Get The YC AI Playbook
The companion guide to the video where I pulled every AI company Y Combinator has ever funded — not 500, all 1,884 of them, straight from YC’s public directory — and turned the data into a build playbook. Inside: how it was measured (AI is now ~1 in 3 of every company YC has ever funded, and 48% came in just the last two years); the 5 funded patterns — (1) sell to businesses, not consumers (67% B2B vs under 9% consumer, ~8:1); (2) sell picks-and-shovels or go vertical (dev tooling is the #1 category, but ~80% pick one boring, expensive industry and own its workflow); (3) build agents, not dashboards (startups pitching themselves as "agents" went from 4% in 2018 to 26% in 2026); (4) stay small (median team is 5, 73% are under 10 people, only 3.4% solo); (5) geography is half a myth (59% Bay Area, but 45% remote-friendly). Plus the graveyard — 15% are already inactive or acquired, and ~46% lead their pitch with the word "AI" (the thin-wrapper tell that gets erased when the model company ships the same feature), versus survivors who own a workflow (e.g. Casetext, AI for legal → ~$650M exit). Ends with a 7-step build checklist and the one line to remember: AI is not the product, the owned workflow is.
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