Ricardo Pantaleon

[Ricardo Pantaleon @sub7ric_]

Today, we're officially launching Anana.

The AI workspace for hospitality commercial teams.

When we first started working with hotels, we thought the opportunity was simple: improve the guest experience by reducing the number of missed calls or messages.

But solving that problem exposed us to the complexity (and value) of the conversations hotels have with their guests every day.

We quickly realized that every interaction contained information that could be used to improve the business.

Hotels are incredibly good at measuring outcomes.

But a guest who calls about connecting rooms, emails about a group trip, gets quoted a price, and doesn't book?

Most of that disappears.

The reservation system records the transaction. It doesn't record the demand that never converted.

That means hotels are making commercial decisions without a huge part of the context their guests are already giving them — while spending more to generate new demand or paying third parties to distribute their rooms.

We built Anana to change that.

Visit https://t.co/nIyG0POSNH to learn more and book a demo.

[Ricardo Pantaleon @sub7ric_]

Every founder has crazy stories about getting started. Here is part of our story.

[October 2024]: I get fired from Palantir
- Not disappointed, not emotional. Pissed
- My literal reaction: "F this tech company, I'll go start my own"

[November 2024]: Found out about YC and decided it was the path
- Got a job as a barista
- Bought a whiteboard
- Tried convincing my friends to quit their jobs and build with me. No idea, no plan, full of confidence. Everyone said no (rightfully so)
- Kept asking Alexandros until he said yes (he's crazy). I promised him that if we got the interview, we would not lose that battle

[December 2024]: Christmas Day, Brooklyn, 9pm. We land on our idea
- The company was DMV-EZ
- Vehicle registration software to make the DMV better across the US
- College friends would see me at the coffee shop and ask what I was doing with my life. My answer: "applying to YC so I can make the DMV better." Everyone was confused and urged me to just apply for jobs

[January 2025]: Become DMV experts
- Spent ALL of our free time on DMV-related things
- Got banned from some DMVs for showing up too much
- Asked everyone we knew to let us handle their next vehicle registration
- Got our first customers (friends and family)

[February 2025]: Took our search to the streets
- Finding people who needed to register a vehicle at that exact moment was slower than expected, so we got creative
- We hung out at random parking lots with cardboard signs trying to get strangers to talk to us (they thought we were scammers)
- Kept running random experiments every week

[March 2025]: DMV-EZ is accepted into YC
- During YC, we realized DMV-EZ was not going to work for many reasons
- Pivot pivot pivot
- Building in hospitality

This photo is us on some random street on Long Island. Mid-February, freezing temperature. Full of hope.

You don't need the perfect idea, just the willingness to look crazy for a while.

[Ricardo Pantaleon @sub7ric_]

Starting a company might be the purest form of self love.

Think about it:
- You bet EVERYTHING on yourself
- You go out of your comfort zone, which forces you to fail and grow into a better founder (but also a better person)
- You meet people you wouldn’t have met otherwise (and some might even become friends for life)

Sure, it sucks and it’s stressful, but in hindsight, it’s probably one of the best gifts you can give yourself.

Allowing yourself to see your true potential 👊

[Ricardo Pantaleon @sub7ric_]

I personally find this really exciting. Tom gave us some of the best advice we received during YC, and I’m confident he'll add tons of value to Anthropic. Congrats Tom!

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

Personal update: I'm taking a leave of absence from YC to join Anthropic. I'll be working with @NotTomBrown on the compute team.

Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and, as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement, availability of compute becomes one of the most important issues to solve.

I'm excited to get started 🚀

[Ricardo Pantaleon @sub7ric_]

The Knicks winning the NBA finals is just a reminder that there is no better feeling than proving people wrong.

When you first start, everyone will doubt you. Strangers, colleagues, friends, and sometimes even your own family.

Sometimes they’ll doubt your abilities. Other times, they’ll doubt whether the odds will ever be in your favor.

Either way, it is your job to keep going and play through the last second.

[Ricardo Pantaleon @sub7ric_]

A bit about why we're building in hospitality!

Why Hospitality? — https://t.co/D1fJfvUUNg

[Ricardo Pantaleon @sub7ric_]

I saw this the summer of 2024. Two days prior, I’d considered entrepreneurship for the first time.

Three years out of college, second job, still depressed. I thought switching from finance to tech would fix it. It didn’t.

Funny how the universe gives you exactly what you need.