A bunch of my founder friends lost their soul to Y Combinator. They entered it passionate about building a company. Then came the question of what to build. And then a YC partner tells them something like this: "You're ex-Google, you should build a devtool. With your background you'll raise easily." So then the founder, who originally wanted to build a dating app, gets told to build an AI devtool instead. Or WORSE, they go build some random ai b2b saas because it's on the "request for startups" list, and a year later it's gone nowhere. Let's be real lil bro, you're not passionate about building a vector database. OK, maybe a few nerds genuinely are, and I respect them. But most of the "AI agent for accounting" founders I meet don't care about accounting at all. The YC partners have a list of categories that are hot and will get funded for sure, and they just mix and match founders to that list. Founder-market fit turns into a matching game. I've watched founders raise $10M and still have no effing clue what they're building. Most of them quit in a few mons and back to openai. Most young founders would be much better off building in a space they're excited about, because that excitement and curiosity will keep you going when it starts to get really tough. Disclaimer: I'm not anti-YC, I actually angel in a lot of YC startups. But if you need someone else to tell you what to build, money doesn't fix that problem. Building @hellyeah_ai with @Doudoujay and team: @lwqconnie @lololalahaoran @anitawu001 @YChahahahaAI @MuvaniaJaya @Antiaefuj @MarcoFerna60597

I grew up in china and am now building companies in the US. The environment for entrepreneurship in each nation is radically different. I find the US has a very high tolerance for founder failure. In the Bay, people don't care if you've failed multiple startups. If anything, it's like a badge of honor. I angel in a lot of YC companies, and many of them will fail. When that happens in the US, the founder shuts it down, starts a new entity, and raises from a new group of investors. Investors buy this narrative of "I tried, it didn't work, let's move on." Chinese culture doesn't tolerate this kind of failure. In China, the mindset is closer to "I have to succeed." Founders keep a struggling startup alive far longer than a US founder would. And if they do start a new entity, the previous investors usually get taken care of with equity in the new company, so it's never really a clean restart. As someone who has seen both sides, I believe the Chinese approach drives a lot more competition and creates a culture of extreme persistence. It means your team doesn't even consider "quitting" as a viable option. They will do whatever it takes. Today, I'm building Hellyeah AI. We're a US company, and I like building here. But the team I want to build is the one that doesn't even think of quitting as an option. The team that doesn't think of quitting: @Doudoujay @hellyeah_ai @lwqconnie @lololalahaoran @anitawu001 @YChahahahaAI @MuvaniaJaya @Antiaefuj @MarcoFerna60597