James Yu

Long overdue: I’m excited to finally publicly share what we’ve been building at Fundra. We’ve built the FundOps™ stack we always wished existed. What started as a side project during my time at Creandum – something I hacked on internally to scratch our own itch – has since grown into a proper product and a company. As investors, we love backing data-driven founders. I’ve been in countless board meetings discussing automated KPI dashboards and streamlined reporting – and I’ve built those data stacks myself while working at Monese. But the irony? The venture capital industry rarely practices what it preaches. Fund operations are still riddled with manual workflows, fragmented tools, spreadsheet gymnastics, and tedious manual document cataloguing. Existing vendors are still in the spreadsheet-digitization phase, essentially putting lipstick on a pig. They lack a real understanding of how fund managers actually operate – which is exactly why we had to build in-house in the first place. A recent quote that really stuck with me: “𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑛'𝑡 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑡𝑠 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑎𝑛 𝑎𝑟𝑚𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑖𝑟. 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑛𝑜𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑝ℎ𝑒𝑟-𝑙𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑙 𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑦 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑠 – 𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑏𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: 𝑏𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑟.” (Garry Tan) Fast forward, after talking to many more funds, the pain points clearly resonated, and hence – Fundra was born. 🎯 We’re here to solve two core problems: 1️⃣ 𝗨𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗼 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 – VCs have access to incredibly rich, intimate company data (far more than public market investors), but don’t have the time or tools to make use of it properly for follow-on decisions, fund planning, reporting, etc. 2️⃣ 𝗕𝗿𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 – The venture ecosystem at large – startups, investors, LPs – is a constellation of bespoke “APIs” that don’t talk to each other. This adds unnecessary overhead to each party in the stack (startups with a diverse pool of investors take the biggest hit), and prevents meaningful future progress in the industry. If you’re a fund manager frustrated by fund ops, let’s connect — I’d love to show you what we’re building. #VC #venturecapital #datadrivenvc #startups

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YC has done a good job supporting ambitious deeptech projects. Seeds sowed over many years are starting to sprout in meaningful ways. Biggest support to founders (esp those building in the physical world) isn’t money - it’s the right advice, network, and peer support.

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Martin Eberhard played a key role early at Tesla and even brought in Elon Musk. Then he was pushed out of the company for pennies. Founders get most of the attention in Silicon Valley, but the ecosystem is built on the people who take a chance and join early stage ventures. Unfortunately, those same people are often the easiest to cut out. Founders can dilute early employees, change vesting terms, and restructure equity with little effort and zero consequences (you can literally do it in Carta in 5 minutes). Daniel Kottke was a close friend of Steve Jobs and helped build the Apple I and II computers. He got no equity (Steve Wozniak eventually gave him a few of his own shares). Brian Acton co-founded WhatsApp and stayed through the Facebook acquisition. When he left Facebook over privacy concerns, he had to walk away from $850 million in unvested stock. There’s more awareness now around how vesting works, what happens during a liquidity event, and how to think about re-ups and dilution. That’s good. But the truth is, if someone really wants to screw you, they can. It still comes down to one thing: trust the people you work with. Or don’t work with them at all.

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The smartest YC founders I know are NOT raising VC money. Here are FIVE unique things they're doing instead: 1) Firing their least technical co-founder. 2) Importing/exporting used Herman Miller chairs. 3) Selling their YC office hours on Craigslist. 4) Auctioning screenshots of their Stripe dashboard as art. 5) Using Central to eliminate nonsense HR/finance work and focusing on profitability - centralhq.com What else am I missing?

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I’ve come to believe that early experiences carry disproportionate weight - far more than we often acknowledge. For designers and builders, “minimum viable” may suffice for validating core functionality, but it rarely earns trust or sparks genuine delight. While velocity matters, I’ve always struggled with the notion that early versions should be merely viable, especially in a world where attention is scarce and emotional resonance is everything. This extends beyond product. Do you show up as the minimum viable version of yourself in your work, your relationships, your craft? I would encourage you to challenge the conventional MVP framework. Replace it with the Minimum Awesome Product. This doesn’t mean it’s fully-featured or pixel perfect. But it should be worthy of attention. Memorable, even evocative in the way it triggered emotion. The kind of product that prompts someone to say, “I didn’t know I needed this, but now I can’t live without it.” You can refine mechanics over time, but the emotional experience of a first interaction is singular and unrecoverable. Don’t settle for viability. Build something worth remembering… and make it awesome! ❤️‍🔥

