15 YC Founders to Follow on LinkedIn in 2026
Paul Xue ·
The short answer
If you’re building a startup, follow these 15 YC CEOs on LinkedIn to gain insights into how they think about building products, finding customers, and running a company. Their posts show how they approach problems, weigh tradeoffs, and explain the choices they make.
Following founders on LinkedIn gives you a closer look at how they build and run their companies. Conduit’s Cole Rubin explains why faster guest replies do not fix slow repairs. Harper’s Dakotah Rice hires people to do a job before they automate it. Artisan’s Jaspar Carmichael-Jack quizzes his salespeople on the product himself. These 15 YC CEOs share decisions you can learn from, with three featured posts from each.
The List at a Glance
Position | CEO | Company | Follow for |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | Omnara | AI development | |
2 | General Legal | Startup legal advice | |
3 | LedgerUp | Finance automation | |
4 | Skillsync | AI development | |
5 | Wafer | AI engineering | |
6 | Harper | Entrepreneurship | |
7 | Conduit | Customer service | |
8 | Ramp | B2B marketing | |
9 | Popl | Event marketing | |
10 | Autumn | Sales | |
11 | Artisan | Sales automation | |
12 | Char | Product design | |
13 | Arist | AI strategy | |
14 | Rootly | Software engineering | |
15 | Bluejay | Voice AI |
How We Chose the List
We started with 60 YC founders our friends, coworkers, and people we follow liked. We reviewed their LinkedIn posts, confirmed their CEO roles, and selected 15 people from different companies. All 15 come from that original list. Each profile includes three posts that show what they write about and how they think.
We ranked the accounts by recent original posting activity, then by how consistently they posted across weeks. Reactions, comments, and reposts helped separate accounts with similar activity. We excluded simple reposts. The order reflects activity and reader response, rather than a score for the quality of someone’s advice.
1. Ishaan Sehgal
CEO and cofounder of Omnara.
Follow for: AI development
Ishaan shows agents doing specific jobs: investigating a database timeout from Slack, accessing files, and running projects built at Omnara’s hackathons. His posts make the infrastructure easier to understand because you can see what someone is trying to get done.
Featured posts
- Investigating a production problem from Slack
- Giving an agent access to files
- What people built at the Omnara hackathon
2. Ryan Walker
CEO and cofounder of General Legal.
Follow for: Startup legal advice
Ryan writes about the business behind legal work: why firms keep billing by the hour, why general counsel bring work in-house, and how AI changes the work lawyers do. His posts help founders understand what they are paying for and the incentives on the other side of the table.
Featured posts
- A former law-firm chairman questions hourly billing
- What a study with patent lawyers found about AI
- Why general counsel are bringing more work in-house
3. Bailey Spell
CEO and cofounder of LedgerUp.
Follow for: Finance automation
Bailey explains what breaks when billing becomes more complicated. An enterprise customer introduces new payment arrangements; a finance portal creates another manual task. His examples show where an AI agent has to work inside the systems customers already use.
Featured posts
- Why billing changes with the first enterprise customer
- Getting an agent through a customer’s procurement portal
- The finance work customers notice when it goes missing
4. Narayana Aaditya Ganeshkumar
CEO and cofounder of Skillsync.
Follow for: AI development
Narayana Aaditya Ganeshkumar on LinkedIn
Nars shows what happens when a coding agent can find your previous work. His posts walk through searching old sessions, adding context to a new prompt, and setting up Skillsync. Follow for demonstrations that make an AI tool’s purpose clear.
Featured posts
- Putting past work into a Claude Code session
- Finding useful work across old agent sessions
- What happens after you install Skillsync
5. Emilio Andere
CEO and cofounder of Wafer.
Follow for: AI engineering
Emilio writes about making AI faster and getting that speed into tools developers already use. His LinkedIn posts track Wafer’s distribution through Vercel, You.com, and OpenRouter. Follow for a technical founder’s view of turning engineering improvements into a service people use.
Featured posts
- Bringing Wafer to Vercel’s Token Pass
- Making Wafer available through You.com
- What growing usage looks like at Wafer
6. Dakotah Rice
CEO and cofounder of Harper.
Follow for: Entrepreneurship
Dakotah explains why Harper hires people to take sales calls and process applications before automating those jobs. He also writes about dividing responsibilities with his cofounder and resolving disagreements. His posts show how the work of running an insurance business becomes software.
Featured posts
- Why Harper hires “Future AI Founders”
- How Dakotah and his cofounder work together
- Why he started an insurance company
7. Cole Rubin
CEO and cofounder of Conduit.
