YC Startup Screening with Claude
How to deploy a Claude agent that browses every batch company, reads every founder’s profile, and ranks them into a four-tier kanban you can share with your team
When you analyze a YC batch, the work falls almost entirely on the founders.
Markets shift. A category that looks small this week opens up the next, and the one everybody chased a year ago has quietly closed in on a single winner you weren’t watching.
Traction is even less stable. A company can have zero customers today and a viral February. A strong revenue chart this quarter can collapse on churn the moment the AI demand curve adjusts and the spike turns out to have been the spike, not the trend.
The only signal that holds across that uncertainty is who built the company.
The tier system in this guide is what makes that signal visible at scale. When you’re scrolling through ~150 startups per batch and 300+ founder profiles, the details that actually predict (the second exit, the prior shutdown that wasn’t a failure, the years spent at the top of competitive gaming, the unusual biographical fact buried in a LinkedIn About section) are the same details a human eye drops first.
The system surfaces them, organizes them into four tiers, and renders the result as a kanban your team can keep open. The judgement call after that is still yours.
📚 By the end of this guide you’ll have a continuous YC batch scout: a Cowork artifact with an agent behind it that re-scrapes the batch directory on every reopen, reads every founder’s profile, applies a four-tier classification you can edit, and renders the result as a live kanban your team can pin and check every morning.
Inside you will find:
How to Set Up Cowork as Your Batch Scout
The Four-Tier Logic for Spotting the Founders Worth Meeting
How to Scrape the YC Directory and Every LinkedIn Profile
How to Turn the Scraped Data Into a Tier-Ranked List
How to Build the Final Dashboard
How to Keep the System Alive Across YC Batches
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