Young founders often treat fundraising like a test they need to pass. It’s not. It’s just a tool.
Sometimes the fear of failing is what you actually need to sharpen your insight into what customers want. That's the only test that matters.

what if AI actually creates more jobs?
Y Combinator: Rentahuman (@RentAHumanX) allows AI agents to communicate with and pay humans to do tasks in the real world. Their mission is to use AI to create new jobs and coordinate workers at global scale.
The future will have more intelligence, more jobs, and more opportunities for people

Jevons paradox playing out in real time.
Cheaper technology is creating more demand and more jobs.
https://www.apollo.com/wealth/the-daily-spark/zero-evidence-of-ai-related-job-losses

Why is overall crime down in San Francisco, but homicides are up?
The answer starts with CA Supreme Court rulings that weakened pretrial detention, then runs through juvenile justice gaps and broken data systems that make the violence harder to stop.
https://garryslist.org/posts/why-is-overall-crime-down-but-homicide-up-in-san-francisco

Chronic debaters are lethal to new ideas for the same reason pessimists are. They sound smart because they’re good at finding flaws before anything has had a chance to work.

earthquakes have killed fewer housing units than the LA planning commission https://x.com/aaronAcarr/status/2060357221142212946
Aaron Carr: Tokyo is one of the most earthquake prone megacities on planet f-ing earth, but it still manages to build infinitely more housing than Los Angeles because earthquakes don’t ban housing — idiotic zoning laws do.

UC is competitive bc it historically had admissions standards for academic excellence.
In 2020 Regents destroyed this by making standardized testing optional (“equity”). Professors are now pushing back.
Terry fundamentally misunderstands causality here.
Dr Terry Simpson: UC is one of the most competitive university systems in the world.
Declaring it a failure because a group of math professors dislike an admissions policy isn’t scientific analysis.

I’m this addicted to @Replit right now
Lauren Frailey: get you a PM that vibe codes from the bathroom 🤙

The hard truth about race based admissions is it hurts the unprepared students at least as much as the unaccepted students.
Liz4SF: 🚨30% of Berkeley Calculus students are severely underprepared (half flunked), yet a whopping 321 Lowell students were rejected by Berkeley. Only 42 students (12%) were accepted from Lowell hs, while Mission hs had 45% acceptance rate (34 out of 76 applicants) @HarmeetKDhillon

Can't stop rewatching it 👀
Replit ⠕: The best design work doesn't happen in a chat box. You need space to explore ideas, create variants, and iterate
Meet the new Replit Canvas
Your agentic design tool to build beautiful websites, apps, marketing assets and more

Exxon Says We’re Two Weeks From Petrol Armageddon
Right. So it turns out closing the world’s most important oil chokepoint has consequences. Who knew.
Exxon’s Senior VP Neil Chapman stood up at a Bernstein conference this week and said what everyone in the industry is thinking but politely avoiding at dinner parties: global oil inventories are approaching “truly unprecedented” lows. His words. And when a Senior VP at Exxon starts using phrases like “truly unprecedented,” you should probably pay attention.
The IEA has already called Iran’s Strait of Hormuz blockade the largest oil supply disruption in recorded history. Over a billion barrels lost since late February. A billion. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a civilisational inconvenience.
Chapman’s estimate: Brent crude hits $150 to $160 per barrel once stockpiles reach critical levels. Two to three weeks away. Wood Mackenzie, never a firm known for cheerful forecasts, went further and suggested $200 by year-end if the strait stays shut. With a global recession as a bonus prize.
So there we have it. The world spent decades building an energy system with a single point of failure, handed Iran the keys to it, and is now surprised that the keys are being used.
Genius, really.
https://open.substack.com/pub/gandalv/p/your-grocery-bill-is-going-to-rise?r=3v7cjb&utm_medium=ios

