Harper (YC W25)

We have interviewed 100s of people. After pace, the #2 trait we hire for is Intellectual Curiosity. Our problem set will change. Today, we think we need to do X. Six months from now, it could be something completely different. We have to respond and react. We are building in AI - a space that changes every few months. The pace here does not slow down for anyone and it's not easy. It requires a certain kind of person. Someone who is agile, thinks curiously about problems, and is smart about the way they solve them. You can teach someone a skill. But you cannot teach someone to genuinely want to figure things out. And when we find people like that, we hold on to them. If this sounds like you, we are hiring. Harper (YC W25)

"Barber at Harper" We have a barber on call at the office. Building a company is all consuming. The team puts in long days and the to-do list never gets ends. At some point I realized the last thing someone should have to worry about is finding time to get a haircut. For instance Finn Lancaster one of our Forward Deployed Engineers was on his 40th hour. So we fixed it. Every few weeks the barber pulls up. Sets up in the corner. The team cycles through between calls and coding. One less errand and one less thing in the way. Taking care of the people building with you is not a perk. It is just the right thing to do. We are hiring! Harper (YC W25)

This is as important as the 5am culture. We have people on this team who show up before the sun is up. Every single day. That energy is everything. But it doesn't sustain itself. Recently, we took the whole team offsite. I realized, the trust that gets built in moments like that, is awesome. The conversations that only happen when there's no deliverable attached that shows up directly in how fast we execute the next day. These moments will matter. I'm certain of it. Offsites, team days, time away from the screen these are how we invest in our most valuable asset. THE PEOPLE. Investing in them consistently and aggressively is the only logical move. The team is the company. Harper (YC W25)

Fifth win in a row secured at Yale University’s #YHack this past weekend 😝😝. This weekend, my teammates Vivian Ni, Jazlynn Kurniandra, and Ravin Chutijirawong built #SecondSelf, a digital twin of you talks like you, thinks like you, and works for you. Very proud to walk away with 1st place in the Personal AI Track. We took advantage of a feature in macOS called Fast User Switching to spawn a computer-use agent in a parallel macOS user session on your OWN Mac. SecondSelf was built completely from scratch in 24 hours. We used custom MJPEG stream + VNC for cross-user screensharing and remote control. Claude Agents SDK + various MCPs to make a capable agent. Swift, SwiftUI, Applekit, A2UI, ElevenLabs for a beatiful and responsive notch UI with generative UI capabilities. Browser-use for fast browser interaction via CDP and cookie-cloning to enable users to give their digital twin their authentication. Hex and Prime Intelligence for reinforcement learning. Hand-animated onboarding website and smiski-inspired avatar. I had a lot of fun and not a lot of sleep (0 hrs). Thank you to Harper (YC W25) for selecting us as the track winners Check out our devpost: https://lnkd.in/efP64E9T Vlog coming soon?: https://lnkd.in/gwZy7_uk

We have covered over 6000+ Companies. And if you have been told your business is too complex to insure, you are not alone. Getting coverage for a complex business takes weeks. Calls tends to go unanswered. Paperwork goes nowhere. And your business just waits. This is the reality for hundreds of thousands of businesses in this country every single day. AI changed that. The judgment-heavy, manual work that kept insurance slow can now happen in hours. It does not have to take weeks anymore. Harper (YC W25) is solving that! #BusinessInsurance #Entrepreneurs #Insurance #AI

We are looking at plans to scale the Harper team. Two years ago it was just me and Tushar Nair at a kitchen table. Printing policies by hand. Counting customers in Excel. Figuring out what insurance actually was. Today we have a team that wakes up every day and gives everything to make this work. People who pull up at 5am because our East Coast customers are calling at 8, who care about this as much as we do. And now we are growing again. The name of the game this year is scale. More customers. More states. More industries. And we need the right people to do it. In fact, we are sending our best people to Yale this weekend for YHack to find them. If you are at Yale University this weekend, come find us or If you know someone who is, tag them below. Harper (YC W25)

Harper (YC W25) is coming to Yale University this weekend. We are sponsoring YHack - Yale's biggest hackathon and a private dinner. The hackathon challenge? Build a Personal AI Agent from idea to product. $4,500+ in prizes for the best ones + hiring for Engineering. We're also hosting a private dinner this Friday near campus for students interested in AI, startups, and building things! Harper is covering everything. We want to connect with folks interested in operations, engineering, strategy, marketing.. and really anything! Apply here to be considered: https://lnkd.in/ew7u5wqf Our top talent is coming to pick the next top talent. Meet: - Harsh Kotwal : Strategy and Operations Leader. - Aryan Jadhav : Founding AI Engineer. - Finn Lancaster : Member of Technical Staff. - Abishanka Saha : Founding Engineer & CSP (Chief Snacks Procurer). Lets Build 🚀! Yale University

I wake up anxious. I go to sleep anxious! Somebody asked me the other day when was the last time I felt like quitting. I had to think about it. And I could not find a single moment. The doubts are real. The questions are real. Even after raising $47 million I still go to bed wondering if I am doing enough. If I am moving fast enough. If I will actually get this to the next level. Those feelings do not go away. But every morning I wake up and I know one thing. We are going to figure it out. There is no version of this where we give up. Maybe that is a little delusional. But I think that is what it takes. Harper (YC W25) Tushar Nair

We grew our team from 2 to 30+, and we’re still expanding. But growing fast is not the hard part. The hard part is understanding the work well enough to know what to build. We learned this early. So before anyone writes code or builds systems, they sit in the core loop of the business. They talk to customers, go through applications, and understand every step of the process. We put people there until it can be automated. Because once you’re inside the workflow, you start seeing things you would’ve missed completely from the outside. Where things slow down. Where people get confused. What actually matters vs what just looks important. That’s what drives what we build. As a result, everyone at Harper gets an insurance license. Engineers, sales, operations, everyone. Not because the license itself matters, but because it forces you close enough to the work to understand it properly. It slows things down at the start. But it’s the way we’ve found to build systems that actually work & function rightly. Harper (YC W25)