Yasin Ehsan

Andreessen Horowitz

Writing angel checks through a16z’s scout fund

Angel Investor

Headstarter

Mobilize AI Engineers to create the greatest products of our 21st century.

CEO & Co-Founder

Capital One

• Filed 2 patents & built 3 micro services which grabs costs of 10K+ Git repos, visualizes data and notifies implementers via Slack of overspent repos, thus assessing growing AWS expenditures (currently $300M+)
• Owned patent process on cost-tracking platform after winning 1st place in division-wide hackathon with 2,715 associates 
• Directed AWS savings on how teams should budget which got featured in CEO’s product strategy call of 26k+ associates
• Spearheaded initiative to reduce AI/ML cloud costs for Capital One’s flagship chatbot (Eno), which gets 1Bn+ monthly interactions, by leading the full product development lifecycle, thus decreasing AWS costs by ~50% ($400K+ savings YTD)
• Led market research by conducting 15+ business analysis interviews with cross-functional team leadership, thus identifying key issue: onus of AWS budget falls on leadership (VPs/Directors) not feature implementers (engineers/leads)
• Created narrative for product management directors to adopt cost platform during growth of team from 2 to 7 engineers
• Pitched $250M+ call center opportunity to VP after initiating ENOHACKs, selecting theme of creating AI persona chatbots

Senior Software Engineer

Major League Hacking

• Estee Lauder HQ---Overall 1st, $7,500 cash prize, 270+ participants, 2019 
• Hack NYU---Overall 1st, Best Design by Facebook, Best Start-up Idea, 310+ participants, 2020
• Capital One: Overall 1st among top-10 teams from division of 2500+ people
• Hack Cornell---Overall 1st, 320+ participants, 2019 
• IBM Call for Code---Overall 1st, Dine with Bill Clinton as prize, 90+ participants, 2019 
• OpenHacks: Best Presentation, 700+ participants, 2020
•  Berkeley AI Hacks: Top 15 from 290+ teams (1300 people). Demo'd to Sequoia and Reach capital
• Hack Cooper---Overall 2nd, 150+ participants, 2019
• Capital One Intern Hack---top-10 among 550+ swe interns many from top colleges, 2019
• CodePath demo day---Overall 2nd, 40+ teams, 2019
• Hack Cooper---Best use of Google Cloud APIs, tour of Google NYC office, 2018
• JP Morgan Code for Good---Overall 1st, got JP Morgan internship offer, 2018 
• Dev Week NYC Conference---Best real-time Communication API, 2018

13x Hackathon Winner

Software Engineering Fellow

Chrono Group

• Ideated and owned 4+ applications with payment walls for local businesses bringing SEO ranking to top-3 Google Search
• Led team of 4 developers to design software patterns and develop company blog chronogrp.com using React, Node, AWS

CTO and Co-Founder

CUNY Tech Prep

• Selected for a full-stack JavaScript program as one of 100 fellows out of 400+ applicants
 • Learn MongoDB, ExpressJS, React, NodeJS + best practices from design to deployment
• Leveraged knowledge: Git workflows, testing, CI/CD, agile development, MVC pattern, APIs/Microservices

Software Engineering Fellow, Web Bootcamp

Impact Labs

• Selective(<5%) fellowship equipping and inspiring next generation of social entrepreneurs
• Created social-impact apps in React, Node, Express, MongoDB, PyTorch, Solidity
• Connected with speakers and leaders from NGOs, social startups and venture capitalists

Product Innovation Fellow

In 2019, I had started my first official tech internship. Prior to starting I had made a strong preference to be matched with iOS as I had just come out of 24-week, iOS bootcamp by CodePath. I wanted to use this as a chance to hone in on what I learned and see how industry tackles mobile dev. I requested that if I cannot be put in a mobile team, my next preference would be r&d. 

I got to be one of two interns out of 50+ interns in TX to work with the iOS team which also happened to be a former r&d team. Choosing work you want is often luck but I "shooted" my shot and was pleased with what I got. 

