Sachin Rekhi is a Silicon Valley product management authority, serial entrepreneur, and the voice behind one of tech's most-read PM newsletters. He co-founded and grew LinkedIn Sales Navigator from $0 to $200M+ ARR, built and sold two companies (Anywhere.FM to imeem; Connected to LinkedIn), and now runs Notejoy with his wife Ada Chen Rekhi while training 10,000+ product managers through his newsletter, courses, and podcast.
YouLearn is an AI-powered personalized tutoring platform built by students, for students. Founded by three college friends frustrated with outdated lecture videos and generic AI tools, YouLearn transforms any learning material - PDFs, YouTube videos, lecture slides, even photos - into concise notes, adaptive quizzes, and an interactive AI tutor. With 2M+ users globally, $770K ARR, and backing from Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch, YouLearn is building what they call a modern-day Aristotle: a lifelong AI tutor that grows alongside each student.
Zarna is building the first cohort of AI associates for private capital - autonomous agents that plug directly into a firm's data and work like a deal team that never sleeps. Founded by four UC Berkeley alumni who were previously forward-deployed engineers at AEA Investors, Zarna automates the grunt work of private equity: tearing down CIMs, building LBO models, drafting IC memos, updating CRMs, and surfacing warm introductions. Backed by Y Combinator (F25), the platform recovers ~80 hours per week for 15-person deal teams and promises full ROI in under 90 days.
Paul Graham is a programmer, essayist, and co-founder of Y Combinator, the seed accelerator that launched Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, and OpenAI. He sold his first startup Viaweb to Yahoo for $49.6 million in 1998, then used that platform to build one of the most influential idea-factories in tech history. His essays at paulgraham.com have become the de facto canon of startup culture, read by millions of founders seeking clarity on how to build, think, and live.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and one of the most consequential figures in the artificial intelligence era. A Stanford dropout who built his first startup at 19, Altman ran Y Combinator for five years before going all-in on OpenAI's mission to build safe superintelligence. He survived a dramatic 5-day ouster from his own company in 2023, returned to thunderous employee support, and has since steered OpenAI to a $300 billion valuation. He holds no equity in OpenAI, yet built a $3+ billion personal fortune through early bets on Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, and a cluster of deep-tech moonshots.
ZeroEntropy is the AI infrastructure company fixing the broken retrieval layer of modern AI applications. Founded in 2024 by Ghita Houir Alami (CEO) and Nicholas Pipitone (CTO), the San Francisco–based startup builds rerankers, embedding models, and end-to-end search infrastructure that outperforms Google, OpenAI, Cohere, and Voyage on public benchmarks. Backed by Y Combinator (W25) and a $4.2M seed round led by Initialized Capital, ZeroEntropy's products — zerank-2, zembed-1, zsearch, and ze-onprem — are used by enterprises including Assembled (serving Stripe, Canva, Robinhood, and Notion). The company's proprietary zELO training methodology, derived from chess Elo ratings and the Thurstone statistical model, produces models with calibrated relevance judgments that binary labels cannot replicate.
Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear — a $1.25B unicorn project management tool trusted by 66% of Forbes' top 50 AI companies, including OpenAI, Ramp, and Vercel. A Finnish designer-turned-engineer who grew up questioning why everyday objects look ugly, attended 5,000-person LAN parties as a child, and turned that instinct into one of the most respected product careers in Silicon Valley. After shaping the visual language at Coinbase and Airbnb (Cereal typeface, Design Language System, Lottie, Google Material Design Award), he co-founded Linear in 2019 with two fellow Finns from Helsinki — and built it to 20,000+ customers and $100M+ ARR while staying profitable the entire time. His philosophy: quality is the growth strategy, tools embed opinions so choose accordingly, and the best MVP in a crowded category isn't minimal — it's sharply opinionated for a specific audience.
Orange Slice AI (YC S25) is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform that uses real-time web signals to find high-intent prospects for B2B sales teams. Co-founded by Kishan Sripada and Vihaar Nandigala — who met on a Bollywood dance team at the University of Michigan — the platform lets sales teams generate targeted lead lists using plain English, enrich existing lists with live data, detect niche buying signals before competitors, and manage pipelines through conversation. Backed by $5.3M in seed funding co-led by 1984 Ventures and Moxxie Ventures, with Paul Graham as an angel investor, Orange Slice has attracted 5,000+ sales and RevOps teams including Oracle, Confido Health, Pirros, and Glass Health.
Harper (YC W25) is an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage that turns the $100B+ industry of email and spreadsheets into a fully autonomous engine for Main Street America. Co-founded by Dakotah Rice and Tushar Nair — two Goldman Sachs alumni who swore they'd never work in insurance — Harper uses its internal AI platform, Harper Hub, to automate form completion, carrier matching across 160+ carriers, underwriter follow-ups, and client communications. The result: 1–2 day quotes instead of 5–7, 85% success rate on traditionally 'uninsurable' cases, 5,000+ businesses covered across 35 states, and 1,000+ customers handled per month versus 20–30 for a typical human brokerage. Backed by $54M in total funding led by Emergence Capital, Peak XV, and Y Combinator. Named after Dakotah's mother's maiden name.
Autosana AI is the first agentic QA platform for iOS, Android, and Web. Founded by Yuvan Sundrani and Jason Steinberg in June 2025 and backed by Y Combinator (S25 batch), Autosana replaces brittle test scripts with AI agents that navigate apps like real users, described in plain English. The company raised $3.2M in February 2026 from YC, Pioneer Fund, Phosphor Capital, DeVC, 468 Capital, and angels including Paul Graham. Revenue is growing 100%+ month over month, and the platform now protects apps serving over 100 million daily active users. The name comes from the Latin 'autosana' — to heal oneself — reflecting tests that evolve alongside the product rather than breaking on every UI change.