Steven Tey

5% of YC startups reach a $1B valuation. That's insane and it highlights how rare breakout success is even within elite accelerator cohorts. For founders, this underscores the importance of focus, capital efficiency, and building product–market fit. For investors, it reinforces the need for portfolio diversity and long-term support. Small, consistent advantages matter more than chasing a unicorn. Here's the math: if you invest in the top 5% of YC startups, you 100x your money. For example, if you invest $10k, it turns into $1m, each time you can buy 2-4 Ferraris While if you are on the other side it will turn into $500m-$1b, while you have roughly 1 in 300 million chances of winning the lottery Of course it's not pure luck - if you're in YC it's because you created your own luck, and you can create more to be in the top 5% (like Screenpipe) Why aren't you applying to YC?

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You shouldn't need to play postman after every client meeting. But for most firms, if one team member meets a client, someone still has to manually share the recording with the rest. That means delays, missed context, and duplicated effort. Smart Share fixes it. When it's on, Vinyl automatically shares external client meetings with your team so everyone has access to the right conversations, even if they weren’t in the room. Internal team meetings stay private (unless you choose to share them) ✅ Only shares with active team members ✅ Guests and external users are excluded ✅ Shared meetings only become visible after the meeting date ✅ Keeps sharing within the same team ✅ Set it once, and it runs in the background You still have control at the meeting level to change meetings from Shared to Private in just a click. https://www.usevinyl.com

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One of my favorite new tools for AI prototyping is Reforge Build. I have a long relationship with the folks at Reforge and they've purpose-built something for prototyping features for *existing* products. There's a big difference between the Lovable/Bolt/v0 stack (which I also love) and what Reforge is doing here. Reforge helps you iterate on what you already have and understands context from your product, customers, research, data, etc. Many of us work in product teams where we're not building something from 0-to-1 on a blank canvas. We have design systems, PRDs, strategy, specs, customer feedback... and the current crop of builders just fails miserably with all that information. This is one of the first products that's built for product teams and NOT for solo builders. It's also built for exploration and validation, not YOLO-ing something right into production. If the hardest job of the PM is to learn what's worth building then this tool helps solve that problem. There are a few features I really like in their new release: -> Design System import. You can connect to Figma OR describe your design system and it pulls in all of it to build you a real prototype that looks like your product. -> Context. We all know context matters a ton with AI. Now you can add and store it in Reforge Build: customer feedback, product knowledge, data schema, strategy documents... all of it. -> Expert Planning. Before it starts building you can be guided through a structured breakdown that defines user needs, metrics, layout priorities, interactions, etc. The first output is then close to your vision. -> Variants! Who wants one prototype when you can have FOUR? This feature gives you multiple design directions to help you find the best solution (not just the fastest one). This works really well with teams too. You can turn any prototype into a reusable template for you and your team then collaborate (share, comment, remix, etc.). Reforge is completing the product development loop by adding Build to the already-existing Research and Insights tools. When I'm vibe-coding a small application I turn to v0 or Lovable... but when I'm building for an established product it's 100% Reforge Build. Thanks to Brian Balfour, Chun Jiang and all the other team members at Reforge who are absolutely cranking on these awesome products. Link below plus a free month as a sponsor of my newsletter! Check out Reforge Build and get 1 month free with code BUILD: https://lnkd.in/gwE_ej6T

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July was Walnut's biggest shipping month. Here is what landed, grouped by what it helps you do: Build with AI. AI Mode got a major upgrade. More editing powers, open by default, now in Playlists and Deal Rooms. Plus inline AI writing for every annotation: describe the tone, get the copy. Wow your buyers. Demos export as MP4 or GIF with one click. Screenshots and charts become real interactive elements. Text types out like a real person. The camera zooms into what matters. Guide markers glide between steps. Stay in control. Publish Deal Room and Playlist changes only when you are ready. Organize your library with drag and drop. Export everything to CSV. Bulk-add allow and block lists in seconds. Open up more opportunities. Create Deal Rooms from scratch for any account, lead, or contact — from first discovery to post-close. Make it yours with Dark Mode across the whole app. Over 20 (!) impactful updates. 🌟 Most voted by customers on the public roadmap 🌟. Full breakdown in the comments.

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AI is changing the structure of most companies we see. Lots more coming from us on how startups can build faster, leaner teams -- and where we see all of this going. Great piece from Pete Flint to kick it off: https://lnkd.in/dcUebcJj

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Gating your product demo behind a signup form is one of the biggest conversion killers out there. Took us a while to act on it. But once we added interactive demos directly to our landing pages at Okteto, the difference was immediate. And the data backed it up. We built ours with Navattic. Big fan of how they handle code-centric experiences specifically. They just published a video on how Okteto uses it (thanks y'all!), link in the comments if you're curious.

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Sometimes a VC passes because they already backed someone too close to you. It may have nothing to do with your company. Same market. Same customers. Adjacent technology. Enough overlap to create a conflict. Founders often take this as rejection. Don’t. Before pitching a fund, check its portfolio. If there’s overlap, ask about it early. Some passes are about protecting the portfolio, not judging your startup. NUK! #VentureCapital #Founders #Fundraising #Startups

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My journey in partnerships... from: App Ecosystem at HubSpot → building product partnerships at HeyGen (AI video that's actually agentic and fun). The old SaaS world and this new wave are coming together (and tanking markets 😅). If you're in Partnerships, or just trying to figure out where this all heads next... I wrote up some thoughts about what's next. HINT... 2026 will involve a non-human buyer strategy. (Check the post linked in the comments)

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