Thomas Chan

ceo & co-founder of @LanternAI__, backed by @YCombinator (F26)

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

robert pattinson has primetime coming out, so does Lantern AI (YC F26)

except ours is about an interrogation over why a role is still open.

today we're launching Lantern agentic sourcer.

hiring managers know who they want:

> a scrappy ex-founder with product ownership
> gtm engineer who's built scalable outbound
> someone who can turn a rough idea to something working overnight

but it’s next to impossible to express this in filters and boolean searches.

Lantern makes your hiring taste searchable.

It learns your taste, looks across the talent market to track down people you’d actually hire, then reaches out to them.

naturally we decided to make a primetime inspired launch vid about it ;)

hire with Lantern: www.lantern.md

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

spilling the beans on the secrets @ycombinator taught us at week 1...
.
.
.
#1 Launch before you're fully ready

One partner told us he spent a year building in the dark before real users touched the product, then realized no one really wanted it. The goal of launching sooner is to shorten the feedback loop between building and learning.

As founders, we often get embarrassed by the quality of what we're putting to the market. We want things to get really polished before giving it to our users, but in reality a lot of it is just an excuse for our unwillingness to face humiliation.

#2 Follow the pull, not your plan

We walked in office hour with our big plan for an innovating Lantern to kill Workday and SAP SuccessFactors. Instead, our partner skipped all of it and asked what customers are asking for RIGHT NOW.

The honest answer is that we've received 20+ inbound requests per week from some of the hottest bay area companies asking for an agentic talent sourcing solutions. These customers have told us exactly what would make them switch. So we are following what the customers are asking for us, not the roadmap we've set originally.

#3 Charge earlier and often

Compliments and usage are NOT demand. YC's view is that it only counts if someone pays. So I'm charging for all users of our product. If someone says no, at least I'll get a data point and a reason. It teaches me more than "oh I'd love your product" does.

AND THAT'S WHY.....

@LanternAI__ 's Agentic Talent Sourcer is live now!

If you're hiring engineers, GTM, or any kind of hard to fill roles, book a demo at www.lantern.md ;)

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

JEV + Lantern AI (yc f26) = Recruiting GOD MODE

we've been playing with JEV for awhile and tbh it unlocks a completely new paradigm in talent sourcing

all sourcing products in the market work like this:

user input -> translate to booleans -> retrieve a few hundred profiles via the filters -> LLM to rank and match

the problem: the most important decision in the entire process becomes the initial pool selection and the boolean translation, as you cannot rank someone you never retrieved

with JEV, @LanternAI__ is able to flip it around

we are able to take the entire accessible pool of account executives in the bay area and ask millions of tiny questions about their profiles and work evidence

in other words, we can now boil the ocean and evaluate the entire talent pool with your taste

a much wider pool than ANY sourcing tool in the market

image an intelligent sourcer having infinite time looking at EVERY profile in the market before making judgements

feels like a fundamental shift in recruiting design

thanks @typesafeai, @snowmaker and @ycombinator for the early access, I know @JustinTang29 is having so fun!

coming soon, book a demo with us at www.lantern.md

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

what sam altman told us at @ycombinator close door dinner surprised me:

“dont try to win at YC”

don’t optimize for every event, intro or party. just make your company exceptional.

before YC, i thought access was one of the biggest opportunities.

but the value isn’t how many parties you get into; it’s whether you leave the batch having built the foundation of an exceptional company.

for us, that means building @LanternAI__ into a coworker that hiring teams can trust with meaningful parts of recruiting.

70 days till demo day. back to building with @JustinTang29

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

@ycombinator f26 just started. strangely, i’ve never felt further from “making it.”

for a long time, YC felt like a destination.

now that it started, it's actually the opposite.

nothing has changed.

the product still needs to get better.
customers still need to love it.
we still need to grow faster.
and there are still a thousand reasons this could fail.

the only difference is that the bar suddenly feels much higher.

i moved to sf with one goal: give @LanternAI__ the best possible shot at becoming something truly important.

now i get to spend the next few months surrounded by people doing the same thing.

getting into YC isn’t the achievement.
what we build from here is.

