Tom Blomfield

Partner at @ycombinator

Cofounded @gocardless and @monzo

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[Adi Oltean @AdiOltean]

Yes, Starcloud-1 runs DOOM on its H100.

Hardest part of running DOOM in orbit wasn't radiation, thermals, or bandwidth. It was resisting the urge to do this on day one.

[Ed Elson @edels0n]

0.3% of the water consumed by US golf courses last year

[Rahul Sidhu @rahul]

Awesome takedown video. Suspects assault and rob the victims, and then @SFPD uses @Flock_Safety ALPR + drones to locate and arrest them.

This tech is helping thousands of agencies, every day, keep Americans safe.

[Pierre-Eliott Lallemant @pierreeliottlal]

We went from 0 to 2,200 paying customers in under a year by following @ycombinator's 15 rules:

1/ Do things that don't scale. Get your first 10 customers by hand.

2/ Launch now, not when it's "ready". A mediocre product in front of real users teaches you more in a week than 6 months of polishing in the dark.

3/ Charge from day one. If nobody will pay, you don't have a startup, you have a hobby.

4/ Talk to users every single day. The roadmap you need is sitting in your customers' heads, and they'll hand it to you for free

5/ Always hunt the 90/10 solution. For almost any feature there's a way to capture 90% of the value with 10% of the effort.

6/ There are only two real jobs: write code and talk to users. Everything else (conferences, press, VC coffees, corp dev calls) is fake work.

7/ You pick your customers as much as they pick you. 10 users who love you beat 1,000 who kind of like you.

8/ Growth is an output, not a strategy. Grow before product market fit and all you're buying is churn.

9/ Do less, really well. Pick one or two metrics and judge every task against them.

10/ Know if you're default alive. Paul Graham's question: on current growth and current burn, do you reach profitability before the money runs out?

11/ Don't hire until it hurts. Headcount is not progress, it's burn. Every great startup was embarrassingly small for embarrassingly long.

12/ Momentum is the only real moat in year one. Ship something every week, even something tiny.

13/ Every great startup is badly broken at some point. The game isn't avoiding fires, it's how fast you put them out. Again. And again

14/ Ignore your competitors. Startups die of suicide, not murder. In year one, the only company that can kill yours is your own

15/ Startups rarely die from running out of money. They die because the founders fall out. Brutal honesty with your cofounder is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy

Good luck !

[Tyler Bosmeny @bosmeny]

I once had to kick a founder out of YC for lying. Thankfully we caught them before the batch started.

Today I found out they're running a European startup accelerator 🤷‍♂️

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

@ycombinator @sdianahu Diana is one of the driving forces behind YC. Huge congratulations!

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

We're excited to announce Diana Hu (@sdianahu) as YC's newest Managing Partner.

Diana co-founded Escher Reality (YC S17), which was acquired by Niantic, where she shipped AR to the 100M+ people playing Pokémon GO. Since returning to YC as a partner, she has worked with nearly 230 companies that are now worth a combined $7 billion.

Few people have built a startup from zero and also shipped at global scale. Diana has done both.

https://t.co/paonIsrK0F

[Pierre-Eliott Lallemant @pierreeliottlal]

Demo Day is in 8 days at @ycombinator.

Quick recap of what happened since we joined YC:

- grew from $800k to $2.8M+ ARR

- went from 700 to 2,100+ customers

- stayed profitable since day one while scaling rapidly

- launched our AI GTM Operator, which runs outbound for you and continuously learns from what works

- 700+ teams with 3+ members now use Gojiberry AI agents every day

- a 7-person team at an $85B company is using Gojiberry to run outbound at a scale that would traditionally
require a much larger organization

- some customers are booking 10+ demos per week on autopilot

- grew the team from 3 to 9 people

- received 100+ inbound messages from investors

- developed a much clearer vision for building a billion-dollar company and a far better understanding of what it takes to get there

And it still feels like we're only at the beginning.

Right now, we're fully focused on product, growth, and our customers.

We're excited to share what we've been buildin,and what's coming next for Gojiberry.

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

https://t.co/5vehaK3SHl

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

I'm excited to be back in Paris on June 29th for @ycombinator Startup School.

We'll be joined by the founders of some incredible companies; PostHog, Datadog, Supabase, AMI, and more.

Link in thread to apply for a ticket.

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

The next blockbuster movie is going to be made by a single person using @YouArtStudio

[Yahia Bakour @mynameisyahia]

1/ The greatest thing about YC is that it starts the moment you get in.

Within minutes of getting the acceptance phone call, you get access to an insane amount of resources...

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

@wkoszek @jc3737 I’m in California. It doesn’t rain here.

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

I just bought a Tesla Model Y

Full Self Driving is one of the most impressive pieces of technology I’ve ever experienced.

I now wish I’d got it a year ago.

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

@wkoszek “Actually Smart Summon” in a parking lot.

I’ve not tried it yet.

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

It just drove from the Tesla dealership in San Francisco down to Palo Alto on the freeway and reversed into a supercharger parking lot, then back up to SF an hour later.

I didn’t touch the wheel a single time.

Unbelievable.

[Isaiah Granet @zaygranet]

I've had about as many horror stories as anyone else. One thing I will say, for everything you hear, YC is probably the best investor to have on your cap table at Seed.

[Edward Ma @edmakethings]

How we reached $1M ARR in our first month of YC and kept growing 25% MoM

As a video agent built around the fan economy, distribution is part of the product itself.

The output of YouArt is not just a video. It is an artifact that can travel across social media and private creator communities. The product creates artifacts that travel.

Creator makes videos with YouArt →
Post on Instagram or send to their private channel →
Audience reacts to the content →
More creators ask how it was made →
They try YouArt →
They create more content →
The loop compounds.

Build products that distribute themselves through what users create.

Pic: Great exchanging ideas with @chasingjohnnn , co-founder of Light Anchor (YC P26).

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

@OfAryaVahedi @awxjack Because I had 2000 people replying on me to pay their salaries.