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Jared Friedman
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Jared Friedman✓

@snowmaker

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

858 Following64.1K Followers2.1K Posts
  1. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    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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    602531.8K868K
  2. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    It's almost hard to believe, but the US has only a single factory left that makes HMX and RDX, the explosives in nearly every modern missile and bomb - an aging wwii plant in Tennessee that's massively backordered. A few years ago, a startup called Solugen was making chemicals for the petroleum industry, when by happenstance they heard about this problem. It turns out that the same infrastructure they'd built for other chemicals was a perfect fit to make energetics. So, that's what they're doing now. They can already make 1/10 of what the old US army plant makes, and in the future will make much more. This is the SpaceX/Anduril moment for the US military explosives market.
    Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab
    In four days of the Iran war, the US and its allies fired more Tomahawks than the US builds in four years. One bottleneck is energetics production. So we built a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain with our own capital. Our modular solution makes HMX and other advanced energetics, the explosives in nearly every US missile and munition. The US builds about 85 Tomahawks a year. The Army's only plant making the explosives inside them is 84 years old, and its $1B upgrade has slipped from 2025 to 2029 or later. That plant is Holston, in Tennessee. It makes about 3% of what it made in 1944, and buyers wait one to two years for its explosives. Holston makes its chemicals and its explosives on one site, so every expansion means building both plants there. A plant like that takes billions of dollars and about a decade to build. Permitting this in the US is a nightmare, because you’re taking on the risk of a chemical plant and an explosives plant at once. What could possibly go wrong. We separated the two. Terraforge 1, Solugen’s Houston plant, is tied into Houston's petrochemical infrastructure and makes inert precursors: white powders about as flammable as sugar. They can ship via FedEx or UPS, and sit in an ordinary warehouse. Discreet. Odin Energetics, our joint venture with Kraken Kinetics, turns them into explosives in shipping container reactors called Nitroforges. It took us six months to build the first one, and they can be set up where the weapons are needed. On-demand energetics. That means no stockpiles or concentrated first-strike targets. Kraken builds the warheads, so every step from chemical to warhead happens in the US. Together we stood up the entire chain from raw chemical to finished warhead. Odin can already make close to a tenth of what Holston makes in a year. To make more, we’re building several factories at the same time.
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  3. Gaurab Chakrabarti✓@Gaurab
    In four days of the Iran war, the US and its allies fired more Tomahawks than the US builds in four years. One bottleneck is energetics production. So we built a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain with our own capital. Our modular solution makes HMX and other advanced energetics, the explosives in nearly every US missile and munition. The US builds about 85 Tomahawks a year. The Army's only plant making the explosives inside them is 84 years old, and its $1B upgrade has slipped from 2025 to 2029 or later. That plant is Holston, in Tennessee. It makes about 3% of what it made in 1944, and buyers wait one to two years for its explosives. Holston makes its chemicals and its explosives on one site, so every expansion means building both plants there. A plant like that takes billions of dollars and about a decade to build. Permitting this in the US is a nightmare, because you’re taking on the risk of a chemical plant and an explosives plant at once. What could possibly go wrong. We separated the two. Terraforge 1, Solugen’s Houston plant, is tied into Houston's petrochemical infrastructure and makes inert precursors: white powders about as flammable as sugar. They can ship via FedEx or UPS, and sit in an ordinary warehouse. Discreet. Odin Energetics, our joint venture with Kraken Kinetics, turns them into explosives in shipping container reactors called Nitroforges. It took us six months to build the first one, and they can be set up where the weapons are needed. On-demand energetics. That means no stockpiles or concentrated first-strike targets. Kraken builds the warheads, so every step from chemical to warhead happens in the US. Together we stood up the entire chain from raw chemical to finished warhead. Odin can already make close to a tenth of what Holston makes in a year. To make more, we’re building several factories at the same time.
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    3057664113K
  4. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    If you have to edit videos (like I do, reluctantly), it's far less painful to do it in Claude code or codex than a traditional video editor.
    Luke Igel @lukeigel
    Introducing Kino: make videos end-to-end with Claude Code and Codex. Drop your footage, get highlights, edit together, send links for feedback, and let your agents cook. AI is becoming a great creative partner. Kino is a new home for your team and agents to collaborate.
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  5. Luke Igel✓@lukeigel
    Introducing Kino: make videos end-to-end with Claude Code and Codex. Drop your footage, get highlights, edit together, send links for feedback, and let your agents cook. AI is becoming a great creative partner. Kino is a new home for your team and agents to collaborate.
    Download
    3261972.7K1.3M
  6. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @agupta: putting our money where our mouth is on hard tech
    Garry Tan @garrytan
    We're doubling down on hardware and are looking for someone to manage our hardware shop
    020197
  7. Garry Tan✓@garrytan
    We're doubling down on hardware and are looking for someone to manage our hardware shop
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    644051964.5K
  9. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Slack is an especially good form factor for interacting with AI agents. Channels, threaded replies, notifications - all the features that make it work well for a team of humans work just as well for a team of agents.
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  10. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @koomen: Michael helped create Claude Artifacts at Anthropic and is now building on those ideas with Spacesheep, a shared workspace for humans and agents. You can use it to make documents, presentations, dashboards, apps, and even games. It's so versatile that it's hard to describe succinctly. At the same time, it's pretty obvious that this form factor is going to replace Office and GDocs.
    Michael Makarov @micmakarov
    It sucks reading the 4,000 words my agent gives me every time I ask it to explain something. Spacesheep (YC F26) gives you a space where you can understand what your agents make. Share what your sessions make in a way people actually get, and collaborate in real time. Works with any agent.
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  11. Michael Makarov✓@micmakarov
    It sucks reading the 4,000 words my agent gives me every time I ask it to explain something. Spacesheep (YC F26) gives you a space where you can understand what your agents make. Share what your sessions make in a way people actually get, and collaborate in real time. Works with any agent.
    Download
    32371.1K411K
