20 Mar 2026Pokémon GO, AI Dog Cancer, Banksy, Open AI Side Quests
2:44:0515 min
Dan: Sparkles Update — $22K MRR, YC & PG's Signed Mac Studio
YC founder Dan joins from San Francisco — 15 minutes after waking up, with investor and demo calls ahead — to update on Sparkles, pitched as 'Lovable for large existing codebases': staging environments that let non-engineers prompt changes to real products. He reports five customers signed during the batch (including Fondo and Jack & Jill), $22K MRR, angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cloudflare, GC and a16z, and says hiring engineers is the current bottleneck. He shares YC batch highlights, plugs apply.ycombinator.com, tells the story of Paul Graham signing his coffee-ruined Mac Studio, and discusses founder-led marketing on X versus paid ads before the show signs off.