Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham has a simple message for aspiring entrepreneurs: You don’t need to focus on artificial intelligence to be successful.
When betting on a startup’s future potential, Graham is typically more swayed by his impression of its founders than the idea behind their business, the co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator wrote in a series of posts on social media platform X on August 10. His track record is substantial: He’s backed more than 4,000 startups through Y Combinator since 2005, including Airbnb, Reddit and Twitch.
“I haven’t met all the startups in the current [Y Combinator] batch yet, but the two most impressive companies that I’ve seen so far are not working on AI,” wrote Graham. “The lesson to take from this is not that AI is unimportant (it’s very important), but that the founders matter more than the idea. The founders are the best predictor of how a company will do, not the industry it’s in.”
He added: “If you want to start a startup to work on a non-AI idea, go ahead. If you’re good, good investors will see it, and those are the only ones you want to convince anyway.”
AI-focused startups raised $104.3 billion from venture firms in the first half of 2025, matching the full-year total from 2024, according to PitchBook. Nearly half of the 140-plus companies in Y Combinator’s current batch of startups are focused on AI, Pitchbook noted.
