Rick Song

YC encourages startups to do things that don’t scale at first - because it forces founders to learn what users actually want before wasting months building complex systems. Doing things manually is the fastest way to validate demand, fix the product, and avoid scaling the wrong thing. Instacart and DoorDash used this approach early on by personally onboarding users and doing manual deliveries. Once you know that people truly want what you offer, you can always automate and scale. If you optimize for scale too early, you often end up with a product that might never take off. #neurobay #founders #scaling #startupfunding #Instacart #DoorDash #YC 

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Plaid is built to make it easier for businesses to build and scale financial products that people trust. That trust starts with knowing who you’re working with. As Plaid helps platforms onboard and support millions of businesses, verifying business identity accurately and efficiently is foundational. That’s why Plaid partners with Middesk to automate business verification during onboarding — confirming core business details, reducing manual review, and helping teams make confident risk decisions without slowing down the customer experience. Together, we help Plaid deliver faster onboarding, stronger compliance, and a more durable foundation for growth across the financial ecosystem they power. We’re proud to support Plaid as they help teams move fast while maintaining trust at scale. #KYB #KYC #AML #BEV #businessverification #financialservices #onboarding #compliance #smallbusiness #SMBs

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New!! "The Bay Area Has 54% of All SaaS Funding. Everyone Else Isn’t Even Close" Based on Carta’s latest startup funding data (Q2 2024-Q1 2025), here are the Top 5 SaaS Learnings that every founder needs to know: #1: The Bay Area Still Owns B2B and SaaS (And It’s Not Even Close) The Bay Area dominates SaaS funding with 54.2% of all capital — that’s more than 5x the next... Continue Reading

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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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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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ESOPs are a retention tool that most startups design too loosely at the start. Vesting schedules, cliff periods, exercise prices, pool size relative to the cap table each of these decisions has downstream implications for hiring, fundraising, and eventual exits. Founders who build their ESOP policy before they need it rarely have to undo a bad one mid-round. The best time to get the structure right is before the first grant goes out. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gKcsbPNM #ESOPStructuring #StartupEquity #EmployeeStock #AbhijithPremanAndCo #APCALLP

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