General Partner at Y Combinator
Check size: YC's current standard deal is $500K for each accepted company: $125K for 7% on a post-money SAFE plus $375K on an uncapped MFN SAFE, accompanied by YC's participation right. It is a program-wide deal, not David's personal angel range.
David's founder story centers on building a simple mobile product to massive reach, confronting weak long-term retention and monetization honestly, then following the strongest user behavior into a better product that became Google Photos. His lens favors technical founders who build quickly, notice what users actually value, distinguish downloads from durable engagement and can pivot without losing the underlying insight.
Apply through YC. Demonstrate the product in seconds, show who uses it and why, activation, frequency and retention cohorts, organic distribution, the user behavior that surprised you, technical advantage, what you learned from failed versions and the next experiment. Be explicit about whether engagement can support a real business.
Technical founders who love building, a simple product people immediately understand, surprising organic adoption, honest engagement analysis, fast iteration, a deep user insight hidden inside an initial product, willingness to pivot and ambition to turn consumer behavior into an enduring platform.
David's account of Bump highlights weak fit for teams mistaking downloads for a sustainable business, ignoring frequency and retention, refusing to pivot after evidence changes or prioritizing organizational scale over zero-to-one work. No exhaustive personal pass list is public.
Separate initial distribution from cohort frequency, durable engagement and the economics required to support a business.
Find the subset of users and use cases with the strongest repeated love, then rebuild around that signal when the original product plateaus.
Make the first-use experience obvious while placing technical complexity behind a reliable product outcome.
Assess whether founders prefer direct building and learning in ambiguity rather than premature process and organizational scale.
A side project can reach global scale when the product removes an immediate friction, but long-term success still depends on repeated value, retention and business-model fit.
Bump's trajectory shows that enormous download volume cannot substitute for retention and a business model, and that the strongest user behavior can reveal a more durable product direction.
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