of these seemingly AI-assisted app writers to talk with me live. I just asked them the same YC app questions and recorded their answers.
I then gave them back the transcripts. Unedited and unpolished.
And...
OMG! A good number turned from easy no to actual good applications.
Magic! Remove AI >> Improve application.
This happened BOTH with native English speakers and founders abroad.
So this is my recommendation to all of you.
Don't let AI touch your application, even for a second.
And maybe try the dictation approach with a friend.
My apologies to the YC admissions team if you already knew AI-written applications were crap and you were using this insight to help you easily move applications to the No pile.
YC's Winter Batch Application deadline is Nov 2nd.
Ryze Design Studio retweeted
@my_mokobara your next big story could be someone’s very first.
Their first flight. Their first trip back with a bag full of home. Their first holiday together.
We imagined a campaign around the moments people remember long after they’ve unpacked.
Meet Moko Firsts. 💛
Hard tech launches like this make us so happy. Excited to watch you grow.
Today we launch @VirajAero (YC F26).
We built a turbine to fly. Now it powers data centers: it makes its own cooling water from the exhaust, gets 40% more power from the same fuel, and gets permitted in weeks.
No water connection, no wait for the grid.
Short, focused reviews really do keep a team moving. Great reminder for every founder who sits on feedback for a week.
Elon Musk runs 120 design reviews a day in 5-minute slots.
He does this while running six different companies at once.
Marc says Elon maps each company as a production process.
Each process has one bottleneck... the single thing slowing it down.
Elon finds the engineer working on that bottleneck and sits with them until it's fixed.
He does this at Tesla 52 times a year. Personally.
"There's no CEO like this."
Most CEOs run their companies through a wall of middle managers.
Andreessen watched IBM collapse under that model.
Inside IBM, they had a name for the failure mode: the "Big Gray Cloud."
It was the traveling court of suited men who kept the CEO away from engineers.
After 12 layers of compounding lies, the CEO had no idea what was happening.
Elon's method is the polar opposite.
Design review math:
- 5 minutes per engineer
- 12 reviews per hour
- 10 hours per day
- 120 reviews per day
An engineer described working for him as entering "a zone of shocking competence."
On sustaining it, Elon's rule is: "I don't take vacations."
Love how human this playbook is. Talking to real people still beats every hack.
i got to $120k revenue without doing half of this.
no product hunt. no 50 chatgpt blog posts. no facebook ads.
what actually got me my first 100 users (no bs):
1) dm'ing people who had already complained about the exact problem i was trying to solve on LinkedIn and X. keep it short and simple.
2) replying under every post in the niche for 30 days. not “check out my tool.” actual answers with insights.
3) obsessing over the first 20 users. be it calls, loom videos, or fixing their setup myself.
4) posting the $$ numbers. $0. then $10k. people trust authenticity.
ads and blogs only start working after some users are already paying you. before that 90% of the job is just talking to people who already have the problem.
are you stuck at getting users for your product?
comment the product link and i’ll tell you how i'll go about acquiring your first 100 users.
first 10 comments get a loom video.
Disclaimer - I lead growth at a YC startup
This Diwali, gift a box of sweets that becomes a glowing lantern long after the mithai is shared.
The result is Mithaas Bhi, Roshni Bhi - our Diwali special packaging concept for @MyHaldirams
@letsblinkit 's packaging and playful doodles already make the brand hard to forget.
We thought, why not give people one more reason to remember it?
So we brought that playfulness into the app, reimagining its Dussehra wish as a little interaction designed to make you smile.
@letsblinkit 's packaging and playful doodles already make the brand hard to forget.
We thought, why not give people one more reason to remember it?
So we brought that playfulness into the app, reimagining its Dussehra wish as a little interaction designed to make you smile.
You’re considering a new hire. The role is needed, but you also need enough time to reach your next milestone.
How much runway does that decision cost? And what would have to change elsewhere to make it work?
These are difficult questions to answer from a bank balance or a single “months of runway” figure.
So we built the Startup Runway Calculator on Ryze Labs. Add your cash, spending, and revenue to see how long your current plan may last. Then change the assumptions and compare the outcome.
You can see what happens if spending increases, revenue takes longer to arrive, or you make a cut that buys the business more time.
It won’t predict the future. It will show you what your plan is relying on, so you can make the next decision with a clearer view of its impact.
Try it here: labs.ryzedesigns.com/startup…
230 applications landed in my inbox after one hiring post.
They came from India, the US, Pakistan, Mexico, and several other countries. We are currently hiring only in India, but reviewing portfolios from across the world revealed something I wasn’t expecting.
The world of design has changed dramatically.
The way designers present themselves has barely changed at all.
Five years ago, when I was applying for jobs, I presented my work in a familiar sequence:
Here is the problem statement.
Here are the personas.
Here is the competitive analysis.
Here is the process.
And here is the final design.
Today, I am sitting on the other side of the interview table, hearing almost exactly the same presentation.
But the work itself is no longer the same.
In just the last six months, the workflow inside our design studio has transformed. Our designers are no longer stopping at design. They are learning to build, develop, prototype, automate and take ideas much closer to completion themselves.
This does not just save time. It removes the loss that happens every time an idea moves from one person to another.
So when I see work that makes me think, “AI could have done most of this,” the question is no longer whether the designer followed the correct process.
The question is:
Where did your judgment come in?
What did you notice that AI would have missed?
How did you use AI to improve your thinking, not replace it?
What can you now take ownership of that you could not six months ago?
And why does your portfolio today still look like a portfolio from five years ago?
I think many job seekers are still referencing the same portfolio templates, case-study structures and “best practices” they find online. But perhaps we need a new wave of portfolios altogether.
