Nadia: Walking Into the Room After the $200M Number

MilesAnd I'm still holding my badge, right? Hasn't even scanned yet, and I spot her across the room. Nadia, same nervous energy as before, except now she's got like forty other founders around her instead of just her co-founder.

GrantThis is year one. I'm Grant. That's Miles. And we've been following Nadia since before any of this.

MilesSince before the number.

GrantRight. Nine hundred million on a company that, what? Eight months old?

MilesSomething like that. And the whole valley's been whispering about it ever since. Every founder in that S26 batch got recalibrated overnight.

GrantSo now it's October. New batch. F26 kicks off, three days in-person, San Francisco.

MilesAnd you can feel it in the room, Grant. Nobody's saying the number out loud, but it's sitting there anyway. The number is a ghost.

GrantA two-hundred-million-dollar ghost.

MilesSure, let's call it that.

GrantSo here's what I wanna know walking in. What do they actually tell this class about it?

MilesBecause you can't pretend it didn't happen. Nadia's whole cohort watched it happen in real time.

GrantNo. But you also can't let it set the market for everyone behind it. That's the tightrope YC has to walk with an entire incoming batch.

MilesRight. And not tension. That's the room. You can feel forty people doing math in their heads they don't wanna say out loud.

GrantThat's the room.

MilesOkay, so before we get into what a partner actually says to forty jumpy founders about that print-

GrantBefore we get into what week one even looks like, because it's not what people picture. It's not orientation slides in a welcome packet.

MilesNo. It's badges, strangers, and somebody's co-founder already arguing about seating. Okay, so day one, Nadia lands in San Francisco. And it's not a Zoom link. It's a badge and a room full of strangers.

GrantThree days, right?

MilesAll in person. Three days. YC's own materials on this call it the kickoff. Founders meeting each other, meeting their group partners, meeting the actual YC team for the first time face to face.

GrantI always picture their first morning as pure chaos. Forty founders, badges upside down, nobody knows where the coffee is.

MilesPretty much. But the structure kicks in fast. They split the whole batch into these small partner-led groups. Not one big room forever, smaller sections.

GrantLike assigned seating for your startup life.

MilesKind of, yeah. From what we're hearing about how this batch is run, that's the whole three days. Meet your group, meet your people before anything else happens.

GrantAnd that's the part nobody talks about when they talk about YC, the dinners.

MilesRight. Weekly dinners. That's the house model. Small group, same partner every week.

GrantSo it's not just office hours in a Slack channel.

MilesNo. According to YC's own description of how batches run, those groups share dinner with their assigned partner regularly, and that's where the actual relationships get built.

GrantThe ones that last past Demo Day.

MilesExactly. The bonds that carry into the alumni thing. You end up knowing your ten, twelve group mates way better than the two hundred other founders in the batch.

GrantWhich for Nadia is probably a relief. Small table, familiar faces before she has to think about the bigger picture at all.

MilesRight. And that's the thing. That dinner table is intimate. Ten people, one partner, plates of pasta, somebody's laptop open with their metrics dashboard.

GrantVery glamorous.

MilesBut walk out of that dinner and back into the kickoff hall-

GrantAnd it's a completely different scale.

MilesYeah, because that small group is maybe ten founders. The room she's actually sitting in for orientation-

GrantIs a lot bigger than ten.

MilesYeah, exactly. So imagine standing in a room where you know ten faces cold and everyone else is a stranger with a company you'll probably hear about eventually.

GrantThat's such a strange split, though. Deep trust with nine people, total anonymous with everyone else in the building.

MilesRight. And I think that's actually by design. YC wants you tight with your group, but the batch as a whole is where the culture and the war stories spread.

GrantSo Nadia's not just meeting her nine, she's meeting the room that's going to define how this whole class talks about money for the next three months.

MilesExactly. And that's before anyone said a word about valuations. It's just badges, name tags, small talk. What are you building?

GrantWhich sounds almost quaint compared to what we know is coming later in the week.

MilesIt does, but that's the thing about kickoff. It's deliberately low stakes. No pitching, no pressure, just get people comfortable being in a room together.

GrantBefore you ask them to be vulnerable about their numbers.