• Built 5+ iOS features resulting in $1 million+ in auto-financing within 8 weeks of app launch
• Developed GPS map geo-fences on bookmarked cars triggering notifications when breached
• Created algorithm in Swift optimizing user movement around Apple’s location limitations
• Top-10 teams from 550+ Software Engineering Interns in internal hackathon across 7 offices

Software Engineering Intern, iOS, Research and Development Team

Google

In 2019, I attended Hack RPI whose lead organizer spearheaded Google Cloud workshops. I was really impressed by his wide grasp of cloud services and wanted to see that in myself. He turned out to be a Google Student Innovator: a program where he was trained in GCP and given the right to distribute cloud credits and Google Merch as one of two on-campus representatives. 

First thing I did when I got back that weekend, was reach out to him and other program leads and do all things needed to become a Google Student Innovator. Which I did. I had already worked on a ton of Firebase projects but this now gave me exposure to the 101 cloud services such as compute. 

I distributed $15k+ computing credits to 300+ students/professionals and hosted Google Cloud Platform workshops at Queens College as part of 200 ambassadors nationwide. I represented with Google at hackathons and mentored competitors on best practices in MVP of web/mobile apps and introduced open-source software and agile development to 100+ students new to programming.

Google Cloud Student Ambassador

10x Hackathon Winner | 8x Bootcamp Alum | 2x AWS Patent Owner | Ex-Capital One Chatbot | TEDx Director | Serving CS Undergrads

Headstarter's Accelerator is for engineers of all levels to build, collaborate and get recognition. With over 115k engineers in our community and 40+ company and VC partners, Headstarter's mission is to mobilize AI Engineers to create the greatest products of our 21st century. Over 2000 engineers from Headstarter got offers at OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc. 

If you want to hire from headstarter, go here: crackedhires.ai

Reasons to Familiarize with AI Engineering in 2025:
1) Cursor wants to make a 50x engineer
2) Most of AI's value will come from vertical apps
3) Every engineer needs forward deployed engineer / founder skills

Apply for Accelerator: headstarter.co

CEO and Co-Founder

We are building the world's first AI professor, Anthony. Anthony will launch students through 5 stages: rook, intern, pro, elite and prime. Our values - intentional, talented and accomplished.

I am happy to announce being an A16z Speedrun Scout. 

This means I can invest from the A16z Speedrun fund into the best teams.
. 
I am also happy to announce that 7 of my Powell House roommates got into YC and 5 are backed by A16z. 

Most of my roommates agree that alone no one would have probably started a company but bringing great minds alike pushes us to become something greater than ourselves. 

So I am launching something called the “The Great Lock-in weekend.”

Go Head to Head: Engineers vs Vibe coders. CS Majors vs Biz/Bio majors. Who can get one paying customer? 

Top-10 teams may be forwarded for interviews with A16z Speedrun to receive $1Mn in funding. 

Or interview with post pmf (product-market-fit) startups for $150k-300K salary for eng/sales.

Headstarter will give $5000 cash and $5000 in OpenAI credits to the winning team. 

Apply now: https://lnkd.in/etBA4Guj

As we say for every launch, bismillah.

Yasin Ehsan 🚀

WE TOOK OVER SF. 

we rented over 100 chairs and in the back there were people still standing.

powell house hosted its 4th event around coding agents. 

powell is a hacker house where 7 roommates got in yc, 5 got in a16z speedrun.