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2024 taught me resilience as a founder. 2025? A fearless team pushing Layerpath to new horizons—backed by a16z speedrun and over $1M in funding! Something magical happens when you give talented people the right canvas, autonomy, and vision.  💫 We don't have separate "website" and "product" teams. When you build with the right people, every touchpoint becomes a product experience worth perfecting. The team just gets it. Karnesh completely reimagined how we position Layerpath through pixels—not just a design refresh but a fundamental rethinking of how we showcase our value. Swathika elevated this with a razor-sharp content strategy, while Anusha brought fresh research insights about the user experience from the first touchpoint. Every startup journey has its chapters. Here's our latest one. ↓ 👥 The Foundation (2024) ↳ Karnesh – first-principles product designer shaping our DNA from day one ↳ Swathika – full-stack marketer whose words defined our origin story They kept the lights on through the toughest moments (forever grateful!) ✨ The Evolution (2025) ↳ Sutanshu – dancing with Transformers since 2017, now igniting our AI revolution ↳ Subhadip – IIT hustle, shipping code at the speed of thought ↳ E Madhu bala – choosing to build over books and hustling over hierarchy ↳ Anusha Malla – HCI expert transforming user research into an art form ↳ Pathange – a PLG ace, before graduation and 18K+ followers ↳ Atharvan – second-year student, yet having senior-level impact To those who were part of our earlier chapters—founding engineers and beyond—thank you for paving the way. Your contributions taught us resilience and set us up for this moment! Now, we’re transforming a single dream into a thriving platform. At Andreessen Horowitz, we heard about software truly understanding humans (via Scott Belsky) —and I realized this new wave of talent is taking us exactly there. We’re building more than products: ↳ Then: A founder’s vision to improve demos ↳ Now: A bold team revolutionizing how humans interact with software ↳ Next: Changing the entire conversation between tech and people Slack is buzzing, weekend hacks turn into core features overnight, and interns outperform pros. This is the startup pace: fast, fearless, and full of heart. 2024 → was about resilience. 2025 → is about soaring together. I’m grateful for every step of this journey. Here’s to the confluence of talent, purpose, and timing. To the OGs who held the fort—thank you. To the dreamers joining now—welcome to the mission. We’re just getting started. Sometimes, the strongest teams emerge from the hardest moments. We’re not just building products but shaping the future of software experiences. And this team? They’re only warming up! ✨ #BuildInPublic #StartupLife #Speedrun #DreamTeam

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30K in the past 7 days. 8 new clients. 8K closed yesterday alone. The velocity is insane right now. But here's what's actually driving it: lessons from a client and our YC group partner. Cole R. from Conduit AI (YC W24) taught me to stop underpricing. "If you charge very little, they think you're a shitty product. Charge more, drive results, and they'll believe in you." He also taught me his qualification framework: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how willing are you to move forward?" If they say 7 or below, dig for the blocker. Budget? Timing? Internal politics? That question saves hours of chasing ghosts. Pete Koomen, our YC group partner, taught me enterprise sales is mostly about listening and understanding their approval process. "Listen for a long period of time. Figure out how they buy, not just what they need." He told us to put some engineering effort in sales, and run someone's persona before we even meet them. Show up with their specific use case already built. These lessons are why we're closing faster now. Your best customers teach you how to win. Your best advisors teach you how to scale.

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Plural is doubling down on our commitment to Metaview as part their $35m Series B led by GV (Google Ventures). For any founder who has built anything of substance hiring is at the same time one of the highest priorities and biggest sources of frustration as we lack relevant tools & solutions to remove unnecessary friction and drive better hiring decisions. We have been blown away by the execution of Siadhal, Shahriar & the Metaview team since our investment early last year, as kept shipping and releasing amazing features to their expanding roaster of blue chip, and very demanding, customers pushing way past their already ambitious budgets. It has been particularly gratifying to see an increasing number of Plural companies adopt Metaview (often in spite of early skepticism driven by the state of the industry) and overhaul their hiring processes.

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