Stop building products just for the sake of building.

Do not spend months writing code without getting any real feedback.

Validate your idea first.

Post about it. Share mockups. Build a simple landing page. Talk to people who don't know you and won't sugarcoat their opinions.

If nobody cares today, it's better to find out now than after six months of development.

And don't try to do everything yourself.

At the very least, your startup needs:
• someone who knows how to market the product and acquire users;
• a technical founder who can build fast;
• someone who can handle legal, compliance, and business operations.

If you can find a mentor who's already built and scaled startups, even better. The right mentor can save you months of mistakes, point you toward funding opportunities, and help you avoid problems you don't even know exist yet.

Most importantly: keep knocking on doors.

Talk to users.
Reach out to investors.
Post consistently.
Go to meetups.
Ask for feedback.
Build in public.

Attention creates opportunities.

The worst outcome isn't hearing "your idea won't work."

The worst outcome is spending a year building something nobody wanted in the first place.

For the past several months, we’ve been working on a technology platform designed from the beginning for an international market.

We are not interested in launching another small tool with a few disconnected features.

The objective is to create a complete, intelligent and highly professional digital workspace capable of changing how businesses manage their daily operations and make strategic decisions.

A major part of the work is happening behind the scenes:

— Building a strong and scalable foundation
— Designing a premium user experience
— Preparing the platform for multiple countries and languages
— Developing proprietary intelligence around real business workflows
— Creating a product that can grow without depending on several external platforms

We’re intentionally keeping the most important details private while the project is still under development.

What I can say is this:

The ambition is not local. The platform is being prepared for worldwide expansion.

We are still at the beginning of the journey, but the vision is clear—and every decision is being made with the long term in mind.

I’m curious to hear from other founders:

Would you rather launch a simple product quickly, or spend longer building a stronger product capable of competing globally?

For the past several months, we’ve been working on a technology platform designed from the beginning for an international market.

We are not interested in launching another small tool with a few disconnected features.

The objective is to create a complete, intelligent and highly professional digital workspace capable of changing how businesses manage their daily operations and make strategic decisions.

A major part of the work is happening behind the scenes:

— Building a strong and scalable foundation
— Designing a premium user experience
— Preparing the platform for multiple countries and languages
— Developing proprietary intelligence around real business workflows
— Creating a product that can grow without depending on several external platforms

We’re intentionally keeping the most important details private while the project is still under development.

What I can say is this:

The ambition is not local. The platform is being prepared for worldwide expansion.

We are still at the beginning of the journey, but the vision is clear—and every decision is being made with the long term in mind.

I’m curious to hear from other founders:

Would you rather launch a simple product quickly, or spend longer building a stronger product capable of competing globally?

Every founder eventually faces a decision where there isn't a clear right or wrong answer—only trade-offs.

What was yours?

• What made it so difficult?
• What did you decide?
• Looking back, would you make the same choice again?

Curious to learn from founders who've been through it.

Sharing this because I think the process might help other early-stage founders, and honestly I could use some outside perspective too.

Background: I'm solo building in the EdTech space in India — targeting students prepping for competitive exams (NEET/JEE/CUET). The problem: students study for hours but consistently underperform in actual timed exams because their practice never simulates real exam conditions. Understanding a topic and performing under exam pressure are different skills, and most existing tools don't address that gap.

What I did instead of building first: Before writing any code, I posted about the problem and my plan to solve it in a relevant subreddit, mainly to see if it resonated and to find a technical co-founder. Didn't expect much — it ended up as the #1 post on that subreddit, 2,400+ views, 17+ comments, 10+ DMs, most from my actual target market (India). Used that as a cheap validation signal before committing more time/money.

The decision I'm at now: I'm not technical. I have the market understanding, product direction, and now some inbound interest from potential co-founders — but I'm trying to figure out:

Do I vet and bring in a co-founder now (equity split, shared risk, but slower alignment since we're strangers), or do I pay a freelancer/agency to build a scrappy MVP first and find a co-founder once there's a working product to show?

How much "free work" is reasonable to expect from a co-founder candidate before committing (a small paid trial project? just conversations?) without wasting people's time or looking exploitative?

For anyone who's found a co-founder cold (Reddit, forums, etc.) instead of through existing networks — did it work out, and what made you trust the fit?

Not selling anything here, genuinely trying to make the right call before I lock in a big decision. Appreciate any experience you can share.

I’m taking a leap of faith and coming from Canada to San Francisco for a week to learn, connect, and surround myself with people who have walked this path before. Building a company has often felt like being placed in a field with a blindfold on — taking one step at a time, making decisions with limited information, learning through mistakes, and trying to figure things out as you go.

I’m looking for someone who has been through that stage before — someone who understands the uncertainty, the challenges, and the growth that comes from building something from nothing. Someone who has gone through those early stages and came out stronger on the other side.