Follow for: Customer service
Cole traces poor guest experiences back to missed repairs and incomplete handoffs. His posts explain how Conduit follows a problem through to resolution and learns from questions the AI could not answer. Read him for the operational work behind a customer-service product.
Featured posts
- Why fast replies do not fix slow repairs
- How an operator improves AI one missed answer at a time
- The problems that start before a guest arrives
8. Eric Glyman
Co-CEO and cofounder of Ramp.
Follow for: B2B marketing
Eric makes finance software understandable through stories people can repeat. His posts cover a Broadway musical about accounts payable, a Tony Hawk partnership, and how Ramp shares knowledge internally. Follow for how a B2B company explains its work and gets people interested.
Featured posts
- A Broadway musical about accounts payable
- The Tony Hawk partnership
- How Ramp shares what its teams learn
9. Jason Alco
CEO and cofounder of Popl.
Follow for: Event marketing
Jason writes about the work around an event: finding the right prospects, qualifying a conversation, and recording enough information for the next step. His posts connect Popl’s product updates to the jobs sales teams do before and after they meet someone.
Featured posts
- Finding prospects before the event begins
- Turning a conversation into qualified lead information
- Comparing badge-scan enrichment tools
10. Vishnu Sampathkumar
CEO and cofounder of Autumn.
Follow for: Sales
Vishnu Sampathkumar on LinkedIn
Vishnu explains where Autumn fits among sales tools and why existing company databases miss useful information. His posts describe earlier signals that a business exists and the questions customers ask about the product. Follow for how a founder defines a category while selling into it.
Featured posts
- Explaining what Autumn actually does
- Finding companies before they appear in startup databases
- What is driving Autumn’s growth
11. Jaspar Carmichael-Jack
CEO and cofounder of Artisan.
Follow for: Sales automation
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack on LinkedIn
Jaspar tests every salesperson’s product knowledge himself. He also writes about asking other founders for advice and what happened when Artisan hosted a customer dinner. His posts make sales management concrete: the questions reps must answer, the people to contact, and the work behind a deal.
Featured posts
- Why Jaspar quizzes every salesperson on the product
- What happened when he emailed hundreds of founders for advice
- What Artisan learned from hosting a customer dinner
12. John Jeong
CEO and cofounder of Char.
Follow for: Product design
John writes about what meeting notes are supposed to accomplish and why teams still lose track of decisions. He also shows how agents fit into his own development process. Follow for the thinking behind a product’s behavior, with examples drawn from work people recognize.
Featured posts
- Why the quality of meeting notes matters
- Finding the decision everyone remembers discussing
- How John works with agents in Linear
13. Michael Ioffe
CEO and cofounder of Arist.
Follow for: AI strategy
Michael writes about the questions leaders should ask before applying AI to a business problem. His posts distinguish knowing that performance is slipping from understanding why. He shares recommendations made to board members and explains how customer conversations can test assumptions about a market.
Featured posts
- What Michael shared with Harvard students about AI
- His recommendations to company boards
- Using outbound sales to test who needs your product
14. JJ Tang
CEO and cofounder of Rootly.
Follow for: Software engineering
JJ writes about building software for people dealing with an outage. His posts connect product design to urgency, stress, and the consequences of getting something wrong. He also shares what he learns from customers and other founders about how AI changes reliability work.
Featured posts
- Building Rootly for people on their worst days
- Working with The Pragmatic Engineer on a reliability deep dive
- What JJ discussed at Rootly’s founder event
15. Rohan Vasishth
CEO and cofounder of Bluejay.
Follow for: Voice AI
Rohan writes about finding voice-agent failures before a customer encounters them. He shares conversations with other builders and examples of the simulation work behind Bluejay. Follow for how teams test an AI product that has to respond to real people in real time.
Featured posts
- Catching voice-agent failures before customers do
- What voice AI builders discussed over dinner
- Trying the digital humans behind Bluejay’s simulations
Build a Feed You Want to Read
Read Ryan Walker to understand the incentives behind legal costs, Cole Rubin to see how customer problems shape a product, and Dakotah Rice for how a founder turns day-to-day work into software. Jaspar Carmichael-Jack offers a direct look at how he manages sales.
Start with a few people whose work overlaps with yours. Read the featured posts, see how they approach a problem, and decide whose thinking you want to keep following.
For more perspectives on marketing, see our 15 LinkedIn marketing influencers to follow.
How we research, write and correct these posts is in our editorial policy.
