Bolt Perspectives | What YC's Founder Says About Founders
Today's topic has nothing to do with AI — it's about founders.
Today's topic isn't about AI — it's about founders. I recently listened to an interview podcast with Jessica Livingston (click "read more" for the original), a co-founder of YC known there as the "social radar," which roughly means she has an unusually sharp eye for people. In YC's early decision-making, the other founders focused more on objective factors like technology, product, and market, while Jessica was primarily responsible for judging the founding team itself.
In this episode, Jessica mentioned several things she pays particular attention to when talking with founders:
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How co-founders interact: Do the founders respect each other?
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Domain expertise: Do the founders have a depth of understanding about the problem they're solving that far exceeds what others have?
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Earnestness and authenticity: Can founders be sincere and transparent when facing tough questions from others, especially the pointed ones they don't have answers to?
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Attitude toward feedback: Are founders open to feedback?
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Commitment and passion: Are founders passionate about the problem they're solving? Do they have the determination to go all in?
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Relentless resourcefulness: Can founders always find solutions and execute quickly with limited resources and limited understanding of the problem?
Thoughts:
In early-stage investing, founders are always the most important factor. This interview didn't contain much that surprised me, but there was plenty that resonated. Bolt has its own core values — they're what we demand of ourselves and what we look for in founders. They map quite well onto what was discussed in this podcast:
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Audacity — daring to break through and challenge limits. On one hand, this resembles what Jessica called commitment. We care whether founders are willing to invest themselves fully in their goals: Are they working full-time? Have they moved to where they need to be to build this? You can deliberate carefully when exploring an idea, but once you've decided to start a company, you go all in with no retreat. On the other hand, building a company is brutally hard. Founders need to take on seemingly impossible tasks from day one, and they need to persevere through difficulties and bravely push boundaries when things look hopeless.
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Agility — rapidly responding to change and iterating. AI is a perfect example of a fast-moving space. As we speak, the field is advancing rapidly. Model capabilities keep evolving, frameworks and tools proliferate, and new competitors and partners emerge daily. Founders need to embrace change agilely, respond accordingly, and keep moving forward. The more practical dimension of agility is that startups always need to optimize under extremely constrained resources and information. Every opportunity has a time window. Even excellent founders sometimes get stuck chasing the ideal solution, leading to paralysis or missed opportunities. So we constantly emphasize avoiding global optimization — instead, execute trials quickly and cheaply, and advance with small, rapid steps.
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Authenticity — open and candid. Being open means founders need to stick to their own path while still hearing others' voices. Others' opinions often provide a different perspective even when they're not directly actionable. Being candid means founders can objectively recognize and acknowledge the current state in conversation, rather than dodging or evading problems. Communication with good partners can bring many things — inspiration, help, various collaborations — but all of it rests on a foundation of candor.
YC was co-founded by four partners in 2005. Nearly 20 years later, it has spanned almost the entire internet and mobile internet eras, supported 5,000 startups, and produced many notably successful cases. This has to do with the opportunities brought by waves of technological development and the industry ecosystem, and of course also with the operating principles and philosophy they've consistently adhered to. Some of the principles mentioned in this podcast can genuinely be called hard-won insights from one of the few large-scale data tests in early-stage investing. Today, standing before this new wave of AI, we as investors have the opportunity to discuss matters of mutual interest with many excellent founders, to feel their passion and authenticity in the process, and to uphold mutually agreed-upon principles in our subsequent collaborations and grow together — this is indeed a fortunate thing in life. Bolt's core goal is to find and support the next big thing, but when facing rapid change and many choices, principles and philosophy remain crucial measuring sticks. With their support, when dreams come true, perhaps the sense of accomplishment we feel will be that much richer. (My WeChat: Can_Zheng)
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Linear Bolt Bolt is an investment initiative established by Linear Capital for early-stage, globally oriented AI applications. It upholds Linear's investment philosophy, focusing on projects where technology drives transformative change, and aims to help founders find the shortest path to achieving their goals — whether in speed of action or investment approach. Bolt's commitment is to be lighter, faster, and more flexible.