Amjad Masad's first "business meeting" was getting caught hacking his own university:
Before he built anything, Amjad was stuck. He was five, almost six years into a degree that should have taken three or four, watching everyone around him move on.
"All my friends were graduating... And I feel like life is passing me by."
The drive was already there. It just had no outlet.
"I had all these big dreams and ambitions. I wanted to build companies, make a lot of money, all of that. But I was stuck."
The thing standing between him and graduation wasn't his ability. He passed his classes, and did well in math and computer science. It was an attendance rule. Miss too many classes in a row and you'd be disqualified. A bureaucratic problem, not an intellectual one.
So he treated it like an engineer, not a student:
"I thought, okay, I'm going to hack into the school and change my grades."
He spent two to three weeks in his parents' basement building the solution. Writing scripts, running network scans, probing the systems until he was in.
He didn't cover his tracks and disappear. He told the school he had something to show them, walked into a room full of deans, and pitched:
"I pulled out the whiteboard and explained all the different problems, all the systems they had and how I hacked into it and really pulled out all the stops and all the charisma to kind of try to impress them. And they were really impressed."
That's the move. He turned a liability into a demonstration. The deans had stayed up all night trying to figure out what went wrong, and here was the one person who could explain it, selling them on his competence in the process.
He almost overplayed it, assuming the presentation alone had settled things and reaching for the door:
"Wait, where are you going? We've got to deal with you. You just hacked into the school. We can't let you go."
What turned it around was a decision-maker who could tell the difference between a vandal and a builder. The university president didn't see a crime to punish; he saw talent to manage.
"You have a great talent, great power, but with power comes responsibility."
And then he made the offer that, in hindsight, looks a lot like @amasad first job:
"We're going to let you go, but you're going to have to spend the summer working for the university trying to fix the vulnerabilities and the security issues."
The business lesson is in that final trade. Amjad created value the wrong way then proved he could create it the right way, and got hired to do exactly that. The skill that broke the system became the skill that secured it.

What’s important now isn’t how long you’ve been doing the job. It’s how recently you changed the way you do it.

when someone comes to your door asking for your vote this year, ask them their views on ending exclusionary zoning.
if their answers are not firmly in support or they haven't thought about it much, don't vote for them.
don't let them trick you with platitudes about environmental justice or social rights. this issue is upstream of almost all other progressive priorities.
Jonathan Berk: "Rent control has not solved the housing problems in New York City, and it will not solve them in Massachusetts. The national pattern is clear. The way to bring down housing costs is to increase housing supply."
- @nytimes Editorial Board
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/opinion/affordable-housing-lot-size-ballot-initiative.html

Re I'm MAGA's twisted sense of reality and morality, a scientist who developed treatments and vaccines that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives (without getting rich from it) should be sent to Gitmo.
"In addition to continuing work on vaccines already in clinical trials for hookworm as of 2010 and schistosomiasis, Hotez led a team of researchers developing vaccines against other diseases including leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, SARS, and MERS, As of 2020, he was also working in development of a Coronavirus vaccine. With Maria Elena Bottazzi, he led the team that designed COVID-19 vaccine named Corbevax."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hotez

Josh Pigford sold his last startup for $4M.
Now he's building 5 products solo with AI agents. @Shpigford showed me:
→ His 3-phase build skill that turns one idea into shipped features
→ How he pairs Opus and GPT-5.5 for adversarial code reviews
→ His "but for real" skill (sneak peek below) that forces AI to catch its own bugs
You won't want to miss this one :)
📌 Subscribe to get our full interview tmr: https://www.youtube.com/@PeterYangYT?sub_confirmation=1

Bill Gurley: Anthropic Thinks It’s Building God
@Jason: It is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.
@bgurley:
“Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never, ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do.
And my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory. Quite frankly, I think they're very close to achieving that.
But then they just got so loud that I've literally, in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory.
I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory.
The more I dig, I've met people who, I dare say, think it's their responsibility, and they're excited about, building a species that's superior to humans.
Dario wrote this blog post called ‘Machines of Loving Grace.’ It was based on a poem.
The last stanza of the poem says, ‘I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors, and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.’
Sounds like an overlord to me.
And then in Dario's post, he says, ‘It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans…’
So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.”
Jason:
“These are delusions of grandeur. Let's call it what it is.
They believe that they're so powerful, these individuals, that they can create God, and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species.
It literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.”

