Anvisha Pai

Y Combinator just dropped their Request for Startups for Fall 2025 💥 It’s a blueprint of what YC wants to fund right now. The ideas they believe could become billion dollar companies. Some are no-brainers. Others are wild 👇

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🚨 Founders: If you're not exploring cross-industry alliances, you're playing the wrong game. Some of the biggest breakout companies didn’t scale by outspending the competition they scaled by out-partnering them. 🚀 Think Figma embedding into dev workflows. 🚀 Calendly riding the rails of Zoom and Salesforce. 🚀 Zapier integrating with Trello and Slack before raising big money. 💡 The playbook? Fuse your solution with another industry's infrastructure and unlock distribution, data, or demand without burning capital. Cross-industry alliances do 3 things: 1. Collapse time by borrowing someone else’s audience. 2. Unlock non-obvious use cases that give you strategic moats. 3. Increase your valuation before the first funding conversation. If you're a startup founder and you’re stuck thinking, “We need capital to grow,” you’re asking the wrong question. Ask instead: 👉 “Who’s already serving my customer in a different way and how do we win together?” That’s how exponential growth actually happens. 💬 Founders: Which alliance would double your reach in 90 days? #Startups #GrowthStrategy #VC #EarlyStage #FounderTips #Platform #AI

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The single most valuable thing I learned at YC has nothing to do with fundraising, product-market fit, or growth hacking. It's a skill that 90% of founders are terrible at. When you walk into a YC partner meeting, they ask one thing: what does your company do? And then they rip your answer apart. "Simpler." "I still don't get it." "Pretend I'm your mom. Try again." I remember pitching my YC startup with some convoluted explanation about workflow automation and AI-powered insights. I thought it sounded smart. A YC partner looked at me and said, "I have no idea what you just said." Their entire program is obsessed with one principle: if you can't explain what you do in one sentence, you don't understand it well enough yourself. That lesson stuck with me. And when I started Mesa with my co-founder Oliver, I applied it from day one. Every product description, every sales call, every investor update — I ask myself: can I make this simpler? The answer is almost always yes. It took us months to compress our value prop into one line any engineer gets in five seconds: GitHub was built for humans writing code. AI agents write most of the code now. Mesa is the platform built for that world. That sentence is worth more than any pitch deck we've ever built. If you can't explain your company to a stranger in under 10 seconds, that's not a marketing problem. That's a clarity-of-thinking problem. Fix the thinking. The words follow.

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One of the better things about the generative AI hype cycle are all the new voice AI startups that are forming. We do need better ambient computing.

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People need to stop thinking that getting into YC is some kind of finish line. It’s not. It’s the starting point. You leave Demo Day with momentum, not success. You get a head start, but only if you sprint immediately. And most founders don’t. They slow down. Get distracted. Start hiring too much. Instead of doing the only thing that actually moves the needle: Getting more customers. Every good thing that’s happened to us post-YC came from that one mindset shift: We stopped optimizing for investors. We optimized for revenue. That means: • No time wasted prepping pitch decks. • No vanity features or roadmap filler. • No spending sprees just because there’s cash in the bank. Just relentless execution, daily revenue growth, and a simple rule: Make customers love us. Triple revenue every quarter. Repeat. The real work starts after YC.

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YC’s best advice is “default alive” - have enough cash to survive without the next raise. Great advice… nobody f*cking does it. Paul Graham (the founder of YC) once said he’d raise $500K, get ramen profitable, and probably never raise again. The guy who’s seen more VC deployed than ANY human alive basically says he wouldn’t use it more than he absolutely has to. But the reason no one listens to this advice is because founders are delusional about their own companies. We think what we have is better than what it actually is, and we can’t help ourselves. Our startups are our babies. We have a totally unrealistic and out-of-touch view of them. It’s way too easy when you have a little bit of traction to go out there and raise way too much money. Then you’re set on a path to burn forever. “Default alive” is a great concept. Maybe 1/100 YC companies actually do this. YC knows it, and they fund them anyway.

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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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This is very true. The valuation trap is real. But I don’t think this is a YC story. It’s a market story. We’re seeing the exact same thing here in Israel. Seed rounds at 30–40M for companies with no product, no real validation, sometimes barely a prototype. Not second-time founders. First-timers. I’ve personally seen more than 20 rounds like this just last year. This isn’t about YC “pushing” companies. The system as a whole hasn’t adapted. The cost of building collapsed. The speed of iteration exploded. But pricing logic stayed anchored in 2021. When capital doesn’t recalibrate to reality, it doesn’t just create paper risk. It creates structural fragility. Good companies get boxed into impossible expectations. They are forced to grow into valuations instead of growing into product-market fit. That’s how promising businesses die early. The tragedy isn’t overvaluation. The tragedy is killing companies that could have become durable, profitable, meaningful businesses. This isn’t a YC issue. It’s a venture industry inertia issue. And the longer it takes to adjust, the more collateral damage we’ll keep seeing.

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Omada Health popped 21% on its Nasdaq debut. Another strong listing after Tempus AI and Hinge Health. But this one feels different. Omada isn’t new. They started in 2011, built through the troughs, and stuck to a space most digital health startups avoided: chronic condition management. Diabetes, hypertension, obesity, behavioral health. Not just coaching or content. Omada was one of the first CDC-recognized digital DPPs. They ran real clinical studies. Got payer coverage. Signed value-based contracts before it was fashionable. Some context: - 1M+ participants across 1,900+ employers and plans - 25+ peer-reviewed papers backing outcomes - Contracts with CMS, Cigna, BCBS, and others They took the long road. No COVID surge story. No AI wrapper. Just steady, operationally hard, tech-enabled care with real economics. The market is rewarding businesses with distribution, reimbursement, and proof that outcomes translate to margin. Feels like healthtech is finally graduating from growth-at-all-costs to unit economics + clinical validation. If that’s the new benchmark, a lot of companies will have to rewrite their S-1s. Which digital health player do you think could clear this new bar? #digitalhealth #healthtech #ipo #chroniccare #valuebasedcare

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YC-Market Fit Everyone loves to talk about product market fit, especially YC founders. They rush to show quick jumps in revenue, get internal YC hype, and call it PMF. In most cases, it is only an illusion. The YC network is powerful. Hundreds of alumni buy from each other, promote each other’s products, and sometimes even acquire one another. This creates a loop of fake traction. A few big logos, a short burst of usage, and some friendly contracts do not mean you have truly solved a market problem. Real product market fit is not about early growth spikes. It is about fixing a pain so deep that users keep coming back, even when the hype is gone. Most YC startups still announce PMF after only a few weeks because it helps with fundraising and visibility. Investors love it, founders feel validated, and everyone claps. Meanwhile churn is ignored, retention is weak, and true product obsession is missing. PMF was never meant to be a marketing slogan. It should be a signal from users, not a headline in a pitch deck. Ask yourself: if you stopped pushing your product today, would users even notice? Would they beg you to return? If the answer is no, you might have YC market fit, not product market fit. 🤔

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