Nuel Sam | Kin Cycle

this is my sign. on Oct. 6, after applying to @jointhebridge I had my first interview call with @MaximMatias1 we didn’t advance to the second stage but that call left me with invaluable insights. one of them was to — as Max puts it — make noise on X. after that call, several other people I spoke to echoed the same advice: make as much noise as possible so people know what you’re building. later today, I’ll take that advice and share the story behind what we’re building at @meetmykin: how far we’ve come and how far we plan to go.

i've gotten quite a number of DMs about the founders' group, and i genuinely can't respond to everyone individually. we're keeping it small for now, with a focus on founders who already have a working product and some traction. if that sounds like you, please reach out to @fikayoadeleke with what you're building and how far you've gotten. appreciate everyone who's shown interest.

I didn’t even listen to my parents. You shouldn’t too especially if your parents are poor. Some of us came from absolute nothing. Just grit and persistence.

Everyone that’s building with AI needs to read this NOW!

My hands are itching me, I want to work on a brand identity design so bad, but I don’t want to waste the muse I have right now on something that won’t be used by an actual brand or business. Small business owners or startups, emphasis on small, hit me up, I’m willing to work on a brand identity design for one brand who needs it. FOR FREE !!

If you are a Founder and want to join our community , kindly send a DM to @Thedanieloreofe for access.

one thing about building a startup is that people can genuinely think you’re doing incredibly well while you’re privately going through one of the hardest periods of your life.

We know how ambitious this is. We also know we can’t build it alone. We’re always looking for engineers, researchers, infrastructure builders and partners who want to help build this from the ground up. We’re heavily bootstrapped. There’s no big budget behind us, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But if building Africa’s own AI computing infrastructure, all the way down to the silicon, is a mission you believe is worth your time and effort, I want to hear from you. My DMs are open.

From the warmest parts of our hearts, we want to say Happy Birthday to our Dada❤️🥂

24 hours left to apply to @ycombinator batch. I'm in the F26 batch and YC is the best thing that happened to me. here are some tips for the brave founders applying. - be yourself - be honest - clear and concise answers - don't use jargon and talk in simple English - know what you are taking about in every detail - show quick growth on your business - explain why someone would pay for it - your idea does not matter as much as the vision or the execution - it should be extremely ambitious. like planetary or multi planetary scale vision! - you are the most exceptional person to build your company, explain what makes you exceptional If I can help you, let me know!

Everyone wants to master "Art of Not Giving a F*ck", But my page is for people who want to give more fucks. More fucks about the right things. The things worthy of lots of fucks. Thick desires.

guys, i am thinking, a 30-day cinematic challenge that will run for the whole of November, a very very simple challenge, here is what it entails, you are gonna film just one scene, only one daily, you post it,( i think we should use a hashtag, so i can track so let's use: #trusttheprocess30days ) you don't need a camera if you dont have one, you dont need lights, just film whatever comes to mind for that day, and at the end of the challenge, you will combine the 30 shots, into a cinematic sequence, and tell a story with it. i will figure out what to gift the best sequence, in due time. who is down?

blown away by the quality of applications we've seen this cycle. We're working through them and we'll be in touch! 💙

It’s my birthday 🎂 So I’m giving myself a challenge. 7 days. One mission. Find the next extraordinary founder before the rest of the world catches on. The relentless builders working on something that could change an entire industry. AI, energy, health, or something I haven’t even thought of yet. Surprise me. No pitch decks. No warm intros. Just DM me what you’ve built, who desperately needs it, and why you’re the one to build it. If something blows me away, I’ll move fast. Really fast. We invest $250k-$3m in 1 meeting. Let’s see what I’ve been missing. ⏳

an entirely new country next year wouldn’t be a bad idea.

The deadline to apply for the YC Winter 2027 batch is coming up in 2 days! YC founders get: 🔸 $500K in funding 🔸 $12M+ in tokens, credits & deals 🔸 Partners who were founders first, and will always have your back 🔸 Access to the best founder community in the world 🔸 Help launching your company across YC’s channels, with a combined audience of 6M+ 🔸 Connections to 100s of potential enterprise buyers through YC’s Early Access Network, months before Demo Day 🔸 Hiring through Work at a Startup, with 1.25M+ candidates across engineering, design & product. (Founders have already made 2,000+ hires) 🔸 Demo Day in front of thousands of top investors Apply by Nov 2: ycombinator.com/apply.

I've read maybe ~10,000 YC applications. 8000 for YC admissions/PG quite a few years ago and anther 2000 informally as an alum. There's a new and growing mistake and I want to share why it's more important than you think. By the way - I try not to ever say YC admissions works this way or that way. That's YC's job and they're always changing things and making up their own minds. But I will share my impression and you can see what you think - YC partners, please chime in as well if you like. The YC application is fundamentally an evaluation of a founder's potential. And much less an evaluation of a specific business. (Airbedbreakfast transitioning into Airbnb because Brian, Nate, Joe never give up and never stop listening to their customers) So, in your writing of the application, YOU need to shine through. This batch, I read ~200 applications. I'm guessing over half were significantly written, edited, or polished with AI. That half was easily in the bottom half of my informal rankings, almost every time. To be clear, most were NOT AI slop. I often couldn't tell at first they had used AI. Founders were pouring their heart and soul into their app - so I what I received was high quality. But I think the AI really hurt them. Here's why: Once polished by AI, I as reader lost insight into the personality of the writer. I love the YC application because the questions are the same questions I would ask in office hours or casually to a friend that wanted help with their startup. It pushes the founder out of their pitchdeck/VC talk style into simple worded questions that can be answered simply as well. And great founders shine through when they just write like they talk. The LLM writing made answers feel more like a corporate cover letter, with the personality drained out. The AI-assisted drafts also gave me a sense of mid work. The writing itself seemed like zero standard deviations from the mean. The LLMs had lopped off the outlier portions of sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts. Given the YC App is an outlier detector, a writing tool that lops off outlier writing is the opposite of what you want. And the AI writing was needlessly verbose. Which hurts when a reliable predictor of great founders is that they're deep thinkers and deep thinking shines through in the density of their writing. So... I did an experiment. I asked a bunch of these seemingly AI-assisted app writers to talk with me live. I just asked them the same YC app questions and recorded their answers. I then gave them back the transcripts. Unedited and unpolished. And... OMG! A good number turned from easy no to actual good applications. Magic! Remove AI >> Improve application. This happened BOTH with native English speakers and founders abroad. So this is my recommendation to all of you. Don't let AI touch your application, even for a second. And maybe try the dictation approach with a friend. My apologies to the YC admissions team if you already knew AI-written applications were crap and you were using this insight to help you easily move applications to the No pile. YC's Winter Batch Application deadline is Nov 2nd.

Agree. The founders I back are out of their depth all the time. The great ones don't know more than everyone else. They just trust they can figure it out when things get hard (h/t @drgurner).