$400M in OpenAI tokens to YC batch
OpenAI offered $2 million in credits to every YC startup; with ~200 companies in the batch, that's roughly $400 million in tokens given away.
Snapshot · God Mode Podcast
The Bear Case for SpaceX at $1.75T | Karpathy Joins Anthropic | Cursor vs Codex vs Claude Code | Codex Builds an ERP in 7 Hours | Why Ozempic Is $20 in China | EP14
Explore episode
May 22, 2026
Where this was said
OpenAI's $2M Credits for YC Startups: Lock-In or Generosity?
At 20:48 · chapter starts 20:30
OpenAI's $2M YC Credits: Customer Acquisition or Competitive Intelligence?
OpenAI is giving $2M in credits to every YC startup — roughly $400M total. The real play: startups use those tokens to onboard users, burning through the credits and locking into OpenAI's ecosystem. When the credits run out, they keep paying. Sam gets a hand in every promising YC company.
Karpathy Joins Anthropic: The Most Bullish Signal Possible
Dan had dismissed Anthropic as marketing over substance. Then Andrej Karpathy — an OpenAI founding member — joined as an R&D researcher. Dan's take: Karpathy must know something the rest of us don't. One hire flipped the entire bull case.
Similar snapshots
MVP built in one week
Sam's initial MVP was coded in approximately one week using ChatGPT voice mode and copy-pasting code, with no prior technical experience.
Discord vs email for young users
Sam argues Discord is 10x better than email for building relationships with younger users who rarely check their inbox.
Monthly infra costs ~$780–$980
Sam's monthly operating costs include Cursor ($200), AI image generation ($100), AI video generation ($200), hosting ($100), email marketing ($80), and AI compute ($300–$500).
ChatGPT-powered pain point research
Sam recommends copying days of Discord chat history into ChatGPT and prompting it to list recurring pain points as a fast, free market research technique.
50 free tools built total
Bhanu and his team built approximately 50 free tools to attract search traffic, each linked back to SiteGPT.
New tool built in under 5 minutes
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu can now create a new free marketing tool in less than 5 minutes by referencing existing tools.
KD filter < 10 for rankable keywords
Bhanu filters Ahrefs keyword results to show only those with a keyword difficulty below 10, making them realistic ranking targets for any decent website.
Minimum 1,000 monthly search volume
Bhanu sets a minimum search volume of 1,000 monthly searches when selecting keywords to target with free tools.
20 downloads/day at launch
PropGPT averaged 20 downloads per day right after launching on the App Store through influencer marketing.
