Company News

This is a list of operating principles we've observed to work well in our startup. I imagine this will will get longer and longer as the company scales.. but it's cool to capture and share as it is today 1. Treat every project like a research project. Be hypothesis driven, and do the minimum work required to test the hypothesis 1. Example: Hypothesis: “I believe that removing a confirmation screen before creating a task will yield a better UX” 1. Test: Remove the confirmation scree

I've been rewatching Ben Horowitz's lecture on How to Manage (YC + Stanford how to start a startup -- link in comments) There are so many insights in here that are counterintuitive for me. It all starts from viewing each complex decision from the perspective of the whole company. #1 - If someone asks for a raise and you give it to them out of cycle, you're killing the culture. You're punishing everyone who didn't ask for the raise. #2 - If someone isn't performing well, demoting them isn't a

Ever have a bad day and wonder how you're gonna get over it? Happens every day in startup land. Just last week: 😵 Our entire browser infrastructure started crumbling under the weight of new users trying it out. There was a memory leak that went undiagnosed, and 20% of all new user requests timed out. Talk about a good experience! 🤯 Trying to build 5 demos at the same time to prep for some calls later in the week.. after spending 8 hours doing discovery calls all day 😵‍💫 Diagnosing really

Why does YC keep talking about "launch early, launch often"? By default.. people don't know that you exist. It's your job to be the squeaky wheel, and let people know "HEY I EXIST", "HEY I CAN SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM" You may have seen my many posts talking about Skyvern hitting star count numbers Those didn't happen out of the blue. We kept launching, and launching, and launching. Trying to spread the word about us. Trying to learn about which use-cases we're best suited for. Trying to solve anyo

Back in February.. I did my first podcast appearance ever with Mike Bifulco We had just decided we were going to open source.. but hadn't pulled the trigger yet It's crazy to watch it back and realize how big of a bet we were making. We had no idea whether the bet would pan out, but we had high conviction on 3 things: 1. Skyvern was a "cool" product. Each successful run made me go "holy shit" (I won't talk about the failed runs 😂). This magic deserved to be made open and shared with the worl

For anyone who's been following along our journey for the past 2 years.. you'll know it's been a long one We wouldn't be here today without the help of all of our friends (ie YOU) who rallied behind us in our super long and crazy startup journey Ever wonder what it took to get here? 0. Our first startup idea -- helping people onboard into companies (it was a bad one) 1. We tried to pivot into a slack + discord chatbot to answer questions (before ChatGPT came out) 2. We explored an idea to bui

HIPAA Compliance Skyvern is now HIPAA Compliant!! This has been a long time coming We've known that we would have to become HIPAA compliant for a long time. We kept talking to healthcare company after healthcare company.. all with the same painpoint "I need help integrating with the highly fractured EHR ecosystem" So.. we open sourced ...And it helped for a bit. Some companies started to self-host us But it was too high friction.

We just hit a milestone I never dreamed of – 6,000 Github stars ⭐️ I remember back in february we had heated discussions about whether we should Open Source Skyvern or not There were a ton of reasons not to do it: 1. What if someone stole our code? Rebranded it to their own? 2. What if enterprises decided not to pay us? Just use our open source version? 3. What if people read our scrappy (crappy) code? Roasted us? 4. What if they tried it out and it didn't work? 5. What if they didn't leave f

Most startups send Investor updates to their investors. It's a great way to stay connected with the people who believed in you.. especially the ones that believed in you when nothing was working! It also holds you as a founder accountable. You're forced to write down how things went / are going at a regular cadence, and reflect why or why not you were (or weren't) able to do what you said you would. The hardest part of these updates is sending them both when the times are good and when the tim

I remember I read a post from my friend Abhay a few months ago about juggling balls in your career. He mentioned that early on in your career, you admire the people that seem to always have their sh*t together. They have a ton of projects going on in parallel, and seem to easily handle everything. The most admirable part is that they never seem to drop a ball -- everything always moves across the finishing line You work hard and learn from that. You do your best to take on as many projects as

This is one of the hardest things I've had to learn as a founder. You set out to build products to help people and solve their problems. You cobble together a MVP, emphasis on the minimum, and launch it to a bunch of users If you're lucky, you get a ton of demand. How do you decide what to build next? How do you decide to focus on customer onboarding vs fixing bugs vs launching new features to unlock more revenue? If your goal is to make people happy (or "make something people want" per YC's

How to find ICPs to go after? This is a question I ask myself all the time. The answer is obvious, right? Who would find the most value out of Skyvern? When we first launched our product, we had no clue what kinds of things companies would want to automate with a product like Skyvern. We had only collected a handful of examples after talking to tens of companies. The examples included: 1. Automating purchasing for companies that helped others order things from a unified portal 2. Automatic

As some of you may know, Skyvern is actually our third attempt at building a startup, and we’ve made every mistake under the sun in our path to get to where we are. I’m happy to say that applying to YC was not one of them, as YC has given us 3 competitive edges we didn’t expect when we first got in. Want to know what they are? Scroll to the bottom to find out 🙂 So.. why did we even apply to YC in the first place? Applying to YC was the easiest choice we ever made. We knew the odds of us gett

Skyvern? What’s that? Skyvern is an AI Agent that helps companies automate browser-based workflows using LLMs and Computer vision. We provide companies with a simple API that lets them automate their boring back-office workflows with natural language. How did the launch go? We spent a few hours in the #1 spot on hackernews and the rest of the day on the front page. Over the day, we received 420 upvotes and 138 comments, blowing our wildest expectations. How did we expect it to go? This wa