One of the many reasons I’m so excited about the privilege to help build Orange Collective is that we are living in the future. Given that we are very tightly focused on investing in Y Combinator companies, typically pre-Demo Day, we are all-in on the unique YC ecosystem. We are rebuilding our tech stack from near-scratch roughly every quarter, using the latest AI tools, primarily from Y Combinator.
YC is the world’s leading tech accelerator. The median TVPI of dedicated YC Demo Day investors is 5x; top decile is 16x (Source). We invest primarily before Demo Day, in order to target even higher returns.
We can do this because we have over 150 Y Combinator alumni as active LPs, ranging from 22-year-olds to Garry Tan, President of YC. Our team of exited founders has collectively graduated from 5 Y Combinator batches. Our team has also collectively angel invested in 200+ Y Combinator companies, including unicorn outcomes like Ironclad, Vanta, Replit, Moonvalley, and Snapdocs.
We’re rebuilding our tech stack regularly for three reasons:
- We are steadily increasing our efficiency
- We are always up to date on the latest tools, in the insanely fast-evolving AI space
- We have peer-to-peer expertise and credibility in the exact sector that many of our portfolio companies are operating in.
Our lead on building our platform is General Partner Dave Yen, a “VC who moonlights as a coder”. Our platform writes company-specific deep research reports, living at a persistent URL, with natural-language Q&A. Our platform also produces daily scout reports on relevant YC launches.
Our architecture combines Next.js with TypeScript, Shadcn UI components, and Supabase for storage. Firecrawl handles automated web scraping of YC profiles and company data. Mastra (portfolio company) handles the agentic layer:
- Multi-step workflows for memo generation
- Agent routing for different query types (company-specific vs. portfolio-wide)
- Hot-swappable LLMs across providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini
Dave started with basic OpenAI API calls, but once he needed to ingest documents, run multiple agents, and pass context between steps, he needed proper workflow orchestration. That’s where we (and many others) needed to use Mastra.
For more details and screen shots, see Mastra’s case study: How Orange Collective Vibe-Coded Their Own VC Operating System.