MilesRight. You don't hand someone a hard conversation about pricing their round on day one. You let them find the coffee first.

GrantPriorities.

MilesBut by day three, the room's not strangers anymore. That's the whole point of three days instead of one.

GrantSo walk me through the actual shift. Day one versus day three.

MilesDay one, everybody's polite, a little stiff. Day three, people are trading phone numbers and already planning to grab dinner outside the program.

GrantThat's fast for forty strangers.

MilesIt is, but that's kind of the magic of cramming it into three straight days instead of spreading intros out over weeks. Okay, so scale. A founder who wrote up notes on a recent batch put the size at around four hundred founders across two hundred companies.

GrantTwo hundred companies in one batch.

MilesAnd that same founder said they get split into partner-led subgroups of about nine companies each.

GrantNine companies. So Nadia's world is nine, but the room is two hundred.

MilesRight. That's the gap. Everybody in her group of nine probably knows what everybody else is building, what they're raising, who's struggling.

GrantSure. That's just... That's proximity. You eat dinner with the same eight founders every week, you know their business.

MilesBut two hundred companies means she's also sitting in a room with a hundred and ninety-one founders she's never spoken to.

GrantAnd every single one of them has read the same headline she has.

MilesThat's the thing about a number like that. It doesn't need you to know the founder personally to change how you think about your own round.

GrantIt just needs to be in the water.

MilesExactly. And coverage of this application cycle backs up what we already know about the format. Fully in-person, small dinners, alumni speaker nights.

GrantWait, alumni speaker night. We hadn't mentioned that part.

MilesYeah, so beyond the weekly dinners, there are nights where alumni come back and talk to the batch.

GrantSo it's not just partners shaping how people think. It's people who've already been through an exit or a down round or whatever, standing in front of two hundred companies.

MilesRight. And you put a hundred and ninety of those founders in a room with a couple dozen alumni who've seen every version of a valuation spike-

GrantAnd suddenly the two hundred million number isn't just something Nadia's group whispers about at dinner

Miles... it's the thing the entire batch is quietly measuring itself against.

GrantWhich is a very different problem for YC to manage than one dinner table getting spooked.

MilesBecause at nine companies, a partner can talk everyone down individually.

GrantAt two hundred, you need something closer to an actual policy.

MilesRight. You need someone standing up in front of the whole room saying it out loud.

GrantIt's kind of amazing there isn't more chaos, honestly, given how fast information moves through two hundred companies.

MilesBookface doesn't help either. One post about a valuation, and it's read by the whole batch within the hour.

GrantRight. And unlike a normal newsroom, everyone in that thread has skin in the game. They're not just reading about the number. They're about to negotiate their own round in the shadow of it.

MilesWhich is exactly why alumni speaker nights matter more this cycle than most. You need voices in the room who've already lived through a spike like this and come out fine.

GrantSomebody standing up saying, "I panicked about a comp like this too, and it didn't actually matter in the end."

MilesExactly that. Because a partner saying, "Don't worry about it," lands differently than an alum who actually didn't worry about it and it worked out.

GrantSo it's not just structure keeping two hundred companies sane. It's culture, proof that other people already came out the other side of a spike like this.

MilesRight. And that's the setup for what actually gets said in that first big session. So that's the actual size of the thing, four hundred people, two hundred companies, and one print everyone's heard about walking in. So what does a partner actually say to two hundred companies about that number? That's the part I wanna hear. So picture the partner up front, whiteboard behind her, and she just puts it right out there. Nine mothers, two hundred million, whatever people are whispering in the hallway. She names it? She names it, and the message is basically, "Forget the print exists when you're setting your own valuation."

GrantWait, she's saying it out loud in front of the whole batch?

MilesFrom what we're hearing out of that room, a partner explicitly coaching this class to price on their own fundamentals, not on whatever the last batch's outlier deal did.

GrantFundamentals, revenue, growth rate, actual traction.

MilesRight, the boring stuff that actually holds up six months later.

GrantBecause the boring stuff is what your seed investor checks when the term sheet's already signed.

MilesExactly. You can't renegotiate a valuation after the fact just because everyone was pricing off a headline.

GrantOkay, but does anyone actually listen to that in the room?

