Fady

Founding GTM @Topo - (YC W24).
sourced & closed from 0 to 1.5m ARR.
tokenmaxxer?

[Harj Taggar @harjtaggar]

The best hires are the ones you can delegate outcomes to, not tasks. Good hires come back with smart questions about the next step. Great ones just get the job done.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The real AI whitepill is: There will always be a market for translating what the 200 IQ people and agents make down to everyone else

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

Counterintuitively, I see some startups obsessing *too much* over their first customer.

Big enterprise customer ghosting you? Maybe they’re just not a good fit. Go get 10 more.

Top-of-funnel solves most problems.

[Fady @fadyben]

@justineliaa Entreprise outbound “not working” is something I only hear from those that are bad at it, 95% of people, not just you. No real intent, no gap selling, then blamed the channel. (Way easier ofc)

The ones who cracked it aren’t writing about it on X. Too much pipeline to close.

[Manny Medina @medinism]

My biggest regret as founder of Outreach: I stopped trying to kill the competition.

Early on, I had no choice.

We raised 2M. Yesware had raised 30M. ToutApp had raised 60M. It was either they lived and we died. Or the other way around.

So we out-innovated them. And it worked.

But then I got talked into getting soft.

"Focus on your own race."
"There will be many winners."
"They can own X, you can own Y."
"Focus on employee engagement and Glassdoor reviews."
"Focus on brand and culture."

That was all bullshit.

Your job as a VC-backed founder is to win. And to win big. Full stop.

You need to be a multi-x returner to your VCs. They hired you to do that job. If you split the market, the most likely exit is a PE acquisition. Not great for your VCs, not great for you. That’s how you get fired.

Killing your competition IS your job description. If you're not up for it, don't be a founder.

Let's be real. We all want to create monopolies. No one actually wants to compete.

The founders who pulled it off had incredible runs. Made fortunes for themselves and their investors. They got disrupted eventually. But while they held the monopoly, it was untouchable.

Here's how they did it:

1- Acquire your competition

DiscoverOrg bought its two biggest rivals (ZoomInfo and RainKing) and became what is now ZoomInfo. They were the only contact data solution for almost a decade.

OneTrust bought every top player in trust and privacy. They reigned uncontested for 10 years.

2- Drown your competition

Salesforce was not the first CRM to move to the cloud and take on Siebel. But they outspent every other cloud CRM into irrelevance. Marketing. Advertising. Feet on the street. By the time competitors looked up, Benioff was on CNBC and no one had heard of Act or Goldmine.

3- Have dumb competitors

ServiceNow was the first ITSM to move to the cloud. The incumbents (BMC and HP) just didn't follow. Who the fuck knows why. ServiceNow destroyed them.

The playbook after that is simple: become #1 and kill #2. Then watch for any challenger coming from the side. Especially ones with momentum. Copy their offering. Bundle it into your product. Suffocate them before they scale.

Apollo would not exist if Outreach had bundled data with workflows.
Gong would not exist if Outreach had bundled call recording.

Those are billion-dollar companies built in gaps I left open. Because I listened to people who told me to "stay in my lane."

I watched Apollo hit a $1.6B valuation selling data to my own customers. I have to live with that every day.

Founders who stick to their knitting end up splitting markets.

Founders who expand to conquer everything touching their business live on.

That's why Uber's market cap is 30x Lyft's. Uber was run by a maniacal visionary who would not stop at anything. I don't even remember who ran Lyft.

Do you?

Winners are expansive, aggressive, and they play to win.

That's the job.

[Fady @fadyben]

@Bouazizalex Calling it now, Browser agents for Bluecollar / Healthcare will surpass SaaS / MCP agents spend by H2 2027.

[Ryan Dahl @rough__sea]

This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.

[Fady @fadyben]

@pitdesi @PeterJ_Walker @cartainc In 2026, this doesn’t mean anything without the NRR.

[Fady @fadyben]

@TheGeorgePu This is wrong at so many levels.

The things to challenge first are the following :

A - the audience (and audience market fit)
B - Your messaging
C - What was the reason or contact

People will reply to you if the reason to contact is compelling.
Doesn't mean kill the product.

[Fady @fadyben]

@FounderKyle We've closed around $400k this year coming from LinkedIn posts (UTM).

I guess it depends on what you sell, and where that audience is.

[Fady @fadyben]

@rom1trs Congrats @rom1trs !

[Fady @fadyben]

@ycombinator @karumihq I'm the head of sales of a YC company, doing 7-10 demos, love the idea behind this, a bit skeptical to bounce rate of ICP leads that human can take, but would love to be proved wrong 6-months from now!

[Fady @fadyben]

@thechangj Worked João Freitas with @MezzoLab, they were great.

[Fady @fadyben]

@aaron_epstein Veeti Huotari from Skar(.)co

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Degrowth is just saying the citizens of the most needy countries should just stay impoverished

Degrowth is a death cult

[Fady @fadyben]

ASML may be the one true exception to this graph.
Non sero, si serio.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Today, we shared evals for an early version of the next model in our o-model reasoning series: OpenAI o3

[Fady @fadyben]

@rushabtated4 👋Interested Rushab !

[Fady @fadyben]

Proud to be a part of this adventure at @gopigment !

[Fady @fadyben]

@snowmaker I was struck by the number of companies in this batch doing a very similar thing (they are great, but curious how they will differentiate)

1. AI-powered-DD &
2. workflow automation and
3. Consumer AI

were the highlights of this batch for me.