Dalton Caldwell
@daltonc
Founder and Partner @Standard_Cap, Partner Emeritus @ycombinator
After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator. YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul,…
Beluga Labs from YC X25 just launched!
Beluga Labs (@belugalabsai) is building Rippling for content creators, starting with automated taxes & bookkeeping. They're already saving creators thousands in deductions. Congrats on the launch, @ACKForeverYoung and @Jack__Swisher! ycombinator.com/launches/Niz-b…
Paul's questions are always so incisive and sharp. He interviewed us for YC, and I still remember that he had such concise and to-the-point questions. Had office hours with him a few times, and he always got to the heart of the problem in like 5 mins. And @daltonc's direct…
"The easiest thing to do...is to fool yourself." Paul Buchheit talks about how important it is to fail in order to move past failure. Founders are often biased and have a positive outlook that their business will work out, but it's extremely important to confront reality early…
These new Lp(a) drugs seem like they could be a big deal for a lot of people
Standard Capital co-founder speaking at the US capital today
On stage now at @theallinpod / Hill & Valley event in DC: @paultoo 🇺🇸
Announcing Sim v0.3 Templates, knowledge bases, realtime collaboration, and more just dropped 🔻
Every company starts somewhere, and in the case of Cheers, that was half of a rented garage in Orem, Utah. I was just finishing up my CS degree @ BYU when I had the idea for what became Cheers. I stopped going to classes (still somehow graduated), and went all in on an idea that…
Congratulations @kul on launching Phosphor Capital! I've know Kulveer my whole life and it's not surprised me that he's been consistently rated as one of the absolute best investors by YC founders every batch. Former founders make the best investors ❤️ techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/y-c……
Kulveer is an amazing human being and a great investor in YC startups, and I am so excited to see what he is doing with Phosphor Capital!
I wrote about how @ZeusLiving (YC S11) survived the pandemic in a thread that went viral with over 2M views. Here's the update and what I'm up to next. 2021: Zeus survived COVID 2022: Chewed glass & made the portfolio profitable 2023: Sold Zeus to @theblueground (40,000+ homes)…
DoorDash (S13) is now a $100B company!
YC Group Partner @paultoo shares what a great company like @DoorDash (YC S13) looks like at the earliest stages: blog.ycombinator.com/doordash-from-…
From YC W22
Workflow86 (@workflow86) is an AI workflow engineer that takes natural language descriptions of business processes and automatically creates fully configured automations with forms, tasks, AI steps, integrations, and more. Just describe what you need, and it handles the rest.
One thing a lot of interesting people have in common is they made unconventional long term bets that ended up working out.
Not many people know this, but OpenAI was actually started at YC in 2015, and was initially known as "YC Research". We were concerned that all of the AI technology would be locked up inside of one company (Google), and so created a "moonshot" effort to make the technology…
Pleasure to come by the YC AI Startup School today! I'm told the recordings will be up "in the coming weeks", I'll link to it then and include the slides. Thank you YC for organizing and bringing together an awesome group of builders! events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus Fun fact is that…
Congratulations to Extend from the YC W23 batch. Incredible customer logos, incredible growth rate. Way to go, Kushal!
PDFs suck. We just raised $17,000,000 in funding to fix this problem once and for all. Extend is building the modern document processing cloud. See how Brex, Square, Checkr, and Fortune 500s use it to process millions of documents:
Founders, just one office hour with @paultoo or @daltonc can change the trajectory of your company, and to have both of them on your side, is game changing! What an unbelievable combo! Had the fortunate chance to work with PB as our group partner when we went through YC, and…
After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator. YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul,…
you should talk to dalton, he's got to be one of the best folks in venture. when my first company went through yc and the first thing did not work, i sort of obsessively internalized dalton saying "don't die" over & over. i tried like 20 pivots over 4 years until i went…
After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator. YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul,…
This is big news. I've known Dalton and PB for almost 20 years, and they both consistently have new insights about technology and startups. This is going to change Series A.
After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator. YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul,…
Dalton + PB is going to be a formidable combination. Each of them would be the smartest partner at a normal VC firm.
After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator. YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul,…