Well Principled YC Application

Summer 2019Active

Well Principled went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2019 batch as a B2B company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Summer 2019
Industry: B2B
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2019

Founders

Ryan RichtFounder
Christopher ShaferFounder
Joseph WingbermuehleFounder

What Well Principled does

We aren’t building AI to replace "knowledge work” that requires neither, but to bolster the working human intellect which has never failed to discover new paths to prosperity. For all their success, mainstream approaches to AI have fundamental limitations preventing them from solving critical classes of problems. We are building a new AI architecture from first principles to break from these limitations. The status quo has ossified around the supervised, brute-force pretraining paradigm. These systems do not, and cannot, handle the essential skills of continual learning, goal discovery, novel planning, and the creation of new knowledge. These limitations are not trivial. Our national prosperity depends directly on overcoming these limitations, because the essential skills underlie the skilled trades. From electricians to machinists to nurses, apprentice tradespeople in all of these fields learn “skilled improvisation” where every solution is novel, and even the goal must be discovered. Prosperity demands the precise capabilities where status quo AI is structurally weak. Worse, these limitations will not be overcome with more compute or training data. They are inescapable consequences of the underlying technologies of supervised learning, neural networks, transformers, backprop, and gradient descent. Progress requires independence from them. We are building a new AI architecture by reverse-engineering the system that got us this far: the human brain. By triangulating between neuroscience, cognitive science, and the evolutionary elaboration of brains, we have identified the brain’s algorithms to (a) continually learn a causal world model (b) select goals to both achieve and learn to achieve more (c) plan to reach novel goals, and (d) creatively produce new knowledge. Join us in building intelligence with ingenuity to bolster the skilled trades.

Well Principled's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Well Principled, Summer 2019 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Well Principled

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

The neural engine for autonomous robots

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We are building a new AI architecture modeled on the human brain to enable robots to learn continually, discover goals, plan novel solutions, and create new knowledge. This breaks from current AI methods that rely on supervised learning and large datasets, which fail at tasks requiring skilled improvisation. Our product is intended for autonomous robots that need to operate in complex, dynamic environments like skilled trades - electricians, machinists, nurses - where every problem and goal can be new.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We live in St. Louis, Missouri, and our company is based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We are based in St. Louis because it's home to the founders and provides an environment suited to our small team and focused research. We plan to remain here after YC, taking advantage of the local context and building from our roots.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Well Principled YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Well Principled's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Well Principled would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.