This grew sales 500%

The CEO of Y Combinator told me one thing is making their startups grow faster than ever.

In the past, for every week they were in YC, startups grew revenue by 2-4%. (Meaning, some doubled in size every few months.)

That’s huge. But nothing compared to what’s up now:

Revenue is growing 10-20%. Every single week.

That’s a 500% improvement over before.

It’s all because of one thing: AI

A few weeks ago I emailed you that I was doing a podcast series on AI. Yesterday, I published our first interview, with Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. You need to hear it because he breaks down exactly how AI is growing both old and new companies in their portfolio.

3 Ways AI is Growing Companies:

1. Urgency

In the past, when YC-backed startups tried selling software to businesses, buyers were hesitant. They’d say, “we already have something that works. Maybe next quarter.” What they had worked well enough, so they had no pressure to try some startup’s new approach.

Today, companies know AI is going to change everything so they want to get on it quickly, before they get steamrolled by it. So sales close rapidly.

2. Faster development time

AI coding tools are supercharging what developers can do. Garry said a 10x engineer who learns to prompt “would literally be a 100x engineer.” That kind of leap is now common among the best teams.

As an example, he said that “the Claude code team apparently has 95% of their code written by Claude, which means, that each engineer working on Claude Code is doing the work of 20 people.”

All that leads to faster MVPs, deployment and iterations.

3. Showing financial impact

I love the CaseText story he told me. It’s a web 2.0-era company that helped lawyers make sense of judgments and legislation.

By adding AI, CaseText started doing the work of a paralegal or legal associate. It was doing tasks like combing through thousands of pages of documents to create precise timelines of events.

CaseText took over work that cost firms tens of thousands of dollars. That has clear financial impact on a law firm. Buying it became an easy decision.

And the founder was able to sell CaseText to Thomson Reuters for $650 million, cash.

What’s next

I’m doing a set of interviews to show what’s possible with AI.

Because I’ve known many of these players for over a decade, I can push them outside their comfort zone. (Skip to 37 seconds in the Garry interview to see what I’m going for.)

Catch this interview on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and anywhere.

~ andrew