Here are the speakers which filled the room:

PANEL 1: 
- paul (ceo browserbase, $67Mn raised)
- grace (ceo arcada labs, top 5% YC s25) 
- sam (cto delphi, $19Mn raised)
- jeff (cto exa, $111Mn raised) 

PANEL 2: 
- rohan (only pm at cursor, $10.1Bn Val) 
- Swyx (devin/cognition, $10.2Bn Val) 
- eno (cto factory, $20mn funding)
- bob (cto, embedder yc s25)


PANEL 3: 
- romain (head of dev rel, openai codex)
- thariq (dev rel, anthropic claude code)
- theo (t3 stack creator, yt 400k subs)
- nate (cof, continue[dot]dev, yc s23)
- jed (staff swe, google jules) 

TAKEAWAY: 
- do not worry about competition 
- raising more money = more anxiety 
- the sales pitch to hire employees is gold

- cursor rules are incredible
- specs is the new frontier for ai code gen
- code gen prompting is often incomplete

I appreciate everyone from my roommates, to the speakers to the incredible crowd that showed up. 

Special thanks to my cofounder faizan who flew in from new york, elena for collabing with glynn capital, oliver for logistics and tawsif for helping make this real. 

Thank you all for making this night incredible. 

What was your favorite part? Who should we have next?

No alternative text description for this image

MEET POWELL HOUSE. 

7 got into YC. 5 got into a16z speedrun.

YC gives $500k and a16z gives $1Mnz 

Most of us probably would not have started companies without being in the house. 

By being here we dreamed big, we debated and we felt “competitive.”

“Competive” here means criticizing what we think is less competent products do well in the market and have a passionate feeling like “jee I can build something way better.” 

If a group of 9 cracked people living in the heart of sf each night go “wow thats crazy how xyz is doing, would have been way bettr if I cooked 123 instead”

… eventually from the frustrations companies are born. 

And we make each other better with intros for customers, hires and investors from our networks. 

My goal is to get our house VC funded and attract the smartest engineers who may not even think about building companies but gather them under one roof and ponder. 

Verily in pondering, generational ideas may be born.

If you are applying to a16z speedrun 

You can dm me for a rec. 

Happy to give feedback on your idea. 

In general think “Good team, good arr and large market” are key ingredients. 

7 of my roommates have gotten into yc and 5 into speedrun. 

Love to hear what you are building :)


ps became a sr scout so I can also invest in you immediately

Speed came to my hood in sf

If you are applying to a16z speedrun by this sunday, feel free to drop your emails. 

I have a some tips I have gathered after probably like 500+ messages last few days. 

Organize your blurb in a specific format. 

Know why your team is the best. 

Know why you will win. 

Show early signs of win. 

I will email exmaples of blurbs that got into speedrun + profiles of people from my referrals!

Had fun meeting cool people at Cursor! I am bullish on companies that are building for dx or ax. 

Dx being developer experience. 

Ax being agentic experience. 

If you are building something cool, DM me! 

Or better if apply to the Great Lock In Weekend and dm me after 🤝

https://lnkd.in/e-TJrQhB

Gathering of the greats:
- Romain Huet, OpenAI CodeX
- Thariq Shihipar, Claude Code
- Jed Borovik, Google Jules
- Rohan Varma, Cursor Bugbot
- Grace Li, Arcada Labs
- Nader Khalil, Nvidia 
- Daniel, Cline
- Eno, Factory
- Flo, Lindy
- Sam, Delphi
- Bob, Embedder

7 roommates from our Powell St House got into YC and 5 got backed by a16z. 

If you were in the summer YC batch or the upcoming one, come say hello.

Comment Interested and dm me for RSVP link!

remove the green goblin “Open to Work.” 

Its just low signal. 

Lack of network. 

Lack of commercial might of ones skills and awareness of how to play the game. 

The game doesn’t favor those who ask favors. 

Its serves to track, chase and tackle anomalies. 

You have to brand yourself as a “winner.” 

That you have some momentum, you have great aptitude because you HAVE already done things that demonstrate greatness.

The last thing you want to come off as is “begging” for a job opportunity. 

That comes off as “hey look no one has hired me and so if you may, can you speak to me.” 

Even you mom uncle or aunt will think twice before blessing you up with nepo treatment. 

So whats the solution. 

