Yesterday, Shiwani and I had the chance to attend Y Combinator Startup School in Bengaluru.
An incredible room. YC partners and founders from India's most promising startups, all sharing their journeys without filters, without pretense.
What Actually Stays With You
The fundamentals, it turns out, are surprisingly simple.
Build with intent and clarity. Experiment relentlessly until you find that clarity. Obsess over your customers, and handhold your first ones. Their trust is non-negotiable. At Heisenbug, that obsession and intention are at the core of everything we do. Hearing it said out loud in that room didn't feel like validation. It felt like a reminder that we're asking the right questions.
And never waste a good failure. Mukund Jha didn't build Emergent on the first try. It took four failed startups to get there. There is something deeply reassuring about that. Not because failure is romantic, but because it means the path is allowed to look messy before it becomes clear.
There was a lot of talk about AI. Most of it was encouraging rather than alarming. The point that landed hardest: when the build itself becomes easier, the real moat becomes the ability to decide fast. To know what to build before anyone else does. The tools democratize execution. Judgment is what separates the outcomes.
Surround yourself with smart people. Learn shamelessly. Keep moving.
One question from a speaker that still lingers with us: Do you let the struggles of the world happen to you, or do you have the audacity to show the world what you have to offer?
The Audience Was Just as Powerful
Honestly, the stage wasn't the whole story.
Someone in the audience was routing his work laptop's $600 Claude limit through a proxy to build his own thing on the side. Another was doing a remote internship mid-semester to fund his master's in Germany. Everyone had a story. Everyone was already moving.
Being in a room where someone else's reality is your dream doesn't intimidate you. It expands you. It shows you what's possible. That's the kind of energy that's hard to put into words, but easy to carry forward.
The Email
Saurabh mailed the YC partners from the event itself, with a subject line that said exactly what we were both feeling: The room is electric, let's not let it die there. He suggested how a community of the attending builders could keep this energy going beyond the event.
Jared Friedman replied within minutes.
It's a good idea. We talked about it but weren't able to put the pieces in place this time. Hopefully next time we'll do it.
That says a lot. Not just about the idea, but about the kind of people who run YC and the culture they've built around it.
P.S. The owl in the photo is a souvenir from a new friend we made there. 🦉
