co-founder @getwhiteboardai, a visual canvas for software design (YC W26) past: snowflake, robust intelligence, stanford
SF, Palo Alto
Joined September 2017
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big announcement ⬇️
super pumped to announce that /dev/fast is being acquired by @ChickfilA
after discussions with the team, we realized that we could build the first sovereign christian b2b saas in the world together.
more details below 👇
💯
I think we're going to see a new wave of interest in usability.
Chat is hard on the brain. Total opposite of what Don Norman wrote about. 100% holding in your head, remembering things, special modes, etc.
Nobody wants the stuff in their kitchen to be in a different place each time they walk in.
System of record + recognizable display are not going away. What's new is how fluidly we can change state WITHIN those as users.
Ketan Agrawal retweeted
Today we're excited to launch Fern by @ishikilabs, backed by @ycombinator: high-fidelity simulation platform for robotics!
Robotics teams are bottlenecked by hardware evals. Running evals in the real world is slow and expensive, and building a simulation that's a) high fidelity, b) fast, and c) scales to millions of rollouts is difficult.
Using only 3 teleop episodes, Fern creates a high fidelity simulation that's grounded in both physics and visual fidelity. Then the platform allows you to run thousands of rollouts in parallel through our API, with no infrastructure, sims, or solvers to manage.
One customer has run 900k+ sims on Fern. Hear how their experience has been 👇
If running high fidelity, scalable evals is a need, schedule a meeting with us at fern.bot !
Today we’re shipping plan mode in Whiteboard.
Most agent plans are markdown/HTML files that go stale the moment you start coding.
In Whiteboard, you plan visually with your agent. Once it’s implemented, the plan becomes a review of what was actually built, code attached.
Demo:
Mixed feelings about the new siri.. it's simultaneously leaps and bounds better than the old one, and leaps and bounds worse than frontier personal agents
RT @sidharthkmenon: when is it too early to hire (+ mistakes that a lot of YC startups make)
- it's intuitive to hire talent as soon as yo…
'Make something that people want' is a good pointer, but at a deeper level, i think that's just downstream of caring about your customers. listening to them, not just viewing them in terms of what they can do for you
It's easy to see through someone who behaves transactionally
how to become the type of person who's great with customers (part 1)
- my uncle has a sweet yet badly trained boxer named Buddy. i've been thinking about Buddy a lot lately.
- Buddy learned that if he constantly barks and growls when guests are around, my uncle will eventually cave and give him treats to shut him up. poor Buddy has made his life materially worse by doing this, and he doesn't even know it. by being mean he gets what he wants - treats & pets from my uncle. but the poor guy is missing out on the same good treatment from every other guest who comes to his house.
- I see a lot of folks doing the same thing: behaving transactionally and getting rewarded for it.* I see it all over the startup world - from interacting w customers, to interviewing candidates, to fundraising (oh my god, fundraising - post for another day).
- let's focus on a specific example today: what can Buddy teach us about being kickass at customer support?
- pick a random customer to do this exercise with: step outside the bounds of the normal transactional relationship and push yourself to go a little bit beyond what you'd normally do for them. ask about their life, their partners, their children. write this down if you have to (really!) so you can ask about these things next time you see them.
- I promise that it will pay surprising dividends to treat a random $20 a month customer like a large enterprise customer (other folks like @mynameisyahia have posted about this!)
- people come to you for help when something isn't going right. They will remember how you made them feel in the moment; before you've fixed their problems, you can at least make them feel heard. To quote Thich Nhat Hanh: "the most precious gift we can offer others is our presence."
- ultimately, what makes or breaks you here is caring. in today's day & age, intelligence itself is automatable. if you're the type of person who can demonstrate this sort of care consistently, you have an insane edge over your competition
- however, there's an additional, unintuitive lesson that took me a while to learn: caring for your customer does NOT mean agreeing to everything they say. it means operating in their best interests, even if it means disagreeing with them.
- think of a "waiter at a fine French restaurant" - a great waiter doesn't let you order a bad wine pairing.
