“The companies that are succeeding are the ones that are very nimble. When the world of AI changes, they just change their ideas. Both Giga and Emergent are great examples of that,” Friedman told ET on the sidelines of VibeCon in Bengaluru on April 17.
Friedman said that Giga and Emergent were working on different ideas when Y Combinator funded them. “We are seeing this happen more and more often now. Companies get into Y Combinator, and they are working on idea number one, they might go to idea number two, three, or four, before finally landing on idea number five, which is the one that actually works,” he said.
The best founders, he said, take the learnings from the previous version and roll them into the new version of the idea that makes sense in the current era. According to him, they are seeing the highest rate of success of YC companies ever because there is more opportunity than ever for enterprising people who can find great ideas and move quickly on them.
“I think the folks in India are going to have an advantage because they are such great builders and the most important right now is just being able to build extremely quickly,” he added.
Friedman, along with two partners, Ankit Gupta and Jon Xu, are in India for the first YC Startup School India in Bengaluru.
Currently, almost all of YC’s startups are working in AI. Responding to a query about the lack of diversity, he compared this with the internet era, where most companies didn’t have websites, followed by mobile apps, which now every company has. “AI is going to be exactly the same,” he said.
When it comes to investment themes, one of the things Friedman is excited about is the concept of agent economy. This includes OpenClaw, an open source personalized agentic AI platform, and Moltbook, a reddit-like social media platform for AI agents.
“This concept that AI agents are going to be the economic actors in the world, that the AI agents are going to buy products, and that you could build a startup where your customers are not people, but actually AI. It’s a very crazy sci-fi kind of concept. I think this is a really fascinating idea that people are going to be talking about a lot more in the next couple of years,” he said.