  13. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @agupta: Cambridge has always been the best place in the world to be an academic researcher. These days, a lot of cutting edge research also happens in industry, and Cambridge is the home to many amazing research startups, spanning AI research, robotics, biotech, defense, and industrials. We'd love for these two worlds to meet eachother, so we're bringing YC Paper Club to Cambridge! if you're a researcher in industry or academia, request a spot below.
    Y Combinator @ycombinator
    YC Paper Club is coming to Cambridge, MA! YCPC brings together people from academia and industry to discuss the latest research. Our inaugural Cambridge event on November 18 will explore the state of the art in robot learning and control. If you’re a student or faculty at a local university, or a researcher in industry interested in staying up to date with the latest literature, request a spot:
    0180279
  14. Y Combinator✓@ycombinator
    YC Paper Club is coming to Cambridge, MA! YCPC brings together people from academia and industry to discuss the latest research. Our inaugural Cambridge event on November 18 will explore the state of the art in robot learning and control. If you’re a student or faculty at a local university, or a researcher in industry interested in staying up to date with the latest literature, request a spot:
    Download
    122820951.3K
  15. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @garrytan: Particle will be on the frontier for smartest model at lowest dollar per unit of intelligence
    Suhail @Suhail
    1/ Excited to announce our new company Particle This is our first step in a series of models focused on developers. With particle-1, we focused on token efficiency and managed to keep parity in performance while using ~45% fewer tokens. Live now:
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  16. Suhail✓@Suhail
    1/ Excited to announce our new company Particle This is our first step in a series of models focused on developers. With particle-1, we focused on token efficiency and managed to keep parity in performance while using ~45% fewer tokens. Live now:
    Download
    2661262.2K394K
  17. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @spenserskates: Both Paul and Jessica spent extended time with me a few years ago during the toughest parts of Amplitude. I met up with them multiple times in Palo Alto and then Anne and I got to visit them in the Cotswolds as well. It's partly that they were there at the beginning, but I think it's deeper in their case, they can't help but care. That's a very powerful combintation. Funnily I don't have a single picture of Paul with a straight face.
    Paul Graham @paulg
    One of the most unexpected things about YC is how long we continue helping the founders. Even though we're generally the first investors, we're the ones still advising them 10 years later. I think it's because we're the investing analogue of old friends.
    040322
  18. Paul Graham✓@paulg
    One of the most unexpected things about YC is how long we continue helping the founders. Even though we're generally the first investors, we're the ones still advising them 10 years later. I think it's because we're the investing analogue of old friends.
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  19. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @PhilipJohnston: My favorite company in the current @YCombinator batch is the @DreamscaleLabs (YC F26) team. Four college dropouts Eric, Chris, Kevin, and Antoine working on cloud inference for robotics. This is almost all done at the edge right now, but will be a ginormous market in a few years as humanoids and other robots ramp up and will wanna run real-time inference that is far more powerful than can be done on the edge. Go team! 🤓👌 @eternaI_entropy, @KDog112358, @pentestduck, @AntoineNeedGPUs
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  21. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @brivael: My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket. After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders. Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry. Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector. Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system. But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away. At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets. Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it. No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%. Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are. What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything. There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us. So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next. Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong. You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now. Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians. I come from your future. Don't make it yours.
    Brivael Le Pogam @brivael
    I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has. Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France? Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
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  22. Brivael Le Pogam✓@brivael
    I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has. Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France? Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
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  23. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @alexandr_wang: 1/ muse spark open is the most capable US open-weight model to date. 816B total params, 42B active. 1M-token context. natively multimodal. built for coding and agentic work like long-horizon tasks, hard software engineering, multi-step reasoning. america! 🇺🇲
    04600294
  24. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @Gaurab: Two PhDs pouring peroxide into strangers' hot tubs. Our parents were so disappointed. In Dallas, @TungstenSeanide and I loaded peroxide from our reactor into his Subaru and drove it to the city's float spas. On weekends we poured the chemicals into people's hot tubs ourselves. It was full service. Then the reactor started making about $10,000 a month. For two guys with day jobs, that was like an infinite amount of money. We knew we had something real, so we looked up @ycombinator. At the time, YC didn't have much of a track record with hard tech.
    040308
  25. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @t_blom: 2027 will be the year of the personal agent. It has finally found PMF with Instinct, Muse & Grokbot. This will cause a tsunami of customer enquiries — it’s now essentially free for a customer to send hundreds of emails, texts and phonecalls to make a single purchase. Businesses will need AI customer service tools to save themselves from drowning.
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  26. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Jared Friedman
    RT @AntWilson: “Build something agents want”
    Supabase @supabase
    Select 26 Hackathon at the YC office last week was the perfect way to conclude Select 26. Amazing vibes, amazing sponsors, and amazing projects. Thanks everyone who participated, and we hope to see you all again next year!
    060344
  27. Supabase✓@supabase
    Select 26 Hackathon at the YC office last week was the perfect way to conclude Select 26. Amazing vibes, amazing sponsors, and amazing projects. Thanks everyone who participated, and we hope to see you all again next year!
    Download
    368012.5K
  28. Jared Friedman✓@snowmaker
    Most robot startups, even well funded ones, are still doing R&D. Ultra's shipping. Their robots are out there in the field doing necessary work every day.
    Ultra @Ultraroboticsco
    Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework. We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics. It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again. So that’s what we’re focusing on.
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  29. Ultra✓@Ultraroboticsco
    Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework. We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics. It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again. So that’s what we’re focusing on.
    Download
    10495717230K