Adrien P.

Yesterday I was chatting with my YC batchmates Ege Kaan Duman and Ali Kavoosi. Something clicked for us: Most founders/investors obsess over mapping A to Z, but what if that's completely wrong? After spending almost an year after YC talking to users, shipping features daily, pivoting, building MVPs, focusing on Typa, building in stealth... I feel I'm finally realizing one of the lessons Michael taught us during YC office hours: "Plan A → B, not A → Z. Leave the full image and long-term future as a question mark." If we spent 10 years talking to every user segment and testing countless features, then traveled back in time, we'd understand the users and features so well that planning the perfect A → Z would be straightforward. But we don't have that luxury. We can't possibly predict steps X, Y, Z when we haven't even mastered getting from A to B. It may seem there's so many different user personas, numerous features that could be built, you're unsure what the ideal roadmap looks like... But there's one path to success that's clear and straight. Stop trying to predict the future. Instead: 1. Pick ONE user segment 2. Ship ONE targeted solution 3. Get ruthless feedback 4. Iterate quickly 5. Repeat It's all about quick execution, learning from it, and being consistent. Stop worrying or planning too much - just focus on your A → B!

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At Davos, the conversation around AI is shifting — from experimentation to economic execution. In a Bloomberg interview, Khaldoon Al Mubarak shared how Mubadala is approaching the next phase of global investment, where three forces converge: • Artificial Intelligence as core economic infrastructure • Monetization as the real test of maturity • Private credit as a strategic tool in a tighter financial environment The signal is clear: This is no longer about deploying technology for innovation’s sake. It’s about turning advanced capabilities into durable value, measurable returns, and long-term resilience. 2025 was not just an “active” year — it marked a deeper shift in how capital is allocated, risks are managed, and future growth is built. AI will not reshape economies because it is intelligent. It will reshape them because it is now deployable, accountable, and investable. #Davos #ArtificialIntelligence #InvestmentStrategy #PrivateCredit #PublicSector #FutureEconomy https://lnkd.in/ddgkD4m7

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In our latest workshop at 14.ai, Alyona Medelyan, PhD 🇺🇦 (CEO & co-founder of Thematic, YC S17), joined us for a deep-dive on how startups and enterprises can transform messy, siloed feedback into actionable insights that drive change across the business. We discussed: • How to centralize feedback across surveys, support channels, social media, and reviews without losing context • Strategies for breaking down silos so insights aren’t lost in disconnected teams or inboxes • How to ensure feedback sparks real organizational change The Q&A explored Alyona’s founder journey, real-world lessons from scaling Thematic, and how AI-first companies are rethinking metrics to align with their mission. Full recap is in the comments.

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Working with teams in Egypt? Here’s what to know about June 30. June 30 marks Revolution Day in Egypt, a national holiday that commemorates the 2013 demonstrations that led to significant political change in the country. It’s a day of reflection on national identity, civic engagement, and the future of Egypt. In 2025, the holiday is observed “in lieu” on Thursday, July 3, meaning government offices and many private companies will be closed, and workers will have a long weekend. 🌍 If you're collaborating with Egyptian colleagues, here are some tips: ✅ Plan ahead: Response times may be slower leading up to and during the holiday, especially for public sector partners. ✅ Avoid scheduling meetings or deadlines between July 3–6, as many may extend their time off. ✅ Respect the context: While it’s a national holiday, it’s also a politically complex day. Avoid making casual or political remarks about the revolution. ✅ Be thoughtful: A simple “Enjoy your time off” or “Wishing you a restful holiday” is always welcome. 🌐 As part of a global team, understanding our colleagues’ national days helps us work not just across time zones, but across histories and values. #RevolutionDay #Egypt #CrossCulturalWork #RemoteWork #GlobalTeams #CulturalAwareness #Professionalism Photo by Dilip Poddar on Unsplash

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Last Saturday at the K-Tech Pioneers event in NYC, Keon Kim shared his perspective on where AI is heading. During his talk, he briefly flashed the winners of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 Hackathon. And this slide’s been stuck in my head all weekend. Why? Because the winners weren’t who you’d expect. • A lawyer • A cardiologist • A musician • A civil engineer • And only one developer It's a small but powerful representation of how the gap between founders and operators is diminishing. You no longer need complex or elaborate organizations, resources, and personnel. Domain experts can turn their knowledge directly into tools, agents, and workflows — without needing a full engineering team or years of technical training. In other words: You don’t need a big org, big funding, or big infrastructure to build something meaningful anymore. You just need expertise + the right AI tools. Dmitry Shapiro, the CEO of MindStudio is doing a free one-hour OpenClaw Masterclass for PMs. More than 14,000 people have already registered, which tells you something about where this space is headed. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/eABgnQKq

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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A peak behind the curtain on the product side from our CTO Dan Pettay. Check out our AI reporting, the development process and what we enjoy when it comes to working with our partners.

