🚀160+ Startups, One Big Trend at YC

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📘Ben Horowitz’s High-Stakes Leadership Playbook

Being a CEO is not about perfect org charts or flawless OKRs—it’s about making impossible choices when both options look like failure.

Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, shares rare lessons from near-death startup battles, billion-dollar turnarounds, and decades of coaching founders.

🔑 Key takeaways from his playbook:

⚡ Why “founder mode” is both right—and dangerously wrong
⚡ The viral origin of Good PM/Bad PM (born out of frustration)
⚡ The one trait that predicts CEO failure
⚡ Why leaders must run toward fear, not away
⚡ Where the next big AI startup opportunities still remain
⚡ His mission to provide pensions for hip-hop pioneers (Paid in Full)

👉 Leadership is not about comfort—it’s about resilience in the face of the abyss.

📌 Explore the full playbook and insights here.

🚨 Google’s 64-Page Guide to Building AI Agents

Google has released one of its most comprehensive resources yet—an end-to-end playbook for moving from AI agent experimentation to scalable production.

📑 Inside the guide:

⚡ Build with the Agent Development Kit (ADK)
⚡ Deploy via the Agent Starter Pack + Vertex AI Agent Engine
⚡ Ensure reliability with AgentOps (CI/CD, evaluation, observability)
⚡ Scale across teams using Agentspace

Unlike flashy demos, this resource focuses on agents that actually run in production.

📌 Access the full 64-page guide here.

👉 A must-read for professionals building enterprise-ready AI agents.

🚀 160+ Startups, One Big Trend at YC

After 20 years, Y Combinator continues to set the benchmark for startup acceleration:

📊 $800B+ in combined market value created
🦄 6.5% of startups become unicorns (vs. 0.1% industry average)
💰 25% of YC unicorns reach $10B+ valuations
📈 Founders are 45% more likely to raise Series A funding

This batch highlights one undeniable trend—AI dominates. Over 60% of startups mention AI in their tagline.

🔎 Sector breakdown:

⚡ 25+ in B2B infrastructure & dev tools
⚡ 20+ in engineering, product & design
⚡ 15+ in B2B productivity
⚡ 10+ in healthcare
⚡ 10+ in sales & marketing
⚡ 10+ in consumer startups
⚡ 8+ in fintech
⚡ 8+ in supply chain & logistics
⚡ 6+ in real estate & construction
⚡ 3+ in B2B security
⚡ 3+ in education

In YC’s early years, consumer apps led the way. Today, B2B infrastructure and AI tooling dominate, reflecting a VC shift toward enterprise software, valued at higher, more predictable multiples (8–12x revenue vs. 3–5x for consumer).

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📚 Paul Graham’s Startup Playbook for Founders

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, has backed 4,000+ startups worth over $600 B. His essays are a goldmine of concise, timeless advice for anyone building a company.

• ⚡ Startup Basics – From Startup in 13 Sentences to 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups, learn the fundamentals that keep companies alive and growing.

• 🚀 Founder Experience – Do Things That Don’t Scale and Founder Mode capture what it truly takes to win early users and lead under pressure.

• 💰 Investment – Master investor relations with How to Convince Investors and Startup Investing Trends.

• 💡 Ideas & Products – Ideas for Startups and Be Good remind founders that curiosity and product love beat hacks.

👉 Read one essay a day to sharpen strategy and stay ahead in the startup game.

🎯 Startups Buzz

🎯 The Startup “Heresy Map” Every Founder Should Make

Breakthrough ideas rarely live in the obvious—they hide in the “forbidden zones” everyone dismisses as crazy, impossible, or wrong. Paul Graham calls them the dead zones of innovation—exactly where billion-dollar startups are born.

👉 Read how to spot heresies in your market (and turn them into opportunity) here.

🎯 The Startup Toolkit Top Founders Don’t Want You to Miss

A curated set of battle-tested resources every entrepreneur should use—covering everything from fundraising and MVPs, to pitch decks, scaling strategies, and lessons from billion-dollar startups. These aren’t theory—they’re playbooks trusted by YC founders, top VCs, and world-class operators.

👉 Explore the full toolkit here and level up your startup journey.

🎯 The Top 50 Angel Investors Behind Today’s Unicorns

A curated list every founder should know—these are the investors who spotted billion-dollar potential before anyone else. From PayPal and Facebook co-founders to YC leaders and serial operators, these angels turned early-stage bets into some of tech’s biggest success stories.

👉 Explore the full list and learn who to watch.

🎯 10 Lessons from Building a $32M Remote Team

A curated set of insights every founder should know—covering everything from hiring top talent remotely and creating accountability, to maintaining culture, scaling operations, and maximizing productivity across time zones. These aren’t theory—they’re playbooks drawn from running a 68-person remote team doing $32M in annual revenue.

👉 Explore all 10 strategies to build your high-performing remote team.

🎯 WEB PICKS

💰 Microsoft’s Secret Plan to Pay Publishers for AI Content
Microsoft is negotiating a marketplace that rewards publishers when Copilot uses their content—could reshape AI content economics.

📸 Google Lets You Talk to Your Photos—AI Just Got Personal
Android users can now edit images with text or voice in Google Photos, making AI image editing effortless.

🏛️ Meta Launches Super PAC to Fight AI Laws—What They Don’t Want You to Know
Meta’s new political group targets state-level AI regulations, signaling the high stakes of AI policy battles.

🚁 This Startup Just Raised $130M to Build Drone Swarms That Think Together
Auterion’s Nemyx creates a unified software standard for fully coordinated autonomous drones, pushing AI robotics forward.