Zaheer Mohiuddin

The best teams in our YC batch aren’t hiring because they are automating everything. It took us at Willow (WillowVoice.com) 8 weeks to crack the code. Here are the tools to automate your entire startup👇 1. Vibe Coding: Cursor & Willow (YC X25) → Dictating raw thoughts make AI understand you better, meaning you can one-shot most problems. 2. Product Analytics: PostHog & Human Behavior → PostHog's session replays + Human Behavior AI = automatic insights from user videos. 3. Pitch Decks: Figma & Gamma → Figma for precise layouts, Gamma for design concepts. 4. Website Design: Framer → Seamless Figma integration + extensive customization without the complexity. 5. AI Workflows: Gumloop & Zapier → Gumloop handles complex multi-step automation. Zapier covers edge cases. 6. Research: Undermind & Perplexity → Perplexity for quick queries, Undermind for academia research. 7. Email: Friday (YC F24) & Apollo & Clay → Apollo/Clay for lead gen, Friday Mail for inbox automation beyond Superhuman. The result is now teams of 2 hitting metrics that used to require 20+ employees—higher ARR targets and more velocity. What other tools do you recommend?

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Many YC founders go to Demo Day expecting to fill their round and get back to work. But then reality hits: Lots of them don't raise a dollar. You just don't hear about these stories. You only hear about the successes. YC partners are clear about this: "Don't think that just because you're YC, you'll lift a finger and raise your round." The badge gets you in the room. But you're still competing against 50-100 other startups for maybe 5-10 investment spots per fund. If I were to do YC again, here’s how I’d approach it: Use the $500K to create a 3-year runway and build something people want with a team of 2 in total. I won’t show up to demo day. Just focus on building. I’d forget about: Growth targets. Fundraising decks. Creating a one-liner. 100% focus on profitability. That's how you become default alive and don’t need to beg for money.

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Got a YC interview? I’ve been through it—and helped others prep. Here’s what the partners are actually evaluating you on ↓ We were interviewed by Garry Tan and Surbhi Sarna in 2023. No smiles. No nods. Incredible poker faces. We thought we blew it. Somehow got in. 9 things to keep in mind: [ 1 ] Can you teach your interviewer something new? They’ve seen every AI-powered [X] pitch by now. [ 2 ] Pre-revenue? Do you have a unique insight—or a credible plan to get one? [ 3 ] Can you show real progress since you applied? [ 4 ] Can your team actually build what you're pitching? [ 5 ] Other early-stage startups aren’t your competition. Post-PMF incumbents are. Most startups die from suicide, not murder. [ 6 ] Got a backup idea? Be ready to pitch it if they ask. [ 7 ] What they're really asking themselves is: If we give this founder $500k and 3 months to learn from the best, can they make something work? [ 8 ] Don’t memorize a script. YC partners are pro bullshit detectors. Founders are just amateurs bullshitters. [ 9 ] They also have great poker faces. Don’t read into it. Focus on clarity and conviction. Good luck if you’re interviewing. And if you’ve done it before—what else would you add?

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We walked into YC with our strategy . Got humbled. YC cut us off and said, “Go get more customers.” We had a 12-point agenda. Questions about product, growth loops, pricing, hiring. The partner looked at us and said: “Why aren’t you doing more sales experiments?” That was it. Whole meeting derailed. Every time we’d try to dig into a new topic, it came back to the same thing: Go get more customers. Everything else is noise. At the time, it was frustrating. We were overthinking product features and trying to automate outbound. But the real problem was obvious: We didn’t have enough conversations with people who could actually pay us. So we dropped the playbook. Started manually DMing. Cold emailing. Getting into calls we weren’t ready for. Truth be told, the results were way better than anything else we’d tried. Founders love to build. But if you’re not shipping sales, you’re not building a business. You’re building a really expensive hobby.

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Everyone laughed when YC gave us this advice. Turns out, it was genius. "The idiot and the genius usually end up saying the same thing. The midwit is the one who gets lost." Take feature decisions as an example. Idiot: “Just ask the customer.” Midwit: “Let’s do a 20-slide deck, market analysis, user surveys, competitive benchmarking, and pick the perfect framework.” Genius: “Just ask the customer.” When you start learning, overthinking feels like progress. You want to use everything you’ve picked up. But the more you pile on, the further you drift from the only signal that really matters: what your customer wants. YC calls this “midwit behavior.” The hard part isn’t complexity. It’s having the restraint to keep things simple, even when you know enough to make them complicated. The best founders I know don’t sound sophisticated. They sound obvious. Because keeping things simple takes more discipline than making them complex.

