Pete Koomen

GP @ycombinator, cofounded @optimizely

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Tenet Industries (@industriestenet) is building low-cost, mass-producible defense systems, starting with strike drones.

Defense primes are still building Bugattis and Ferraris. Tenet is building the F-150 for defense.

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

@MattewPhillips @usemoss In person only I’m afraid

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

Come build agents that can finally hold a fluid conversation at the 24-Hour Conversational AI Hackathon, hosted by @usemoss at the YC Office, June 6-7. First place wins an interview with a YC partner: https://t.co/T9md5yyoF4

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Everyone's bottleneck in voice AI is the same: retrieval. The agent thinks, network round-trips to a vector DB, and the magic dies.

Moss runs search at sub-10ms (no hop). Open source. This is the layer voice agents were missing. Build on it June 6-7 at the YC office.

[Jared Friedman @snowmaker]

One night I quietly gave our AI agent full access to YC's production database. It made the agent 10x more useful. That's what convinced me that trust-by-default is the only way to get the most out of agents.

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

Napkin math is the first food tracker I actually like using

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

What’s messing up your tummy? Napkin Math (https://t.co/Y4moEMPw89) knows.

Napkin Math is the hyper-personalized AI food journal that helps people achieve their health goals.

Congrats on the launch, @jynniit, @clairen19 & @manny4c!

https://t.co/ToyIGHGljP

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

For more than a year we've been building tools at YC to make it easier to use agents at work. I enjoyed speaking publicly about this for the first time with the Lightcone crew!

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Over the past year, we've been building our own internal agent infrastructure at YC: over 350 tools, self-improving skill loops, and a shared organizational brain that gets smarter overnight.

In this episode of the @LightconePod, we sat down with YC General Partner Pete @koomen to talk about how he led the effort from the ground up.

We cover how giving agents unrestricted access to one database was the key unlock, the self-improving skill loops that get smarter overnight, and why he thinks we've arrived at the personal computer moment for AI.

00:39 — YC's AI Stack
02:15 — The Finance Team Problem That Started It All
05:07 — SQL Access Changes Everything
07:20 — One Database to Rule Them All
09:14 — Jevons Paradox
10:07 — Denormalizing for Agents
12:15 — The Single-Player Era of Agents
14:16 — 350 Tools and a Shared Registry
16:24 — Skillify, DRY, and MECE Resolvers
18:23 — The Self-Improving Dream Cycle
20:26 — The Two-Sentence Pitch Skill
23:06 — How Super Intelligence Compounds
25:10 — Recording Everything as a Building Layer
27:10 — The Shared Organizational Brain
29:18 — Trust-Default Culture as a Requirement
30:44 — Raising the Floor for New Employees
32:35 — Horseless Carriages
34:24 — Why Chat Is the Best Interface for Agents
38:50 — Just-in-Time Software
40:49 — Centralizing vs. Decentralizing AI
43:32 — The Personal AI Revolution

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Gustaf (right) when he was in YC. You can see why our nickname for this startup was "the band".

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

Szymon, TesterArmy’s 19yo CEO, started professional development at 14 and shipped production apps used by millions throughout high school. He had to travel back to Poland during the batch to graduate.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

TesterArmy is the simplest way to QA your website or mobile app.

It runs real tests across browsers and devices, catches regressions on every PR, generates tests from natural language, and much more.

Try now and start testing in minutes: @TesterArmy

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Memorial Day is a reminder that freedom isn't the default state of the world. People fought and died for it.

I am thankful America is where you can build, create, and push the frontier forward.

Thank you to the men and women who served and gave their lives. 🇺🇸

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Mount (@mountinsure) secures and insures autonomous AI agents before they cause damage.

They secure the workflow, measure the remaining risk, and transfer that risk through insurance built specifically for it, so companies can use AI agents in more productive workflows without carrying the full risk alone.

Congrats on the launch, @johnbachm & @fabeamherd!

https://t.co/Nx1fgrbYNn

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

@yacineMTB Congratulations!!

[Theo - t3.gg @theo]

This sucks.

America should welcome greatness. Builders, innovators, and creators should have a fast path to citizenship.

I can’t fathom why we would make life harder for founders starting billion dollar companies that want to anchor themselves in the US.

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

Charles and Dean are making a bet that serious software engineers will always need to understand the code their agents are writing. They designed @StageReviewApp to make that easier to do. Congrats, guys!

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Stage is a code review platform designed to help engineers understand AI-generated code.

Your team is drowning in an endless backlog of PRs. @StageReviewApp turns code review into a guided process and enables you to review changes faster than using GitHub.

Congrats on the launch, @ceefryingpan and @DeanStratakos!

https://t.co/IBD8MtBJvH

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

A lot of people are trying to figure out recursively self-improving companies right now.

I break down what we’re seeing at YC.

[Tyler Bosmeny @bosmeny]

A mic drop moment @ycombinator tonight

@sama just offered $2M in OpenAI tokens to EVERY YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity

Just like Yuri Milner offering to invest in every startup back when Sam was a YC partner

I can't wait to see what's unlocked when you let the most driven, creative and formidable founders tokenmaxx

[Aseon Labs @aseonlabs]

Aseon Labs is building robotic pitstops for autonomous fleets.

Charging, cleaning & inspection where the fleet operates, not miles away from it.

The pit crew for the autonomous age.

Backed by @ycombinator.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Aseon Labs (@aseonlabs) builds robotic pitstops for self-driving cars. A depot in a box for charging, cleaning & inspecting autonomous fleets directly in operating zones.

Congrats on the launch, @kalligeros & @keenebyname!

https://t.co/lmuivcel68

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

@binsquares Congrats, this is great :)

[Lucas Crupi @lucas_crupi]

@loombotic We’re launching the world’s first quick-turn, high-mix, fully automated wire harness production line.

Our goal is to make wire harnesses as fast and easy to order as PCBs or sheet metal.

Customers can already upload a harness design and get an instant quote. Starting today, these parts can now be produced on our automated line.

We’re starting with Mini-Fit Jr., with more connectors coming soon.