1) remove your open to work green goblin logo
2) cleanse your optics and positioning from looking or unemployed to capable, deserving and high-in-demand

Here are 10 quick ways on top on my mind: 

1) all your titles for previous positions should relay one theme ie software engineering, product management etc do NOT play musical chairs on past titles. 

2) canonicalize your titles. If your title one place was “Software Development Engineer” another place was “Software Engineer ” and another place was “Web Developer” just call it all “Software Engineering intern/tutor/researcher etc” 

3) in your linkedin profile title keep it to 2-3 most recent roles or achievements ie “Ex-software engineer at Y | 450+ commits on github” 

Replace “450 commits” with anything worth mentioning ie degree from a top institution or some ridiculously hard achievement 

4) what to do if nothing you have is notable or hard? Have regret and take action. Do not invite being comlicit or okay with sub standard personal brand. Elevate. Sign up for a program. Go work somewhere for free. Do things, move. Try something. 

5) network with people better than you in 3 ways: in person events, linkedin dms, emails

6) for in person events have a 30sec pitch about what you do. “I was a former software engineer i worked on this hard problem in my own time and very confident in xyz skills. On my free time i ski, read or some hobby.” At end of an interaction leave with an email and linkedin

7) for in person events a great tactic is to find those in charge and ask who the most important or influential people are. Quickly look for the opportunity to find them and share your situation. Many times if you are decent at presenting yourself and asking nicely, important people have massive networks and they can introduce you 

8) once you have someones email follow up within 24 hours and have a strong email subject line along with a clear ask within two sentences ending your email with a question mark. 

9) keep an excel sheet of everyone you had a coffee chat, a in person meet and send them updates every 2-4weeks or 2-3months to keep them following your journey. People will root for you more if they see you 0-1. 

10) post on LinkedIn more. 

So much of “Linked-in” is what you do offline. 

Agree?

Guys I need someone who fits: 
- failed founder 
- extroverted, high agency 
- strong eng skills 


You will be one of 4 people in a highly specialized team of former founders. 

Work for cofounders of a 35mn arr company under 4yrs. Strong chance of unicorn soon and having 1mn in equity if exits. 

Salary can be what you want. Just know opportunity is in toronto so requires a move. 

Dm me resume or a memo why you. And comment something below so my team can get back.

If you are a founder- here are 3 ppl ik looking for a role. 

1/  2x founder raised 25Mn, 2x gold Olympiad, MIT ‘11. Wants to be PM at a startup or potentially staff SWE

2/  AWS Strategy team 1yr. Harvard ug ‘24. Wants ops or product role at startup

3/ Head of Product at a health-tech startup. Medical doctor.  Wants ops/product in SF. 


3 more in eng: 

1/ works on the complier team at samsung. Tons of open source contributions

2/ works in ai lab for 2yrs. Prev meta 2yrs. 

3/ stripe senior SWE. Looking for earlier stage. 

If anyone is interested interested in an intro with anyone above. DM me. 

If you want me to feature you in a post and are cracked, comment “feature” and DM me.

If you know a founder hiring or someone who is cracked looking, tag them below or dm me.

Do the thing. 

Code it out, put it out. 

Too many people have voices in their head. 

Voice of: 
- imperfection
- comparison 
- anxiety “what ifs”

Shun them all. 

Go ship something ugly, imperfect today. 

Comment below what you want to ship?!

Or as Varun Rana would say 

“Common meng”!! 


Ps i am hosting an event with openai code, calude code, google jules, cursor bugbot in sf. Dm me for rsvp link :)

structured breakdown on how EXACTLY to network online (save this / repost if helpful):
1/ clean up linkedin

- this means no "open to work" 
- show case some sort of wins (hackathon, good school, olympiad, startup idk something "hard") and agree not all wins are equal
- a good profile picture
- updated titles
- brief bio 
- posts that are pinned all add to something called "trust" 