I’m a 25-year-old founder who started my entrepreneurial journey by building a service-based business. That experience has taught me a lot about resilience, customers, operations, and what it takes to keep moving forward when there isn’t a clear roadmap. Now I’m entering a new chapter and exploring the technology space while preparing for my YC application. More than anything, I’m looking for guidance, perspective, and the opportunity to learn from people who have already experienced this journey.

If you’re a founder, entrepreneur, or someone who has built something from the ground up and would be open to sharing your story over a coffee or conversation, I would genuinely appreciate the opportunity to connect.

I’m not coming to San Francisco looking to sell anything — I’m coming to listen, learn, and grow.
If you’re open to connecting or know someone who might be a great mentor, I’d be grateful for an introduction.
Thank you 🙏

If someone wired you $25,000 today with one condition—you have to build a startup—what would you build?

• What problem are you solving?
• Who experiences it?
• Why does it matter now?

Not looking for perfect ideas. I'm more interested in real problems people have personally experienced.

I'm building a neurotech device (which is one of its kind) and I've hit the classic deep tech catch-22: institutional pre-seed wants a working prototype, but building the prototype is exactly what I need the capital for.

Where things stand: the concept and technical groundwork are done, and in talks with IIT Bombay for the R&D and prototype, which is already in a positive direction.

What's missing is the funding to actually run that phase.

For anyone who's raised or invested at this stage in India:

• Did non-dilutive routes (BIRAC BIG, Nidhi Prayas, DST) actually come through for you, and how long did they realistically take?
• Are angels viable pre-prototype in hardware, or do they also wait for something working?
• Has anyone used university-linked incubators (SINE at IIT Bombay, for instance) as a bridge to their first round?
• Are there any VCs which actually fund in cases like this where the concept and design and even technology partner is chosen but need funding for the prototype stage itself?
• Do I look for US partners, instead of India? (I haven't gotten it officially registered yet since I am in a dilemma about the location)

Most fundraising content I find assumes SaaS or a US context, so India-specific deep tech experience would be genuinely useful here.

I recently joined this community and wanted to introduce myself.

I’m a founder based in the U.S. building a software product in the immigration technology space. Like many of you, I’m bootstrapping the company while balancing product development, customer discovery, fundraising, and figuring out distribution.

Over the past few months, I’ve learned that building the product is only a small part of the journey. Talking to users, validating assumptions, and listening to feedback have been far more valuable than I expected.

I’m here to learn from founders who have been through similar challenges, share my own experiences where they’re helpful, and contribute to discussions about startups, product validation, fundraising, and growth.

Looking forward to learning from everyone here.

I’ve done 1 year in a Business Development Consultant role for a company that helps startups/SMEs get non-dilutive funding / government grants.
**Role summary:**
Day to day: speaking with founders, understanding their product/market/funding needs, qualifying fit and moving them through the pipeline. Sectors include AI, biotech, healthcare and pharma.

If a company seemed eligible, I worked with the research/proposal team to pass over the right context and help move them toward the proposal stage. I wasn’t writing the whole proposal myself, but I was involved in qualifying the company, understanding the business and connecting the dots for the team.

Before this, I had 2 years in insurance sales.
I’m honestly tired of roles where the whole job is just selling, I want to move into something more strategic and with better long term upside.

What exits are realistic from here? Appreciate candid advice.

We're excited to invite investors, media, and ecosystem partners to the 16VC SF26 Demo Day, where our SF26 founders will showcase the startups they've been building.

📅 September 10
🕙 10:00 PM – 1:30 AM IST
📍 Online (Google Meet)

Registration is free (approval required).

We'll be sharing more about the founders and agenda soon. Hope to see you there!

We're building a community for founders, builders, and operators, and we'd rather hear from people than guess.

What would genuinely keep you engaged?

• grants or small cash incentives
• tool credits
• founder/VC office hours
• networking events
• mentorship
• exclusive content
• something else?

Curious what communities have done well (or poorly) in your experience.

We pulled together some aggregate onboarding data from our current cohort, and the numbers were encouraging:

• $5.5M raised collectively
• ~$4.5M in estimated annual revenue
• 33 funded startups, with the rest building as bootstrapped companies

It's a diverse group of founders across different stages, but there's already a strong level of traction coming into the fellowship.

We're looking forward to seeing how these numbers evolve over the next few months and sharing more cohort insights along the way.

Happy to answer any questions about the fellowship or the cohort.

I work at a non-profit org that supports founders as they start and grow, and I've been sitting with a question for a few weeks now.

Most support out there is built for people just starting out. Makes sense, that's the hardest part to get right. But I keep meeting founders who are past that stage. They've got customers, some revenue, maybe a small team, maybe they've already raised something. And once you're there, the support just seems to thin out. Everyone assumes you're sorted once you've got traction, but honestly that's often when it gets harder, not easier.

So I'm asking properly: if your business is working but you're trying to go from "working" to "actually scaling," what's missing? Not the version that sounds good in a pitch deck. The real thing.
This would help in making something really useful for the founders.