Jason Gray

Founder and Managing General Partner @Pioneer_Fund; Alumni @ycombinator

[Jared Friedman @snowmaker]

If you want to find a truly impactful idea, a good place to look is in the trash bin of history.

Most of the ideas that have most broken out in the last 5 years aren't new. They're old ideas that got written off too early.

examples:
1) AI: When Sam started OpenAI, saying "AGI" got you laughed at
2) Space: Elon started SpaceX after people had written off the 1960s-era dreams as sci-fi
3) Supersonic flight: Blake started Boom after everyone assumed Concorde already proved it couldn't work
4) Nuclear energy: fission and fusion are roaring back decades after ambitious people stopped studying nuclear physics
5) GLP-1's: After the fen-phen disaster, weight loss drugs were synonymous with snake oil.

There's a good reason this keeps happening. When a hyped idea fails, there's a backlash. It becomes embarrassing to work on - anyone still working on it is assumed too dumb to know better.

So, if you want to work on something like this, you have to teach yourself to feel the tinge of that embarrassment and push past it.

[Harley Finkelstein @harleyf]

You don’t have to love Elon Musk to recognize what this headline says about us.

A country that spends more time criticizing wealth creation than encouraging it sends a clear message to builders: your success is tolerated, not celebrated.

Canada should be the best place in the world to build ambitious companies. Headlines like this make us look like we’re not quite ready for that.

[Diana @sdianahu]

I'm deeply grateful and honored

YC has changed my life twice: first as a founder, and now as someone who gets to back and support ambitious talent that's unproven

feel lucky to do this work, and even luckier to do it with people I admire so much

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Legalize standardized testing

Legalize merit

[Jason Gray @jasondgray]

“This is also why the "YC is just a brand" critique misses the point entirely. Brands are marketing. Witness is epistemological. YC doesn't convince founders they're smart. It confirms they're seeing reality clearly when nobody else around them can.”

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

https://t.co/cRwIIexCa9

[Oleg Zaremba @olzare]

On call with Pioneer Fund today one of the partners said we strive for "excited curiosity".

I find this phrase almost perfect - it is unmistakably positive but also humble and supportive.

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

Once you have this, AI will seem magical

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Co-sign.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Founders who are the realest actually do this

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Make Canada too business friendly to ignore. Especially for our own most capable.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Oh Canada, don't call it a comeback!

Thanks for your feedback. 🍁

[Yana Welinder @yanabana]

Had a call with a UX researcher who shared this ❤️

How's your Friday going?

[Jason Gray @jasondgray]

@taro_f @HarryStebbings @pioneer_fund @TimSuzman Thanks! We’ve probably been too quiet about the fund our community of 400+ @ycombinator alumni has built. We’d love to share the story with @HarryStebbings

[Michael Seibel @mwseibel]

YC Startup School East in Boston on April 20 - deadline to sign up is April 12 - apply to attend here: https://t.co/tWHT93IUbR

[Dilan Dane - e/❤️ @dilan]

The truth, I believe, is that YC today, 16 years later and >10x bigger, is, in fact, a BETTER experience than ever before.

This is an incredible testament to YC's mission, culture, and everyone at YC.

Here are some of my top observations.

[PeerDB (YC S23) @PeerDBInc]

Today, we are excited to announce our seed funding round of $3.6M, led by @8vc and includes @ycombinator , @WayfinderVC, @WINFunding , @flexcapital, @roguecapital, @pioneer_fund, @orangecollectv, and several angel investors. https://t.co/LPU39vt8Ll

We extend our gratitude to all our investors, customers, and well-wishers for believing in our vision of becoming the de facto standard for data movement and ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) for Postgres. We want to make it effortless for Postgres users to move data in and out of Postgres to implement any use case they desire.

[Jason Gray @jasondgray]

@sweatystartup @SigmaOS helps with this.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

@TimSuzman @pioneer_fund Champs

[Tim Suzman @TimSuzman]

Huge congratulations to @pioneer_fund company @pelagohealth on the $58M Series C!

From TechCrunch (link in reply):

- "Since its Series B, Pelago has experienced an impressive 11x revenue surge."

- 100% client retention

- "Users are five times more likely to quit smoking in one year with the Pelago platform than other programs."

Really incredible to see. And I love knowing that every time they grow, they're helping people get healthier.

[Unify @letsunifyai]

Very excited to release our Model Hub https://t.co/R9uT6ZL1cw 😍 - a collection of LLM endpoints with live runtime benchmarks all plotted across time 📈

We currently have 21 models provided by: @anyscalecompute, @perplexity_ai, @replicate, @togethercompute, @octoml, @MistralAI and @OpenAI, with many more on the roadmap.

We test across different regions (Asia, US, Europe), with varied concurrency and sequence length. By plotting across time, our dashboard highlights the stability and variability of the different endpoints, and their ongoing evolution across API updates and system changes. Our benchmarking code is open source: https://t.co/USvGcNt5br

Following the great work from @withmartian last week, we mention several new findings in the thread below, focusing on llama-2-70b-chat and mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v0.1 ⬇️

Our unified API also makes it very easy to test and deploy these different endpoints in production, without needing to create several accounts 🔑

Our Hub is a work in progress, and we will be releasing new features every week 🚀

We are granting everyone $5 starting credits with a free top up of $2.50 every week, compatible with all major LLM providers (more coming soon!).

You can sign up here https://t.co/nVYkpvck4W. Please tell us what you think, and we’ll quickly incorporate feedback into the next weekly release! 😊

As always - let’s unify AI! 🟢💪