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This Week at YC

February 27, 2023

🤐 The hard conversations founders don't want to have

While having honest and difficult conversations can be uncomfortable, they are essential to your growth as a founder. In this video, Dalton and Michael discuss why this kind of transparency is important, and share examples of hard conversations they have had with founders in the past.

 

📉 Why would you start a startup in an economic downturn?

In an economic downturn, there are obvious downsides of starting a startup — but there are also powerful upsides; because to survive, you have to actually build something people want.

 

🔥 Founder Fireside: Adam Elsesser - CEO of Penumbra

Few founders have managed to stay the CEO of their company, especially when it is publicly traded at a market cap of $10B. Adam tends to shy away from the spotlight, so we're happy that he's joining us to talk about how he got the company going, what drove him to stay in the CEO seat, and how to maintain a startup-like culture even when you have thousands of employees.

🚀 The Launchpad

Discover new YC companies and products

This week we had over 40 new startups launch from the Winter 2023 batch!

These companies are building across almost every sector, from entertainment to e-commerce to biotech — with many leveraging machine learning and generative AI to tackle difficult problems, such as robotic process automation and drug discovery & development. Meet them all below:

JustPaid.io

Spend confidently with smart financial tools
Mountain View, California

PoplarML

Deploy machine learning models with one command
San Francisco, California

GoodCourse

Tik-Tok style compliance training for modern teams
London, United Kingdom

Pigeon

Document collection made easy, organized and secure
New York, New York

Mercoa

The accounts payable & BillPay API for B2B fintechs
San Francisco, California

moonrepo

Developer productivity platform for managing monorepos at scale
Portland, Oregon

Escape

Secure your GraphQL APIs
San Francisco, California

TorMagnus Pharmaceuticals

Finding better treatments for Parkinson’s disease

OfOne

Automating order taking at fast food drive-thrus
Oakland, California

Chart

Lightning-fast ML inference in your own cloud
San Francisco, California

SpecCheck

Unifying how the optical industry does business
Los Angeles, California

Second

The second developer bot you've always wanted
San Francisco, California

Clad

Software to manage telecom subcontractors
New York, New York

Koywe

The on and off ramp for crypto in Latam
Santiago, Chile

Byterat

Data infra for battery R&D and production
San Francisco, California

Bluebirds

Resell to past customers who've switched jobs
San Francisco, California

Lavo Life Sciences

AI-accelerated quantum chemistry for rapid drug development

Onu

Turn scripts into production-ready internal tools
New York, New York

Blyss

SDK for privacy, built on homomorphic encryption
San Francisco, California

Booth AI

Easy product photography with Generative AI
San Francisco, California
Find more YC companies and discover new products

Fabra

Easily integrate with your customer's data warehouse
San Francisco, California

Salient

Outbound sales on autopilot
San Francisco, California

Buildt

AI powered conversational code search & full file codegen
San Francisco, California

coil

Cut fees & kill churn with seamless bank payments
San Francisco, California

Resend

Email API for developers
San Francisco, California

Mirrorful

Simple, open-source design system infrastructure
San Francisco, California

qoohoo

Monetize your audience across all platforms
San Francisco, California

Finni Health

Platform for autism care providers
San Francisco, California

Infisical

Open source secrets manager for developers
San Francisco, California

Trigger.dev

Developer-first open source Zapier alternative
San Francisco, California

Bujeti

Corporate cards and expense management platform for African businesses
Lagos, Nigeria

Noya

Wireframe to design & code in minutes
San Francisco, California

Lasso

Robotic process automation for Chrome using GPT3 and computer vision
San Francisco, California

Pierre

A new way to review code
San Francisco, California

Codeparrot

Automate API testing using production traffic
San Francisco, California

Truewind

AI-powered bookkeeping and finance software for startups
San Francisco, California

Twig

Global expense management for film & TV production companies
San Francisco, California

Helicone

Observability platform for GPT-3
San Francisco, California

Speedy

Democratizing marketing to SMBs
San Francisco, California

Miracle

Speed up clinical trials by using AI
San Francisco, California
Find more YC companies and discover new products

🌎 YC Community

Highlights from our founders in the news
Relativity Space sets March launch date for Terran 1
TechCrunch
How one Brazilian startup’s pivot to corporate cards has paid off
Vanity Fair

🔥 Hacker News

Top posts from this week
  1. The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are (theatlantic.com)
  2. The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (csail.mit.edu)
  3. My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account (jeffgeerling.com)
  4. The beginner's guide to over­complicating coffee (tylercipriani.com)
  5. Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge (wired.com)
  6. Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel (2016) (gkbrk.com)
  7. Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub (medium.com/@shiloholotu)
  8. Software 2.0 (2017) (karpathy.medium.com)
  9. World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back (bloomberg.com)
  10. Let's build a Chrome extension that steals as much data as possible (mattfrisbie.substack.com)
Read more on Hacker News

💸 Money Moves

The latest raises and rounds from YC companies
Finch (YC S20)
$40M Series B
San Francisco, California

TechCrunch: Finch lands $40M to connect disparate HR systems with a single API
Replicate (YC W20)
$12.5M Series A
Berkeley, California

TechCrunch: Replicate wants to take the pain out of running and hosting ML models
Quell (YC S20)
$10M Series A
London, United Kingdom

TechCrunch: Quell’s gamified home fitness tech drums up $10M
Svix (YC W21)
Undisclosed
San Francisco, California

Svix: Fixing webhooks with new funding from Andreessen Horowitz
WorkPay (YC W20)
$2.75M pre-Series A
Nairobi, Kenya

TechCrunch YC-backed HR-payroll provider Workpay raises $2.7M to scale in Africa
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