FounderMode

YC founders aren’t just using AI—they’re hiring it. From coding and QA to outbound, research, and strategy, founders are wiring up agentic pipelines and custom “AI employees” to move faster with a human in the loop. This post curates how they actually work: where they delegate, how they structure agents, and the playbooks that keep shipping continuous.

AI has made building software—and even full internal tools—shockingly fast. So where do real moats come from now? YC founders share how they’re shifting strategy: going deep on verticals and workflows, leaning into hard tech, building proprietary data and internal agents, and treating sales, trust, and taste as core defensibility.

Software moves at the speed of deploys. Hardware and deep tech move at the speed of physics, procurement, and regulation. Eight YC founders explain how timelines, validation, and go-to-market work when you’re building with atoms instead of abstractions—and how to survive the grind.

Everyone speculates about the most “high-signal” YC companies. But when you ask founders who they actually admire in their own batch, very different patterns emerge—generosity, boldness, usefulness, and grit. We compiled the shoutouts from 26 Human Behavior interviews to build a real Wall of Love from inside W26.