2/ a strong pitch via inmail

pitch like your 3 most accomplished, distinguished items in bullets. For example for a recent GT graduate who had 5 offers (meta, netflix, scale and several startups) 

he would mention:
- I did competitive math in HS
- I interned on this team at Amazon
- I run the data science club (had x speakers or Y projects)

and he got 6 interviews at top startups and firms like that

3) a strong "call to action" (cta) 

cta that hits best is "can we do a quick 15min call?" or 

"can I get your advice on X" 


other tips that go hard
- DO NOT YAP (keep the whole text under half screen if I open on phone) 
- MAKE IT PERSONAL (find common alma mater, ethnicity, recent posts etc) 
- FOLLOW UP (people are busy, they might want to but forgot, so ping!)
- REFER (have someone that knows you + them ping them to respond to you) 
- THUMBNAIL SUBJECTLINE (have a good hook to get someone to read it)

so wyt? is this helpful? what else would you add? 

repost if you like this to share with a friend! 

ps I am hosting the event of the century "great lock in weekend." Vibe coders vs  software engineers with goal to get one paying customer. 

apply at headstarter website (or link in bio)

Look who I bumped into! Grace Li 

Grace is a top YC portco summer batch

She is cooking. 

She spoke at our house when she had 30k users with Luke from cursor 

Today she will speak again but now with 133k users just 2 months later

Stay cooking. Super bullish on Design Arena

Did yk there 8 types of cs projects: 
1- class projects
2- online tutorial projects 
3- hackathon projects 
4- personal projects 
5- open source projects 
6- team projects 
7- user generating projects 
8- revenue generating projects 


I ranked it in my order of importance above. 

Class projects no matter how technical or low level are most times negative signal. 

Flip side, revenue generating projects showcase the opposite: autonomy, agency and product mindset. 

Each type of project deserve its own description. 

Personal projects show you are active and tinker on ideas that bug you (a good sign). 

Team projects who you can work with others and collaborate which is what real world is. 

Open source (oss) show that you can read other peoples code or accept others feedback for a standardized “production” codebase. 

While personal and team projects are variable in quality ie you can claim easy things as hard, oss sets a baseline ie if you have an accepted pr on langchain, thats dapper! 

But few things top up a fast growing user generated or revenue generated project. 

So build things quickly and get some users and learn why they are usuing it!

Whats something you have built in the past?

your AWS certifications mean nothing. 

Here is what i did to pass 2: 
- R.O.T.E. memorize the main aws services
- I worked on sre team so I also was fairly exposed 
- i crammed 7 udemy practice exams like 24hrs before the test

I did not work hard. I just spent prob less than 12 hours of total effort to pass. 

I took the exams to help me get promoted because capital one had an internal metric on how many engineers need certs by the year end. 

by taking the exam, it made my boss look good in front his boss as it showed that team contributed to the "quota" 

beyond that use case, and being in a purely devops role (which ai will automate) have an aws cert IS NOT AURA. 

I would sway from such activities and if you had gotten one or plan on getting one know that is not signal. 

And thinking it is signal qualifies easily as person is "not cracked" 

hope this makes sense.

i think the most important type of learning happens from leveraged relationships. 

not from text books.

not from school / mba / degree.

also not from any type of networking. 

but a specific type of networking where there is mutual respect, understanding. 

And ideally value creation. 

Like one or both parties benefit from a sales transaction on highly influential or intellectual matters. 

Imagine the deal made with cursor and claude. With oracle and openai. 

Imagine being in the same room as Ashish as he wrote the ml paper “attention is all you need.” 

(Thats the paper behind all llms and transformer architecture model)

Being in those spaces at those times opens your aperture and understanding of the world. 

On critical and asymptotic decisions. 

On asymmetrical bets. 

Be around ambitious people. 

During their ambitious moments. 

This, in my opinion, is the most important type of learning. 

Agree? 

P.S. this is a pic i did w a panel with cursor, cognition, factory and embedder: all competitors code editor space. 

Sywx (cognition/245k twitter) is a personal hero. I have been following his podcast “the latent space” for years! 

So it was an honor to have him pop to one of our hacker house events unannounced and had to make him a speaker!