* for more reading on this, check out this lovely article from @threepointone: sunilpai.dev/posts/collectin…
Ketan Agrawal retweeted
giving feedback, part 2: what to do when you're not sure what is wrong, exactly
- imo, the hardest feedback to land is what Slava Akhmechet calls "ambient feedback": when something isn't quite right but it's hard to put your finger on exactly why things aren't working with a coworker.
- ironically, this type of feedback is especially difficult to deliver if the receiver is well-meaning and generally good natured. Folks can and will over-index on feedback in a way to please you. Founders should be especially wary of this failure mode -- you can easily end up compromising your teammates' strengths in light of perceived weaknesses.
- An apt quote here from Nathaniel Hawthorne: "easy reading is damn hard writing". It takes a lot of patience and effort to convey thoughts accurately and simply to another person, especially if you want them to change their behavior. If you're anything like me, it's easy to underestimate the asymmetry in how long feedback should take to write vs. read.
- So writing feedback for murky/uncertain failures is really, really challenging. This is not the school essay that you submit in a mad rush a minute before the final deadline. It's going to take time to get right, and you should get comfortable with that.
- Ok, so how do you actually fix these "ambient failures"?
- I recommend starting from a base of great examples of places that didn't feel right to you, even if you don't know exactly why. I learned how to do this from my friend Brian, who is a deft and tactful leader: collate examples from your mentees/employees into a private document which you can reference later. The examples don't need to be grouped or even labeled with what went wrong; a description for your future reference will do.
- Come feedback time, build from these example documents into to themes: when scanning over examples, you will start to group them, somewhat unconsciously, into themes.
- these themes are going to be much more accurate because they are backed up by evidence. It's a lot harder to be defensive when you have concrete examples to point to as well.
- In the worst case, you might notice that the themes start looking like the job description. At that point, a more serious conversation about role fit / performance is warranted.
- Remember, the ultimate goal of feedback is to help the other person get better, so in any case, the feedback must come along with a proposed plan to help someone get there (which involves your assistance!!)
- I personally enjoyed Radical Candor by Kim Scott if you're looking for further reading on how to do this whole process well.
- Ironically, the feedback process (gathering evidence into a document for later analysis) has been surprisingly useful for supercharging our team's coding agent workflow as well, in the form of agentic lints. The specifics here are a poast for another day.
YC was simultaneously such a valuable experience for us, and also something that if done over, we would’ve changed some things about how we approached it
Recommended reading!
how to avoid the mistakes I made during YC, part 1: the pivot
- I recommend that you come into YC with an “inkling of PMF”.
- For context, I entered YC with very little confidence or work done on my original idea. People tell you that going in that you don’t need an idea & pivoting during is totally fine.
- Of course it is fine to pivot – nobody is going to execute you by firing squad if you do. But the success stories (Brex, Deel) obscure the overall survival rate of companies that pivot.
- Look at the facts of how YC is set up: you have 10-12 weeks to scale a company as quickly as possible; to raise a great round in ‘26 you should probably be doing 1M+ ARR.
- it’s not right to perform gymnastics with the definition of ARR. To get to that ARR milestone, your life is going to be 100x easier if you have genuinely made a sale doing your current idea BEFORE going into YC.
- YC partners write about the pivot for a simple reason: they want you to pivot if your idea is bad! If you've spent 10 years working on something, you’re unlikely to pivot. There is definitely truth in this.
- If I were to do YC again, I would certainly have worked on my idea for a bit before entering. There is a sweet spot here - probably a few months, maybe less, to get an inkling of PMF. In my experience these kinds of companies tend to kill it during the batch.
see thermostats as the amazing cybernetic beings they are
Yes, and if you hire an HVAC technician, and when he comes over, he says that he doesn't believe in machines with 'goals' - maybe says "that's mystical thinking, only physics is real" - fire him immediately. Someone who can't *see* thermostats for the amazing cybernetic beings that they are will be very bad at fixing one, making one, or inventing the next one.
Coming soon: your agents can draw interactive, freeform animations in Whiteboard. examples below powered by the Pele rendering library (thank you @kepano for the amazing open-source lib!)
You can click around in the diagram to see the underlying code. And since Whiteboard is a VSCode fork, you get all the power of LSP, goto-definition etc when inspecting the code :)
we throw very good parties
partiful.com/e/UTzv7T1ioGfUC…
