Cofounder, Lonk
Search every verified Alan Yan interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote β each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Alan Yan, cofounder of Lonk, has been active in discussions about startup fundraising and product development. In October 2025, Yan discussed the company's $30 million seed round, which he described as "arguably the largest seed round coming out of demo day in Y Combinator history." He spoke about the process of validating a business idea, noting that the team built a full integrated development environment and programming language in about three months to create a minimum viable product, and that early customer feedback helped them refine their approach. Yan stated that he "still really believe[s] in the old idea that we killed," attributing its failure to poor timing. In a December 2024 pitch, Yan described Lonk as building "an AI recruiter for startups" that takes a job description, searches the internet, and returns a short list of candidates filtered by criteria such as experience and domain. He said the company learned that its early adopters are "seed-stage founders" rather than recruiters, and that the team combines his seven years of recruiting experienceβincluding placing the first engineer at Brexβwith his co-founder's engineering background. Yan also appeared in a 2020 panel discussion on iGaming in Asia, where he commented on the Philippines as a hub for online gambling operators, and in 2012 he interviewed Codemasters co-founder David Darling about the history of the video game company.
“Nice to think that you know you always know that this is the idea... it's like you really place a bet and you're like see something and there's a bit of a spark there.”
“I still really believe in the old idea that we killed β it was just the timing was very wrong for that idea.”
“A small number of people being like 'this is super cool' kept me going to build out a full ID and programming language and in probably three months an MVP that we were happy with β something we could sell to people.”
“We then sold that for a month and it told us there's something here but like this, this, this and you're like okay, fair.”
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