Why you really should talk to your customers

This Week at YC

May 8, 2023

🔓 Secrets you can learn from your customers

Successful startups don’t just build technology – they solve human problems. The key is listening to the people who really matter: your customers. Hear YC Group Partners Dalton and Michael outline how companies like Airbnb and Brex found their way by building genuine connections with customers and how talking to Starcraft 2 streamers helped Justin.tv become Twitch.

🚀 The Launchpad

Discover new YC companies and products

LanceDB

serverless, low-latency vector database for AI applications
San Francisco, CA

Flagright

A GPT-powered AI toolkit for AML compliance ops
Berlin, Germany
Find more YC companies and discover new products

🌎 YC Community

Highlights from our founders in the news
Brian Chesky, Co-Founder & CEO of Airbnb, on "what it takes to come up with an idea so weird that it seems like it will never work, and then make it work."
The Social Radars
Nomba: from an AI chatbot to a $150 million valued company
Techcabal
Airbnb launches new budget-friendly listing category, Airbnb Rooms
USA Today

🔥 Hacker News

Top posts from this week
  1. Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” (semianalysis.com)
  2. It's A(door)able (ncase.me)
  3. MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry (theverge.com)
  4. Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs (primevideotech.com
  5. Replit's new Code LLM: Open Source, 77% smaller than Codex, trained in 1 week (latent.space)
  6. Eye Candy (eycndy.com)
  7. Bank Failures Visualized (observablehq.com)
  8. Htmx Is the Future (quii.dev)
  9. I want to talk about WebGPU (cohost.org)
  10. Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers (modular.com)


 
Read more on Hacker News

💸 Money Moves

The latest raises and rounds from YC companies
Nomba (YC W17)
$30M Pre-Series B
Lagos, Nigeria

TechCrunch: African payment service provider Nomba raises $30M
Sitenna (YC S21)
$3M 
Atlanta, GA

SiliconRepublic: Sitenna raises $3m to expand in the US and Canada
Bend (YC S22)
$2.5M Seed
New York, New York

TechCrunch: Bend is taking on Brex and Ramp with a green twist and a $2.5M seed round
Openlayer (YC S21)
$4.8M Seed
San Francisco, CA

Openlayer: Openlayer raises $4.8m seed round to build guardrails for AI
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Older messages

10 Questions to Discuss with Potential Co-founders

Monday, May 1, 2023

When you're trying to figure out if someone is a good co-founder match, it helps to start by asking the right Q's before deciding to work together. This Week at YC May 1, 2023 🙋🏻‍♂️ Questions

Advice for Technical Startup Founders

Monday, April 24, 2023

YC's Diana Hu dives into topics like how to ship an MVP, how to deal with tech choices & technical debt, and how & when to hire an engineering team. This Week at YC April 24, 2023 📙 Advice

The Student's Guide To Becoming A Successful Startup Founder

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Dalton and Michael sit down to share the hard-won advice they wish they had known back in high school. This Week at YC April 17, 2023 👩🏻‍🎓 The Student's Guide To Becoming A Successful Startup

Meet the YC Winter 2023 batch

Monday, April 10, 2023

Our 36th Demo Day featured founders from 250+ startups, building across verticals including B2B/enterprise, fintech, healthcare, climate, and more. This Week at YC April 10, 2023 🌱 Learn about the

💰 Modern Startup Fundraising 101

Monday, April 3, 2023

Brad Flora has coached 100s of startups on fundraising. He's seen it from every angle: as a founder, as an angel investor, and now as a Group Partner. This Week at YC April 3, 2023 💰 Modern Startup

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