Portfolios that show not only what you designed, but how you think in a world where almost anyone can generate a decent-looking first draft.
Interestingly, I face the same question while pitching Ryze.
A founder will sometimes tell me, “But I can do this myself on Claude.”
And they are not entirely wrong.
AI can generate options. It can write copy, create layouts, suggest features and even help build the product.
But the hidden cost is not always money.
It is management.
Writing prompts. Reviewing outputs. Spotting what is wrong. Redoing what almost works. Connecting one piece to the next. Making hundreds of decisions without knowing which ones actually matter.
DIY with AI may feel free, but the founder is now the designer, operator, reviewer and project manager.
It has not removed the work. It has simply moved the work onto their plate.
Think of interior design.
I can upload photographs of my home to ChatGPT, share references and ask it to redesign the space. It can give me beautiful options and even suggest where to source the materials.
But I can only prompt AI with what I know.
I may love wooden flooring. What if it is unsuitable for my climate, my building or the way my home is used?
If I do not know enough to provide that context, how will I know that something important is missing from the answer?
That is where expertise comes in.
Not because experts have access to tools that others do not.
Because they know what to ask, what to question, what to reject and what the client does not yet know to consider.
That is the real value of human judgment.
For designers, the challenge is no longer proving that you can follow a design process. It is proving what you bring to that process now that the tools have changed.
For studios, the value is no longer simply producing the work. It is taking ownership of the outcome and removing the burden of managing it.
AI has not made expertise irrelevant.
It has made it much easier to see where expertise was missing all along.
Hiring a creative team is quietly one of the hardest things a founder does.
Not the work itself. Building the team that does it.
You need a brand designer. A product designer. Someone for marketing. A developer.
So you read portfolios. Run interviews. Wait out notice periods.
Then you onboard four people and hope they work well together.
That's a company inside your company.
And at pre-seed, you're the one holding it together.
Everyone waits on someone. Every question routes back to you. You're the only shared context in the room.
So a lot of founders skip all that. "I'll just use AI."
And you can. Sort of.
But doing it yourself with AI quietly turns you into the creative team.
You're learning what good design even looks like. Building context you didn't have. Writing the prompt five more times.
Deciding whether the output is actually right.
AI didn't take the work off your plate. It moved it onto your plate and called it free.
Both roads end in the same place.
The person who should be building the company is instead running its creative function. Or becoming it.
We name the cost of hiring. We rarely name the cost of carrying it yourself.
Which is why the embedded model is starting to matter.
A senior team that already works together, sits close to the intent, and owns what happens next.
The team you'd have built yourself. Without the months. And without becoming it.
The goal was never more tools or more hires.
It's fewer things the founder has to hold.
P.S. That's me "playing" golf. No swing, no golf shoes, no clue. Just holding the club and posing for the camera. Admire the confidence, ignore everything else ;)
#startups #founders #earlystage
50/50 is easy. Fair is harder.
That’s why we built the Co-founder Equity Split tool on Ryze Labs.
It helps founders think through equity based on actual contributions — commitment, capital, risk, IP, role and ownership of the outcome.
The calculation is completely transparent, so you can see what’s influencing the split and how the result is worked out.
You also get a downloadable report to use as a starting point for the conversation.
Try it here → labs.ryzedesigns.com/equity-…
Would you split founder equity 50/50?
How do you know if your startup idea has a market big enough to build for?
Yesterday, we talked about getting your startup idea clear.
But once you know what you’re building, the next question is probably even more important:
Who is actually going to buy it and how big is that opportunity?
This is where TAM, SAM and SOM usually enter the conversation.
And very quickly, you end up with a giant market number that looks great on a pitch deck.
But here’s the more interesting question:
How much of that market can you realistically reach?
That’s what our next Founder Toolkit tool, Market Sizer, helps you work through.
You tell it what you’re selling, who your ideal customer is, where you want to start and how you make money.
It then helps you estimate your TAM, SAM and SOM, while keeping the assumptions and calculations transparent so you can actually see how the numbers were reached.
Built on Ryze Labs. Free to use.
Try the Market Sizer → labs.ryzedesigns.com/market-…
How do you get clarity on a startup idea when half of it is still living in your head?
Put it down.
The Founder Clarity Canvas helps you organise your idea across the 9 key parts of the business, from the problem and solution to customers, costs, revenue, positioning and growth.
You also choose the stage you’re at, so you can look at the idea through the right lens.
Once everything is sitting in one place, it becomes much easier to see:
What’s clear. What still feels vague. What needs more thought.
It won’t tell you whether your idea is good or bad.
It helps you understand your own idea better before you keep building around it.
And this is one of those tools that can be genuinely priceless when you’re building something.
It’s completely free to use, so please make the most of it.
Founder Clarity Canvas is live on Ryze Labs. ;) - labs.ryzedesigns.com/founder…
How do you know if an idea is actually worth building?
And if it is, how big is the market?
How much will it cost to launch?
How should you split equity?
How long will your money last?
What do you even send an investor when they ask for “something quick”?
Turns out, founders keep asking the same questions.
When I announced Ryze Labs last month, we didn’t have a Founders’ Toolkit in mind.
We were just building things we wished existed.
Then one founder problem became one tool.
Then another.
Then another.
And somewhere along the way, Ryze Labs turned into a toolkit for the messy bit between:
“I have an idea”
and
“I am apparently running an entire company now.”
The Founders’ Toolkit is live!
Market sizing. Equity split. Cost to launch. Runway. Positioning. Investor one-pagers. Brand voice. And more.
Built to help you think through the decisions founders usually solve with 14 tabs open, three spreadsheets and one mild existential crisis.
If you’re building something right now, have a look.
You might find exactly the tool you didn’t know you needed.
Have a look ;) labs.ryzedesigns.com/