I work as a group partner at Y Combinator. Over the last 48 hours I've talked to numerous founders of YC companies who told me they can't make payroll to their employees next week. In many cases they had raised millions of dollars which is currently locked into their SvB accounts. Even if they get access to the insured $250k on Monday that won't last long and in many cases not even cover the payroll they are planning to run. YC wrote this petition with these founders in mind who in good faith trusted that their money would be safe in Silicon Valley Bank.
Readit Newsgustaf commented on Urgent: Sign the petition now ycombinator.com/blog/urge... · Posted by u/version_five
gustaf commented on Request for Startups: Climate Tech ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-... · Posted by u/jeremylevy
>Low or zero emissions concrete
Feels like there's already options there.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a4078516...
https://cen.acs.org/materials/Chemex-goes-global-carbon-neut...
Although I'm betting it's better to just radically cut demand rather than try to invent a really good carbon-neutral/negative concrete. If we could sink a whole bunch of carbon into concrete though (significant carbon capture -> magic? -> concrete), that would be cool though.
That's a really uncomfortable fact with a lot of climate issues: it's way better to just not do the thing instead of trying to find a neutral/net-negative carbon process for the thing.
Making the world cut demand for concrete might actually sound dramatically harder than making zero-emission concrete. (and both are extremely hard!)
gustaf commented on Request for Startups: Climate Tech ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-... · Posted by u/jeremylevy
The only thing that would move the needle on a massive societal level is reliable nuclear energy in every city and country. But is that too hard for startups to tackle? Or it doesn’t fit the narrative? Every other climate “tech” just nibbles at the margins if that even. And the byproduct of mass nuclear energy adoption would be that the issue is solved and there would be no more climate mongering amongst the conference crowd. They would have to find another “the sky is falling down” cause. That would also lead to less justifications for war from the war crowd if all the world had true energy security. Maybe that’s why?
Reminds me of this previous initiative:
We are big believers in Nuclear energy, and it's part of the RFS.
But many other sectors need to be electrified for nuclear power to have its decarbonization impact: buildings, industry, transportation etc.
gustaf commented on Request for Startups: Climate Tech ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-... · Posted by u/jeremylevy
The list feels like "this is everything you can try" rather than "this is everything you should try".
Some of these are "let's take an unrelated industry and try to cram climate into its story", others are ideas that are doomed to fail. And the "if only forests existed forever they would be a better carbon sink" argument is so flawed I am disappointed to see it at all.
But, also a lot of good projects to work on in there.
Which ideas are doomed to fail? I would love to hear your feedback
gustaf commented on The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company costplusdrugs.com/... · Posted by u/yawnxyz
Hi guys, Alex Oshmyansky here, CEO of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Crazy to see our little project at the top of Hacker News!
We're planning to introduce a lot more drugs with transparent prices later this year, cutting out monopolistic middlemen in the supply chain and alleviating pharma drug shortages, particularly for rare and orphan disease conditions.
We are looking for a few devs (fullstack, frontend, and backend). If anybody is interested, drop me a line at alex@costplusdrugs.com
In the meantime, happy to answer questions if anyone is interested!
Congrats on the launch Alex - very happy for you and everyone you will be able to serve! /Gustaf
Very excited about this! Hoping more firms will make this decision
Donor lookup for Gustaf Alstromer [1].
Paul Buchheit "So good!" (video of RJK Jr. talk), reposting a tweet with the caption "they could have done it any time. They chose not too. Thats why ppl voted against them" on another tweet about illegal border crossings [3].
Jared Friedman "The young engineers going to DOGE remind me of the early days of the US Digital Service, when a bunch of SV engineers moved to DC to fix http://healthcare.gov. It's the same energy, but now the mandate isn't to fix the government's tech, it's to fix the government." [4]
Michael Seibel "Had an amazing talk about the US economy tonight. All kinds of feelings. Opportunities/ challenges abound. I choose to be optimistic." [5]
It looks like there are a few board members that are either keeping silent about politics or are more vocally against Trump and some of his policies, but a large portion or the majority are actively supporting Trump.
Considering the motivation of YC, the sentiment of many of the prominent figures and the brief amount of Googling, I would say that YC is much more in lock step than not. So it looks like, for the most part, I did jump to conclusions correctly.
[0] https://punchbowl.news/article/tech/garry-tan-trump-ai-crypt...
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?cand=tech+f...
[2] https://x.com/paultoo/status/1890191142689632593
[3] https://x.com/razibkhan/status/1890167090692387028
[4] https://x.com/snowmaker/status/1886672263216504853
[5] https://x.com/mwseibel/status/1888457501806653835