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Dalton Caldwell
Standard Capital
2,713 posts
user avatar
Dalton Caldwell
Standard Capital
@daltonc
Founder and Partner @Standard_Cap, Partner Emeritus @ycombinator
SF Bay Area
standardcap.com
Joined September 2007
956
Following
191K
Followers
  • Pinned
    user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    May 22
    A message for recent YC founders
    191K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Apr 16, 2025
    Be the person your LLM thinks you are
    351K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    May 12, 2025
    The S&P 500 now has 3 YC companies: DoorDash, Airbnb and Coinbase.
    316K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Jan 25, 2025
    It's insanely easy to run models like DeepSeek R1 locally via @ollama (YC W21) Once ollama is installed, you just need to type "ollama run deepseek-r1:8b"
    user avatar
    ollama
    @ollama
    Jan 20, 2025
    DeepSeek's first-generation reasoning models are achieving performance comparable to OpenAI's o1 across math, code, and reasoning tasks! Give it a try! 👇 7B distilled: ollama run deepseek-r1:7b More distilled sizes are available. 🧵
    ollama runs DeepSeek models
    553K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Feb 23, 2024
    When a startup is competing against a large competitor, they aren't competing with the *entire* company, they are likely competing with some PM focused on internal politics/career progression. With this framing, it shouldn't be surprising to see startups win as often as they do.
    253K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Nov 26, 2023
    I wonder what % of people know that the way to fix a lot of devices is to reboot them, but have no mental model for *why* this works.
    1.2M
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Jun 12, 2025
    After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator. YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul,
    733K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Nov 1, 2025
    What are the non-obvious second and third order effects of this?
    924K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Apr 28, 2025
    There is no substitute for a strong internal drive to do things, everything else is built on this foundation.
    76K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Apr 2, 2025
    One of the most reliable cognitive boosts is to walk around a lot every day.
    260K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Feb 4, 2025
    One hallmark of a high agency person is someone that can reinvent themselves without skipping a beat.
    100K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    May 26, 2025
    Software ate the world, now AI is eating software.
    134K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Sep 18, 2024
    Keep showing up.
    96K
  • user avatar
    Dalton Caldwell
    Standard Capital
    @daltonc
    Nov 15, 2023
    If you aren't willing to start small it's hard to get started at all.
    120K

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