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Everyone's panicking about the proposed $100K H-1B visa fee, but here's how I think it will actually play out, especially for startups and tech jobs. If this fee really goes through, the first group to feel the pain will be early-stage startups in the US. These are the teams that rely on immigrant engineers to ship product fast, and suddenly they'd be staring at massive added costs just to keep talent in the country. Many of them won't pay. They'll simply stop sponsoring visas. What happens next? Two things. First, we'd see a lot more remote hiring. Instead of going through the headache of immigration, companies would just open dev offices in India, Eastern Europe, or Latin America and hire directly. Second, we'd likely see a shift in global talent flow, a kind of "brain drain reversal." Fewer people would dream to move to the US, and more would choose to build from home. In a way, this could accelerate the trend we're already seeing: Silicon Valley is no longer just in California. It's everywhere, especially Bengaluru. If this rule passes, that shift just gets 10x faster.

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YC has done a good job supporting ambitious deeptech projects. Seeds sowed over many years are starting to sprout in meaningful ways. Biggest support to founders (esp those building in the physical world) isn’t money - it’s the right advice, network, and peer support.

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One of the best lessons I’ve learned from Paul Graham and YC is to solve one problem for one persona. Don’t chase breadth. Chase depth. Stay with that one problem until people love you for it - not tolerate, not like - love. Love is when your product creates irreversible change. When removing it feels like losing a limb. But here’s the catch. The problem you’re solving has to live in a big market. Otherwise, you’ll build a masterpiece that only a few ever see. Start narrow. Win deep. Then expand. If you’re pre-PMF, this is your whole job. Everything else is noise. #startups #voiceai #dialnexa

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Soham Parekh going viral for working at multiple YC startups at once points to something that’s rarely talked about: overemployment. If you missed it, Soham landed high-paying remote jobs at multiple YC startups by crushing interviews, then doing the bare minimum afterward. And this isn’t new. “Damien,” the anonymous big tech worker, once claimed he held multiple full-time roles at once and did nearly no work at any of them. Yes, it’s on the company if they don’t notice that someone on payroll isn’t pulling their weight. But as a company scales, it becomes harder to track individual output. Being close enough to the work to know how difficult something actually is, or how much someone really cares, is not a trivial task. Remote teams need to overcompensate for that. That might mean more structured check-ins. It might mean building stronger middle leadership. I’m not saying remote teams can’t work. But overemployment is a very real challenge. And it’s worth pointing out the obvious: Overemployment is impossible in person. If someone on your team checks out, you’ll notice it within minutes.

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Why you can’t find a technical cofounder: 1. Your vibe is off. Founders can smell desperation, arrogance, and “I just need someone technical” from miles away. 2. Your pitch sounds like chatgpt and a tedtalk had a boring baby. 3. You treat devs like code vending machines. They want a partner, not a project manager with delusions of grandeur. 4. You haven’t built anything. You’re out here looking for a CTO but haven’t validated the idea, messaged a user, or even made a google form. 5. You're speed-dating for soulmates. Swiping through devs like it’s Tinder for startups won’t work. If you're serious about finding someone to build with, act like someone worth building with. Join the Cherrytree community to find real cofounders.

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Too often YC companies move orders of magnitude slower post YC. I felt this myself even after telling myself this wouldn't happen to me. The experience of doing YC feels like you accomplished something. But in reality, there is a lot more work to be done. During YC, its normal to get a lot of traction in such a short period of time but what founders struggle with is onboarding customers for the sake of traction and onboarding customers that truly make a great fit for your product. You might have to take a step back after program to ask yourself if you're really building a repeatable product which can feel very overwhelming. An important characteristic of founders is not allowing these slumps to get the better of you and making tasks feel surmountable in times of uncertainty. This led me back to getting the basics right: - 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁: Reduce that cortisol, you can't crush goals without taking care of yourself. Sleep, diet, and exercise aren't optional; neither is sanity. - 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀: Each challenging task you conquer builds confidence for the next. Momentum breeds momentum. - 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗹𝘆: Big tasks break down into small steps. Small steps are surmountable steps. Slumps aren't permanent. Tasks aren't insurmountable. You've got this.

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Pat Grady from Sequoia Capital led a $75M Series A last week in OpenEvidence. That’s a huge Series A from one of the best, so I wanted to dig in. “There are a lot of great ideas in health care, but it is such a complex system,”Grady said. “It’s really hard to cut through layer upon layer upon layer.” Let’s skip over the founder story (2nd-time founder with a previous $550M exit) and focus on the product — what got Sequoia excited? Sequoia draws the comparison to a “ChatGPT for doctors,”but focused on research papers that help doctors recommend treatments for their patients. That’s a very different product-led growth strategy than what most investors are seeing in Healthcare AI today. OpenEvidence isn’t bogged down by long sales and adoption cycles in the enterprise. The product is free to sign up for, and onboarding 35,000 doctors per month. “In less than a year, OpenEvidence became perhaps the fastest-growing healthcare business in history. Aside from the iPhone, we believe no technology has been adopted by doctors so quickly. Even more remarkable is that it all happened via word of mouth; the engine of OpenEvidence’s growth is trust.”—Sequoia This kind of product and growth is rare in healthcare. That might give a glimpse into why Sequoia believes OpenEvidence is a different kind of company in a challenging and competitive market.

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