lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club

YC W25 | Healthcare AI | Yale 19' | PhD | Stanford GSB |
VC Scout for YC, Pear, a16z, Antler, Sequoia, Insight Partners |

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

In 2019, he left academia for a biotech startup.

A year later, the pandemic hit.

The company raised $1.1B.

Today it’s worth $4B+.

Looking back, he told me:

“Joining was actually a reckless decision.”

Not because it failed.

Because nobody knew it would work.

That’s the part survivorship bias erases.

People see:

• Unicorns
• Fundraising
• Headlines

They don’t see:

• Panic
• Wrong bets
• Endless uncertainty
• Wondering if the company survives another year

One line stuck with me:

“Funding isn’t winning.

Funding just buys you runway.”

The biggest opportunities rarely look obvious.

The biggest risks only look obvious in hindsight.

Full interview below (8 mins) ↓

https://t.co/J2LjuPiUsf

#biotech #startup #EntrepreneurMindset #founders #interview

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

🔥🔥🔥

[Sorhan @sorhanHQ]

Today, we’re introducing ELU: self-healing software for engineering teams shipping software at AI Speed

AI made shipping software 100x faster, now introducing more bugs and user frictions in production, and understanding user experience is still painfully slow.

ELU closes that loop.

It detects issues affecting real users, generates the fix, validates it through code review and simulated users, then auto-merges it into production.

And for companies that can’t send user data to third parties, ELU runs directly on their infrastructure.

In the last two months, ELU’s ARR grew 8x, and 600+ companies have onboarded since July.

As every company ships software faster, the winners will be the ones whose products can learn, fix, and improve themselves.

If you’re shipping faster than you can test and fix, book demo: https://t.co/oZGQTxJYfY

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

Today, an investor asked me why they weren’t on our investor list.

The answer is simple: I genuinely forgot we talked a few weeks ago. 😂

That’s how you know your traction is getting too good.

Our investor network is expanding fast, and now you can submit your startup directly through our website!

We’re currently helping several founders with PhDs from top universities, frontier AI labs, and companies globally with fundraising.

We review every startup team ourselves and will reach out if we think there’s a strong fit.

If you know a founder or investor that you think should be in our network, please reach out.

We’d love to chat!

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

@mati @ElevenLabs This is awesome

[Naval @naval]

When you look back, you’ll wish you’d just done the long-term version of everything.

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

@matanSF wow

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

@Red_Xiao_ Excited to see

[Manus @ManusAI]

Introducing Manus 2.0

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

Female founders are still incredibly underrated.

I recently worked with a female founder who shipped the product I advised her in a week.

She launched and got 10K+ users on day 1.

I gave her some advice on growth.

She executed immediately and acquired another 33K users in two days.

I’ve met so many talented young female founders like this.

Many are exceptionally good at sales, distribution, and GTM.

These skills are incredibly valuable but hard to quantify on pitch deck.

Sometimes the best founders don’t look the best on paper.

You can only realize how good they are when you work with them and see how fast they execute.

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

It’s hard to believe it’s only been two months.

I came back from China, started building this community, and honestly had no idea where it would go.

Since then:

• We’ve supported 20+ startups on their journey toward accelerators and fundraising
• The community grew to 5K+ followers on RedNote
• 800+ founders reached out, far more than I’ve been able to fully onboard
• We started building relationships with YC, Pear, a16z, and investors across the ecosystem
• A few LPs even reached out to explore what building a fund together could look like
• I had the opportunity to interview Garry Tan
• The community reached $20K MRR

And behind all of that, things have been much messier than the numbers make them look.

I burned out and escaped to Seattle for a week.
I said break up like… five times?
We’re still basically pre-product.
My website is still broken because I genuinely haven’t had time to fix it.

Thankfully, the @Stoody team is helping me with it this weekend.

The biggest thing I’ve learned from these two months is that you don’t need to have everything figured out before you start.

So much of this came from simply showing up, helping people, listening to what founders needed, and building from there.

I’m incredibly grateful to every founder who trusted me, every person who made an introduction, and everyone who offered to help along the way.

Still early. Still messy. Still learning.

And still shipping broken things.

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

I’ve been seriously thinking about starting a fund.

Every day, we meet exceptional founders and startups that are still completely under the radar.

What we see on the front line is often very different from the broader market consensus.

For now, our priority is simple: help the founders we work with to win, help them get into top accelerators, raise capital, and build great companies!

But over time, we don’t just want to advise the best founders we meet.

We want to invest in them.

We believe some of the founders we’re working with today will build massive companies in future.

One step at a time. 🚀

[Lisa Su @LisaSu]

So excited to welcome @theworldlabs and @drfeifei to the @AMD family! I’ve always been a huge fan of Fei-Fei and her pioneering research in AI. Together, we’ll combine World Labs’ deep expertise in AI and world models with AMD’s compute leadership to power the future of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem. Can’t wait for all we’ll accomplish!

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

I’m subleasing my apartment near SF.

The person who’s about to take over my place offered to pay extra rent.

Even cover my moving expenses if I could move out this week.

Turns out, he just signed an offer with a top AI lab and is moving to SF next week.

The AI talent migration to San Francisco is very, very real.

Welcome to SF.

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

Hope you saw my post last month.

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

If you haven’t buy IN memory, now it’s time

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

@gen_instinct 👀

[General Instinct @gen_instinct]

Introducing InstinctFlash, the unified open-source physical AI model runtime for fast, efficient inference.

End-to-end robot policies don't fit on the edge. VLAs are already extremely slow to run on-device, but WAMs are even slower, taking 20-50 steps to even de-noise a single clip for an action.

Flash allows you to run generalist models from 8 model families on a single commercial GPU, in real time.

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

@svabhishek @ndrewlee DM me what you’re building

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

At the a16z Speedrun AI Faire today, so many impressive founders and startups.

After referring founders to YC and Pear, excited to also scout for a16z and connect the most promising founders with the right opportunities.

Always looking for exceptional builders. 🚀

[lily_fbc | Founder Builder Club @lily_fbc]

Excited to continue expanding the investor network around Founder Builder Club.

Going forward, we’ll be sharing selectee startups from the FBC founder community with the Insight team for their deal pipeline.

Insight Partners is one of the world’s leading software and technology investors, with $90B+ in regulatory assets under management and investments spanning early stage through growth.

As FBC grows, one of our goals is to build stronger bridges across the ecosystem.
We’re excited to help exceptional founders get discovered earlier and build long-term relationships across the venture ecosystem.

More to come.