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

This is why hiring taste is so important. "I’m impressed by your background” is not convincing if u can’t explain what impressed u.

we're building lantern.md to learn that taste, then find and reach out to the right people (no flan recipes)

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

this person injected a prompt in their LinkedIn bio asking recruiters for a flan recipe.. and it worked lol

but deleting the recipe still wouldn’t make it good outreach.

recruiters/ hiring managers need to know:

> what have they done that’s relevant for this role?
> what am I assuming about them that might be false?
> why would this opp be worth considering from THEIR side?

We ask candidates to explain why they want the job. We should be able to explain why we contacted them.

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

@BedantaHq @ycombinator @LanternAI__ thanks man

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

This was our kitchen last month. Next week, we start @ycombinator.

We’re building @LanternAI__ : an AI hiring manager that learns your hiring taste, then handles the sourcing, research, outreach, interviews and scheduling to get the right people to you.

The important part is knowing who YOU would actually hire.

Someone can look great on paper but not be the right fit for your team. Lantern learns what you need in a hire so you can find the right person, fast, without the manual work.

Big few months ahead, hyped to show y'all what we’ve been working on.

Check us out - www.lantern.md :)

[Justin Tang @JustinTang29]

this is a good example of why we need better market intelligence when hiring.

Say you’re hiring an ai engineer. before opening that role, I wanna know:

- which companies have the best people doing this today?
- what are they paying?
- is my comp range realistic?

you can answer most of these questions yourself. but it's gonna take a lot of research.

we're building the easiest way to do this. before you start recruiting, lantern.md looks at the market for the person you’re trying to hire.

maybe your comp might be too low. maybe you're searching for the wrong title. the person you’re describing might not even exist.

better to find that out before you start recruiting

https://t.co/fG2QGe2ErF

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

first yc event done! really nice meeting everyone before things get super busy. (also i just really wanted chinese food.)

more events soon 👀

https://t.co/YOIevPlNdV

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

i'm hosting a dim sum w/ @rhobusiness before yc fall batch kicks off 🥟

on 9/6, in SF
details + rsvp: https://t.co/k2d3Z0nvWV

come join us! :)

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

If ur looking for exceptional talents beyond the obvious search on LinkedIn Recruiters and want this level of support, request a demo at www.lantern.md or drop me a DM :)

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

12:39 am: our user pinged us on Slack
2 mins later, our CTO @JustinTang29 is on it

they're using @LanternAI__ to discover a quality candidate (most sourcing tools would miss this)

The candidate doesn't look strong if you look by just title and boolean keywords.

Lantern goes deep by connecting the dots from all available evidence about their proof of work, the problems they’ve solved, publications etc.

But a part of the workflow was misconfigured accidentally.

Rather than asking the customer to file a ticket and wait until the next day, Justin just jumped in and reset it for them.

This is what customer obsession looks like.

To us, every support question is product research and a chance to make Lantern simpler, easier to use.

We stay close with our customers when they need us, (even if it happens after midnight 🤷‍♂️)

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

@BedantaHq 🤝

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

Since joining @ycombinator, we've received lots of interest from investors before the batch even started.

One piece of advice from YC resonated a lot with me: fundraising and valuation are not measures of startup success.

The real work is:
- Talking to customers
- Building the product
- Creating sustained momentum

@JustinTang29 and I are grateful and honored, but our priority rn is building @LanternAI__

Capital should help a great company move faster. It shouldn’t distract you from building one.

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

@GaddipatiHarsha lol ;P

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

don't let a rejection email feel like a decision about your company.

i got rejected twice before getting in, even made it into top 10%.

it was a bummer for sure, but i didn't think of yc as the goal. i'd be happy to get in, but it'd be fine if i didn't.

went back to focusing on our users rather than the application.

to everyone who got one this week: it decides much less than it feels like it does. keep building.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Strange as it sounds, YC wants companies it rejects to succeed. Otherwise we won't know if we reject someone good.

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

@t_blom @ycombinator your ai counterpart was smart enough to see past my trolling 👀

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

saw some cool ideas from my f26 batch mates at @ycombinator 's pre-batch social. best one was getting startup advice from AI @t_blom. the future is extremely well-funded😌

[Thomas Chan @onethomaschan]

this isn't even the worst part about an ats.

the deeper problem is that the system turns hiring into a keyword bingo, and then calls the match a “signal.” a resume with the right keywords will beat someone whose work is clearly better, because softwares can parse nouns more easily than judgment.

we built lantern.md to understand people. we study the work, the team’s standards, and the evidence behind a career.

hiring should begin with judgment. that's our philosophy.