Jared Friedman (@snowmaker) / X

Jared Friedman

1,773 posts

Jared Friedman

@snowmaker

founder, techno-optimist, college dropout, partner at @ycombinator.

San Francisco

linkedin.com/in/jaredfriedm…

Joined April 2007

Pinned
Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Jun 18, 2023
Yesterday we hosted 400 top university students at the YC Summer Conference - a fun day of talks about startups. Talking to the students afterwards, I found myself giving a lot of the same advice. So in case it's useful to others, here is my startup advice for students.
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Jan 28, 2025
They actually did it. Boom is officially the first independently developed supersonic jet.
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Jan 28, 2025
The Boom XB-1 was built by a team of just 50 people. Many of them joined Boom right out of college.
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Jan 26, 2025
Lots of hot takes on whether it's possible that DeepSeek made training 45x more efficient, but @doodlestein wrote a very clear explanation of how they did it. Once someone breaks it down, it's not hard to understand. Rough summary: * Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Jul 23, 2025
If you are a technical founder, you do not need a non-technical cofounder.
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Aug 28, 2023
Some of the best startup ideas live in a grey area of legality. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, YouTube, Coinbase were all somewhere between questionable and flat-out illegal in their early days. One reason for this is that incumbents cannot take any legal risk on a new initiative. Even if
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Aug 1, 2025
If you're building an AI agent to automate some job, like a payroll specialist, the hardcore move is to just go get that job and do it for a while. We call this "going undercover", and we're seeing more of the top founders do it. It's the best way to learn what to build.
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Jan 28, 2025
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Jan 28, 2025
The pilot who flew the XB-1 today is Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg. He's an absolute bad-ass who literally went to Top Gun and has 200 carrier landings.
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Oct 25, 2024
Until recently, I thought that 3D printing had failed to live up to its promise. But then I noticed that every hardware company in the last YC batch was 3D printing their product with their own printers. Turns out it actually worked, it just took a while.
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Mar 28, 2024
(0/25) Here's a list of 25 YC companies that have trained their own AI models. Reading through these will give you a good sense of what the near future will look like.
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Aug 21, 2024
Ares Industries, which builds cruise missiles, launched today out of YC’s current batch. This is YC's first weapons company, and this is an actual photo of their missile. Here is the story of Ares Industries and why we funded them. (1/10)
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Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Feb 23, 2025
One of the highest leverage things founders can do right now is to invest in becoming top 5% in their use of AI coding tools.
355K
Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
Jul 15, 2025
Build a company good enough to get bought twice.
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