Sublime

Was Chatting With a Well-Known Founder Yesterday About the "Founder...

Introducing Embedded Intelligence - and a $10M seed from General Catalyst, Valor, SV Angel & Others https://t.co/riRnTEWiM3

Sitch, founded by Nandini Mullaji, just raised $2 million in pre-seed funding led by A16z Speedrun to bring personalized, swipe-free dating to a wider audience. Users pay up front for setups — $90 for 3, $125 for 5, or $160 for 8 — vetted by a chatbot trained on Mullaji’s real-life matchmaking experience. If they're ghosted, they get a refund.

So here's the story of how we missed Airbnb, one of the best startups to come our way in the past few years.

The Airbnb founders came out of the winter 2009 Y Combinator class. They came to see us during their time at YC. They told us about a great stunt they pulled at the Democratic Convention in Denver (in which Obama was nominated). They bought a... See more

For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that worked well.