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How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI

How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI

12 segments available

In this recent batch talk, YC General Partner Tom Blomfield breaks down how to build a self-improving company using AI. He'll cover how to create a series of recursive, self-improving AI loops and explain why the founders who get this right will run companies that can improve while they sleep. Chapters: 00:00 — Companies Are Roman Legions 00:54 — Copilots Are the Wrong Mental Model 01:55 — Extract the Domain Knowledge 02:24 — The Recursive Self-Improving Loop 04:12 — The Holy Shit Moment at YC 05:50 — Self-Optimizing Product and Support Loops 06:29 — Burn Tokens, Not Headcount 07:23 — Middle Management Is Over 08:05 — Make Everything Legible to AI 09:40 — Regenerating the YC User Manual 11:19 — Software Is Ephemeral, Context Is Valuable 12:18 — Where Humans Still Matter Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Segments Timeline

1
0:00 - 0:55
0:55 duration168 words

Companies Are Roman Legions

"This is based a little bit off a talk Diana gave. There's a video up over the weekend which is super cool. Um Jack Dorsey was tweeting some stuff like two or three weeks ago that I thought was super c..."

2
0:55 - 1:55
0:59 duration185 words

Copilots Are the Wrong Mental Model

"which I thought was great was it's like this underlying assumption that hierarchically organized companies are the are the way that we should be organizing like our economic units of value. And I thin..."

3
1:55 - 2:24
0:28 duration73 words

Extract the Domain Knowledge

"But like this idea that there's domain knowledge or business knowledge or like some knowhow that's inside the heads of people and in Slack messages and in emails and in notion. All of this like inform..."

4
2:24 - 4:12
1:48 duration352 words

The Recursive Self-Improving Loop

"some it's not something you bolt onto the side of a company. It's not like a tool you give to your engineers to make them more productive. But I think you can reimagine what a company is as a set of r..."

5
4:12 - 5:50
1:37 duration353 words

The Holy Shit Moment at YC

"query the database in different ways and use rag and all sorts of stuff to like come up with five relevant founders for you to meet. But again this is like this is a sidekick right this is an agent th..."

6
5:50 - 6:29
0:38 duration158 words

Self-Optimizing Product and Support Loops

"Just have a self-optimizing like product loop. Or you do it with customer service queries. You have customer suggestions coming in and in and in. you triage it with a kind of you have to have an agent..."

7
6:29 - 7:23
0:54 duration181 words

Burn Tokens, Not Headcount

"implications? One is like burn tokens, not headcount. We are seeing companies get to demo day with about 5x more revenue per employee than they did 18 months ago. And I think that's going to continue ..."

8
7:23 - 8:05
0:41 duration165 words

Middle Management Is Over

"think middle management is done. I just don't think you need middle management for this coordination problem. I think AI should be doing it. And for me, there are two roles. Jack Dorsey has three. I a..."

9
8:05 - 9:41
1:35 duration344 words

Make Everything Legible to AI

"here I'm not sure anyone has a truly self-improving company in every function. I might be wrong. You might prove me wrong. What would I do? First of all, this is really, really important. I would make..."

10
9:41 - 11:20
1:39 duration335 words

Regenerating the YC User Manual

"It was written 5 to 10 years ago, most of it. It's kind of out of date. So, Haj thought uh last weekend, since now we've got about 2,000 hours of recorded office hours in the last 3 months, why don't ..."

11
11:20 - 12:18
0:57 duration201 words

Software Is Ephemeral, Context Is Valuable

"that those as entirely disposable. I would very preciously store all the data. So as Gary said, he puts it all all of his emails in markdown. Never throw anything away, but then treat the the software..."

12
12:18 - 13:29
1:11 duration246 words

Where Humans Still Matter

"and I think the humans sit around the edge of this interfacing with the real world. So it's where this intelligence makes contact with reality. Human beings reach into places the models can't go yet. ..."