MilesI mean, forty founders who just watched a comp print blow past every model they built, some of them are gonna anchor anyway. That's human.

GrantYeah, no, I get the instinct. You see one number, and it rewires what feels normal.

MilesWhich is sort of the whole reason she has to say it out loud instead of assuming it's obvious.

GrantFair. So this batch is starting under a very different sky than the one before it funding-wise.

MilesIt's a wild sky. A web piece covering this application cycle frames the whole thing against Anysphere's reported exit, something like sixty billion dollars.

GrantSixty billion.

MilesFor one company. So when a partner tells a room of pre-seed founders to price on fundamentals, she's competing with headlines like that landing in their group chats.

GrantThat's the actual fight then, not the coaching itself. It's the coaching against everything these founders are reading on their phones at lunch.

MilesRight. And you can coach discipline into a curriculum, but you can't coach it out of someone's Twitter feed.

GrantNo, you cannot.

MilesHere's a very concrete version of it. Say you're at pre-seed, doing decent revenue, nothing crazy. Normally, you'd anchor to your actual growth curve.

GrantSure.

MilesNow imagine sitting in a room where somebody just said two hundred million in the same building three weeks earlier, informally, in a hallway conversation. Some founders are gonna walk into their own term sheet negotiation thinking that number is a floor, not an outlier.

GrantEven though nothing about their business resembles that company at all.

MilesRight. That's the anchoring trap in a sentence. The number doesn't need to apply to you to distort what feels normal.

GrantWhich is exactly the trap the show already watched play out with Nadia's own batch.

MilesExactly. That's the connective tissue here. It's not abstract advice. It's advice built directly off a case we've been covering for months. So that's the turn for this batch. The S26 chaos isn't background noise anymore. It's the actual case study. She's not being coy about it.

GrantShe's using our own storyline as the warning label.

MilesBasically, don't be the next print everyone whispers about.

GrantDoes it land, though? Like, do founders actually walk out of that session pricing differently?

MilesWe'll see what Nadia's cohort does when term sheets show up. That's not a week one thing.

GrantTrue. Okay, so that's the pitch inside the room.

MilesNow flip it. Think about how many people even wanted a seat in that room in the first place.

GrantBecause getting coached on fundamentals only matters if you cleared the door to begin with.

MilesRight, and the door this cycle was jammed. So we've covered the door they walked into, but there's a deadline behind that door too.

GrantRight. Before the room, there's the paperwork. Everybody sitting in that kickoff cleared a cutoff first.

MilesJuly 27th. Techclout Africa had a piece out five days before that walking through the deadline for anyone still deciding whether to apply.

GrantCutting it close.

MilesAnd what stuck with me is who was even eligible. Solo founders, people with nothing but an idea, teams that already had traction, all of it.

GrantWhich is wild when you think about who's actually sitting at that kickoff together.

MilesSomeone at the idea-stage next to somebody who's already shipping product to paying customers every month.

GrantSame three days, same partner group.

MilesMhm.

GrantI mean, that's a strange room to walk into. You've got founders who've never had a customer sitting next to founders who've already raised real money.

MilesAnd YC doesn't sort them by stage once they're in. They're all just batch.

GrantRight. No separate track for you're further along.

MilesNope. But nobody really talks about the ones who applied and didn't make that seat.

GrantThere's way more of them than there are people in the room.

MilesWay more.

GrantEvery cycle's the same shape. A flood of applications land against that deadline, and then a small slice actually walks into the building in October.

MilesIt's like watching a stadium empty out until you're left with the people on the field.

GrantAnd that's what people miss picturing week one. They picture the room. They don't picture the funnel that got narrowed down to build it.

MilesIt's not that people just showed up. It's that these are the ones who got through a process most applicants never see the other side of.

GrantWhich changes how you read the dinners, the coaching on the valuation number, all of it. That's happening with people who already cleared a bar most founders never see the other side of.

MilesAnd Nadia is one of them.

GrantShe's one of them.

MilesNo pressure.

GrantNone at all.

MilesSolo founders could apply, idea-stage teams could apply, people with real traction could apply, and still most of them didn't make it through.

GrantDo we actually know the ratio for this batch specifically?

