YC DM shortlist from partial scrape

Date: 2026-04-11

Scope:

• Built from partial YC scrape in /tmp/yc-output-20260411.jl
• 523 YC company pages scraped before stopping
• Only filtered shortlist saved here

Filter:

• active YC company
• team size 5-15 preferred
• B2B / technical / developer / infra / workflow heavy
• founder role CEO / CTO from title or founder bio
• recent trigger found from founder/company posts when possible

Note:

• For 4 people below, trigger is company-level or cofounder-level, not direct personal post. Still usable for DM in a tiny team context.

Ranked table

Per lead

1. Catherine Jue

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: 3w ago, “what will the identity layer for agents look like?” and launched Managed Auth.
• Why pain: shipping agent infra means auth, ownership, support, and reliability questions pile up fast across tiny teams.
• DM opener: “Your Managed Auth launch hit same pattern we see in small eng teams: once agents touch real accounts, invisible state becomes operational debt fast.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

2. Rafael Garcia

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: same 3w Managed Auth launch; Catherine explicitly frames it as shared founder obsession with agent identity.
• Why pain: CTO for browser infra for agents will feel coordination pain around auth, observability, support, and fast-moving product changes.
• DM opener: “Saw Catherine frame Kernel around agent identity; that usually creates brutal coordination load once product, auth, and support all move at once.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

3. Faizaan Chishtie

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: 2d ago, described pivot from bespoke APIs to desktop automation after “look of anguish” trying to record automations and teams “debugging blind” without replays/logging.
• Why pain: this is direct process pain, owner ambiguity, and hidden-state debugging pain in one post.
• DM opener: “Your ‘debugging blind’ line is exactly why we built Ryva. Once automations, support, and engineering cross over, state visibility becomes bottleneck.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

4. Neo Lee

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: 5d ago, hiring founding engineer; “You’ll live on Slack providing customer support. Because at our stage, the engineer and the support team are often the same person.”
• Why pain: almost perfect Ryva signal. tiny team, weak boundaries, support + eng + shipping collapsed into one loop.
• DM opener: “Your ‘engineer and support team are often the same person’ line is exactly the kind of invisible-state pain we’re helping teams remove.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

5. Sky Yang

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: 2d ago, hiring founding AE; role owns demo, onboarding, adoption, expansion, and “building the playbook.”
• Why pain: when one early hire owns entire customer lifecycle, coordination gaps between product, GTM, and delivery become painful fast.
• DM opener: “Your founding AE post reads like classic early-stage coordination compression: one person spans demo to expansion, so state visibility matters a lot.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

6. Rhim Shah

• Social: LinkedIn
• Trigger: 2mo ago, announced Arva’s new CRO to support mission of automating financial crime compliance operations.
• Why pain: compliance automation teams live in process-heavy, high-stakes workflows where hidden owner/blocker state compounds quickly.
• DM opener: “Your CRO hire post signals Arva is entering a new operating phase. Compliance ops teams usually feel coordination debt before they feel headcount debt.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

7. Oli Wales

• Social: LinkedIn
• Trigger: same 2mo Arva scaling move; company pushing agentic AI for financial crime compliance operations.
• Why pain: CTO side of a 14-person compliance automation team likely carries decision/thread/ownership load across product, customers, and infra.
• DM opener: “Saw Arva scaling the team around automating fincrime compliance ops. In teams like yours, invisible execution state usually turns into process drag fast.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

8. Shikhar Bhushan

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: 6d ago, announced GA + seed; 3w ago detailed shipping s2-lite, 2mo ago listed product improvements, access control, usage visibility, SDKs.
• Why pain: infra/devtools team shipping fast on access control, visibility, SDKs, OSS split, and GA rollout usually feels coordination pain internally.
• DM opener: “Your posts on GA, access control, usage visibility, and OSS split all point to same pattern: fast infra teams need project state visible or every milestone turns into sync overhead.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger 1, trigger 2

9. Stephen Balogh

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: same s2.dev GA + seed + product cadence trigger.
• Why pain: CTO on stream infra team managing scale, durability, OSS/cloud split, and customer rollout is prime for hidden-state coordination pain.
• DM opener: “Saw s2 hit GA while shipping access control, visibility, and OSS changes. That kind of infra cadence usually breaks when decision state is not visible.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

10. Sri Raghu Malireddi

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: 1mo ago Moss launch; company page 6d ago still pushing real-time semantic search runtime for conversational AI.
• Why pain: early runtime/infrastructure teams moving across browser, mobile, and server usually depend on clean ownership and low coordination overhead.
• DM opener: “Moss sits right in the zone where tiny infra teams can move insanely fast or get buried in invisible context. Your launch made me think of that immediately.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger, company

11. Harsha Nalluru

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: same Moss launch / company push; profile frames Moss as sub-10ms search infra running on-device and in-browser.
• Why pain: CTO-equivalent on runtime infra teams will feel coordination pain across SDKs, infra, latency work, and customer expectations.
• DM opener: “Saw Moss positioning around sub-10ms search infra across browser and device. Teams doing that kind of work usually need decision state visible or progress gets expensive.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger, profile

12. Cody Swain

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: 1mo ago, “Three days into investor meetings, we pivoted our entire company.” He calls out classic engineer mistake: attached to solution, searching for problem.
• Why pain: pivot pressure + model reliability + real customers = acute alignment and decision-load pain.
• DM opener: “Your pivot post read like textbook invisible-state pressure: fast learning, real customers, high-stakes decisions, tiny team. That’s the exact environment we think about.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

13. John Newsom

• Social: LinkedIn
• Trigger: same 1mo Parametric pivot trigger.
• Why pain: CTO for robotics/model team doing pivot + customer work will feel every hidden blocker and ownership gap immediately.
• DM opener: “Saw Cody describe Parametric’s full pivot in the middle of investor meetings. In that kind of robotics sprint, invisible project state becomes brutal fast.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

14. Andrea Pinto

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: 1w ago, Nottelabs funding/launch coverage framed product as missing infra layer for reliable production-grade web agents.
• Why pain: web-agent infra teams live inside messy auth/session/data/ops workflows where invisible state compounds quickly.
• DM opener: “Nottelabs being framed as the missing infra layer for reliable web agents stood out. Teams shipping that layer usually hit coordination pain before they hit roadmap pain.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

15. Lucas Giordano

• Social: LinkedIn, X
• Trigger: same 1w Nottelabs funding/launch coverage: perception engine, stealth sessions, secure credential vault, single API.
• Why pain: CTO side of agent infra + secure session handling + developer UX is exactly where hidden operational state gets expensive.
• DM opener: “The Nottelabs launch hit a nerve for me: when you’re building secure agent infra, decision and blocker visibility matters as much as raw speed.”
• Sources: YC scrape, trigger

Best first wave

1. Faizaan Chishtie
2. Neo Lee
3. Catherine Jue
4. Shikhar Bhushan
5. Cody Swain
6. Sky Yang
7. Rhim Shah
8. Sri Raghu Malireddi