There are probably ~120000 ppl in SF whose primary income is supported by tax receipts (excluding pure welfare benefits recipients)
If you assume that households which contain one such person vote in their economic interests, the “graft bloc” may be half of SF municipal ballots

In my Harvard fellowship I study the views of AI accelerationists, safetyists and skeptics.
What I have come to realize is that both the Accelerationists and the Safetyists believe that we are creating an AI God.
The difference is that Accelerationists believe that it is the god of the New testament.
A god of loving kindness.
The Safetyists believe that it is the god of the Old testament.
The jealous one who told Abraham to kill his son, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and killed everybody in the flood.
The Skeptics think it's just a damn toaster with more knobs.
The All-In Podcast: Bill Gurley: Anthropic Thinks It’s Building God
@Jason: It is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.
@bgurley:
“Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never, ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most

This is HOW Hermes Agent Self-learning LOOP works:
Useful workflow → Agent skill
Experience → Gbrain page
Important decision → searchable memory
Repeated loop → automation
Then Hermes curator cleans the stale skills so the loop keeps compounding.

Two years ago Seattle Public Schools shut down its advanced program bc it didn’t like that Asians did well in it.
i/o: The black-white achievement gap is over 4 grade levels in Seattle Public Schools.
Seattle Public Schools official:

We're don't fit the stereotype for what YC founders are supposed to look like at Andi.
No ivy league creds. No ex-Google or Amazon. Wrong demographics.
(None of that matters to YC btw)
But we were lucky to have help from Alumni with feedback and review when we applied.
And we try hard to pay it forward and help as many other founders as we can.
YC accepts late applications. You can still apply.
http://ycombinator.com/apply
Andi: Andi helped 654 startups with YC Application reviews in the last 30 days. We helped 72 with personal Alumni feedback. And we recommended 17 to YC.
http://yc-advisor.andiai.com

Imagine replacing 90% of your employees with a team of geniuses who have no idea how your company operates.
Total chaos. Nothing works.
That’s what AI feels like today.
The missing piece is extracting all the domain knowledge from people’s heads and providing that as structured context to the models.

Got your ballot. Got 47 mailers. Got candidates acting like they know you.
They don’t.
“I Don’t Know You Like That” by GL Studios.
Use Garry’s Guide before you vote June 2nd. And don't forget to also vote in our Civic Impact Awards!

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

This recent @latentspacepod pod was a good one (they usually all are).
One specific piece resonated: They were talking about AI agents writing code, and the line was basically that without caution / diligence, your codebase can regress to your worst engineer.
Bad AI-generated code does not just create a one-time cleanup problem. Once it gets into the repo, it becomes part of the context for the next change. The agent sees the bad pattern, assumes it is part of how the system works, and then builds on top of it.
So if you let bad architecture, bad code, or code slop leak into your repo, you are not just making the codebase messier. You are changing the inputs that guide future agent decisions.
This is the failure mode I worry about with coding agents - particularly on larger teams. I get a ton of value out of coding agents, but you need real mechanisms in place to keep them from amplifying the worst parts of your system.
Some of that is technical. You need a system around the agents: better planning, review steps, adversarial agents, fresh-context reviews, tests, checks, and small changes that limit the blast radius. Basically, a team-aligned process around compound engineering.
But that is not enough by itself. You also need experienced people at the wheel.
Especially on a broad team where lots of people have access to these tools, someone still needs to read the code. Someone needs to understand the architecture. Someone needs to know when a change is technically working but pulling the system in the wrong direction.
Bad code in the repo becomes precedent. And once it becomes precedent, the agent can keep building on it until the codebase no longer accurately reflects what you are trying to build - and is hard to move forward, with or without AI agents.
Latent.Space: 🆕The Age of Async Agents: Devin’s 7x PR growth, 80% AI commits, background agents, memory, testing, & Open-Inspect https://www.latent.space/p/cognition
@cognition cofounder + CPO @walden_yan and Open-Inspect creator @_colemurray explain why engineering is moving from local IDEs to cloud