If you applied to speedrun and want another shot at an accelrated interview for $1Mn in funding at $10Mn valuation, apply to The Great Lock in Weekend. 

Winning team gets $5000 cash + $5000 OpenAI credits. 3-days, remote, async Oct 10-12. Lock-in.

The concept behind this is simple: 

one weekend, one product, one customer. 

everyone has ideas. everyone has "unique insight."

everyone has friends and family, work mates and potentially investors who say 

"wow what a great idea. you will be successful and already making us proud"

but reality is none of it matters. what matters is cold hard cash. 

who is paying you? why are they paying you? who else wants to pay you? 

YOU WILL NOT KNOW THAT

if you are busy making 
- nice pretty ppt decks with no traction slide
- networking with 50k investors who will talk but not invest
- talk about your idea to customers but not ask them to pay

IF THEY ARE NOT PAYING, you don't have a startup yet. 

you are not a founder yet, you have an idea. Show that its worth something. 

Agree? 

Comment below if you applied or plan to soon.

literally someone who messaged me about his failed startup idea from my attached post got a job offer like the next day

About said person: 
- maintained open-source code repo
- 600+ github commits 
- shared why startup failed (had no revenue unfort.)
- still in college

the team he joins was alongside 10 other failed founders (many of them failed YC) or have many years of experience in SWE. 

being a failed college founder creates so much opportunity. its literally your trump card. 

you do not need any ivy deg, you do not need 2yrs at a hot startup or 5yrs at a meta. you are given the same caliber of **respect** as them.

I have a startup willing to pay 500K base, I have another backed by every t1 vc  and also one with like 10 princeton football players. 

if you want me to fwd you to any, just be like "interested" and share a 3 bullet point dm on why you :)

HOT TAKE INCOMING. 

What is the actual use of a technical recruiter. 

Like literally most recommendations made by recruiters are dog sh**. 

Founders are never happy. Engineering managers are not happy. 

10 candidates put in ashby. 50hours invested. 2 offers given. 1 went somewhere else. 

that means 8 reccomendations were bad. 45 hours wasted. 

I am pissed off at the sheer imcompetence of this job role. 

Like how dare someone claim to be a technical recruiter while never knowing how to code themselves. 

Like in today's world people openly lie on resumes, githubs and linkedins. How in the world does a recruiter keyword match in a world of chatgpt where everything is tip-top?

Top schools…number of years of exp…how hot was last startup or prev company ?

Recruiters DO NOT have a gage on the quality of work and the stank ranking placement of the work compared to others. 

They can only fancy keyword match on resume. They can only “guess.”

Imagine if the airforce recruiter tried to hire an F16 pilot based on a “guess.”

If I wrote high performance code, if I prompted my cursor background agent if I rebuilt my own version of tool calling, I don't want my "10-year-old-cousin equivalent" to be judging my work.  

In the ai engineering world of evals and tool calling which literally changes everyday, I bet you the recruiter can’t even differentiate a bee from an bat. An apple from an orange. Sugar from salt. 

I want to have someone who I can respect and respects my work, ask me intellectual questions and have deep conversations which excite me and make me forget what time it is as I talk about my high quality, high velocity code. 

Recruiters are a job role of the past. Especially technical sourcers, technical agencies and technical recruiters. 

I get it. Its cheaper labor, early lines of offense to search and sort but sub optimal. 

See past them. Encourage the recruiters to learn to code (not a little baby replit tool but proper infra and full designed systems pub-sub, microservices etc)

If you are a founder and want aura, do not work with recruiters. Do the the hiring yourself and have your engineers speak with best leads. 

I have some super cracked engineers in my network that are currently interviewing for top startups and AI Labs, I am happy to share candidate reccomendations.

If you are a YC startup, a series A/B startup, let me put you on. 

I want to change the world in many ways, I can't do it all at once. but one part that rages me is incompetence systems. 

LETS CHANGE THE WORLD. Dms are open.

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