Why Does Knowing What to Build Matter More Than Knowing How?

A Y Combinator partner says knowing what to build is now the harder problem, because being able to build is something anyone can have on tap. From 2022 through 2025, Y Combinator doubled down on a technical co-founder as non-negotiable, an idea that had always been around and then came to the fore. In the last year the cohort thinking moved toward builders.

The products that never got made were the ones where people already knew there was a buyer and already knew there was a problem, and at the margins still could not convince an engineer to work on it. Once building is on tap, the gap that matters is the one an engineer used to have to be talked into.