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Paraform just announced our Series B, bringing total funding to $65M. Our round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Felicis, A* capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures. I joined Paraform after years of building labor marketplaces – first at Instawork matching hourly workers to shifts, then at Roo matching veterinarians to hospitals. Every marketplace I've worked on has the same core challenge: how do you match the right person to the right opportunity? Sounds easy in theory, but hard in practice... especially when it comes to hiring. That's because most hiring managers can't articulate their ACTUAL requirements, so it's our job to infer what they need from their actions. On the candidate side, it's just as difficult. To deliver on hiring managers' abstract requirements, we need to deeply understand candidates and the recruiters they work with. But that's what makes Paraform special: by managing the end-to-end hiring journey, we can understand our users – hiring managers, candidates, and recruiters – better than anyone. And that's why we're better than anyone at actually delivering on outcomes. 1,500+ hires in 2025 alone. Each one makes the next match faster and more accurate. We're building what I believe is the richest hiring dataset ever collected: real hiring outcomes, candidate preferences, recruiter skills, and hiring manager nuances. And we're just getting started. We're looking to aggressively grow across EPD – check the comments or DM me for more details!

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FurtherAI raised $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz i joined as the first hire when we had no product, just conviction. we envisioned AI agents that could truly understand insurance - learning from every interaction and getting smarter within the platforms where real work happens. the journey hasn't been linear. we started automating submission intake - extracting key details from broker emails and PDFs, running eligibility checks 30x faster. policy comparisons with state-of-the-art accuracy. the feedback loop was intense: ship fast, learn faster, iterate relentlessly. customers loved the speed, but speed without simplicity is chaos. so we went back to first principles. every UI decision, every feature — distilled down to its essence. because complexity kills adoption. in a space moving this fast, momentum is the MOAT. while others debate AI's potential, we're shipping irreversible value. we're not just digitizing legacy systems - we're redefining how an entire industry works. this is just the beginning 🚀 cc: Nexus Venture Partners , South Park Commons, Y Combinator Converge VC, Pioneer Fund and others!

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One of the most useful mental models I’ve learned as a founder is what Astro Teller calls the “Monkey and the Pedestal.” Imagine you want to impress people by having a monkey juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal. There are two parts to the project: 1. Train the monkey 2. Build the pedestal Building a pedestal is a solved problem. Training the monkey is not. Most people start with the pedestal. The lesson? Don’t. In startups, it’s tempting to work on the known, visible parts (product interfaces, slides, branding) because it feels like progress. But the real question is: can we actually train the monkey? After nearly a decade in financial services, I’ve learned the hardest part isn’t the pedestal of dashboards, workflows, or even AI automations. It’s proving we can win our clients’ trust by solving their problems scalably, accurately, and auditably. Once you do that, the pedestal is easy. The startup path is full of pedestals. The discipline (and courage) is choosing to focus on the monkey instead. Tackle the monkey first.

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We didn't set out to build a blog product. When Ali Yazdi and I relaunched a2 analytics, LLC 16 months ago as an #AI content company, we had one focus: helping national service brands tell local stories at scale through content that actually drives growth. That led us to our #programmatic geo pages product. Pages grounded in first-party data, local reviews, real pricing data, and third-party insights like weather. Pages with unique, compelling content that deserved to rank. That product works. We're proud of it. But sometime in the second half of last year, a pattern kept showing up in partner conversations. Ali started sketching a new idea over the summer. At the same time, I kept thinking back to my own experience running revenue for a large review site. Even with strong teams and real resources, content creation always hit the same wall. Great content requires a village: writers, editors, #SEO, engineering, legal, brand, design. And even with all of that, teams eventually had to choose: Do we create new content, or maintain what's already working? Both matter. There are just real trade-offs at scale. Over time, content can become Frankenstein's monster. Layers of edits from different eras, different owners, and different priorities. The maintenance cost adds up. So does the opportunity cost. We heard the same frustration from partners. And we saw agencies producing flat blog #content that didn't perform, didn't refresh, and didn't reflect the quality of the brand behind it. The real push came in Q4 last year. A partner came to us needing +15,000 pages of content. A full site build from scratch, including over 300 pieces of blog content alongside a large programmatic rollout. The scope was real. Doing it the traditional way wasn't going to work. Ali had a vision: not AI that writes content, but an AI product that orchestrates content creation. #AIAgents designed to play the roles of the village. Working together and improving over time. We built. We tinkered. We had a break through. That product is called Forge. Forge is custom to each partner: voice, #design, elements, structure. It blends your team’s unique insight with AI workflows so teams can ship faster without lowering the bar. Content that improves over time, not content that decays. It's already powering expanded programs with a few early partners, and we're taking it live with several new teams this quarter. The product will continue to improve, and the early results are encouraging. The internet doesn't need more content. It needs better content. We're trying to help with that.

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