MilesNo. The reporting doesn't break out a number for F '26. It just tells you who was eligible and when the window shut.

GrantFair, but directionally, it's never been close cycle over cycle.

MilesNo.

GrantYou know, I always think about the people who didn't apply at all, the ones who talked themselves out of it before the deadline even hit, sitting on some idea they never sent in.

MilesThat's its own kind of story.

GrantIt is. Maybe a different episode.

MilesNoted.

GrantOkay, so that's how you get in the door.

MilesNow there's a date sitting on everyone's calendar that matters just as much.

GrantWhich one?

MilesSo mark it now. YC's blog posts literally list it, Wednesday, December second, twenty twenty-six.

GrantThat's Nadia's demo day.

MilesThat's Nadia's demo day.

GrantWait, a Wednesday? Feels almost mundane for something that big.

MilesI know. No ceremony to the day of the week. It's just circled on a calendar somewhere in a founder's apartment right now.

GrantAnd everything between here and there is the actual batch.

MilesRight. Building, meeting investors, figuring out if the thing works.

GrantWith that print still sitting in the back of some founder's head the whole time.

MilesMaybe, or maybe by November, nobody's thinking about it anymore.

GrantYou think it fades that fast?

MilesI think a deadline not specific replaces it. You stop worrying about someone else's number when you've got your own countdown running.

GrantFair.

MilesAnd, you know, thinking about the shape of it, Nadia's story started with a yes or no email. This one's different. There's no verdict day. It's just a slow build toward a date that was picked before she even walked in the room.

GrantThat's actually a nice contrast. The S '26 arc was all about waiting for a single answer. This one's about what she does with three months once she already has it.

MilesRight. The tension's shifted from will I get in to what do I build now that I'm in?

GrantWhich is a much longer, quieter kind of pressure. No dramatic verdict, just a hundred small decisions between now and December.

MilesAnd a lot of those decisions are going to run right through that fundamentals conversation from the kickoff.

GrantEvery term sheet she looks at between now and then, she's got that partner's voice in her head. Price on what's real, not on what somebody else's round did.

MilesThat's the whole point of getting that message in week one instead of week ten. It has time to actually sink in before the stakes get real.

GrantI don't think we get a clean answer by December, honestly. Some of it we won't know until the term sheets actually land.

MilesBut at least the room got told what to watch out for. That's more than S26 founders got walking in blind.

GrantThink about where we started this thing. Nadia walking into that room on day one, not knowing anyone yet.

MilesSomebody she's never met is about to become the person she has dinner with every week for three months. And whatever the partners told that room about pricing their own round, that's the thing she's carrying into every conversation from here out.

GrantNot the number from the batch before hers.

MilesNot that number.

GrantSo what actually happens between now and December second?

MilesWe wait, same as everyone else who applied and didn't get in, honestly, except she's the one who's in the room.

GrantThat's the part that gets me. However many people wanted that seat, she's the one standing in it right now.

MilesAnd in a few months, we find out what she built with it. And whatever happens with her round, we'll actually be able to compare it against the number that started this whole arc, apples to apples, same accelerator, different quarter.

GrantWhich is kind of the whole experiment here, isn't it? Whether coaching against an anchor actually works when you test it on the very next batch. December second, circle it.

MilesCircled. So that's it. Nadia's got a date on the wall.

GrantDecember second. That's hers.

MilesNot somebody else's number to react to.

GrantRight. Her own thing to build toward.

MilesI kinda love that for her.

GrantYeah. Me too.

MilesIt's a strange thing to watch happen in real time, somebody go from being defined by someone else's headline to having her own deadline nobody else gets to touch.

GrantAnd we'll be back before December to see how the batch is actually shaping up, not just what they were told on day one.

MilesRight. Because coaching a room is one thing. Watching what forty founders actually do without advice under real pressure is a completely different story.

GrantIf you're in your first year at YC and something like this happened to you, we want it.

MilesEmail us, yearone@heyjmaddow.com. Tell us the moment it changed.

GrantDoesn't have to be dramatic, just real.

MilesAnd if this episode did anything for you, leave us a review. Genuinely helps.

GrantIt does. Alright.

MilesGo check on your own countdown, Grant.

GrantWorking on it