Alan Yan on customer traction
From $30M Seed Raised Out of YC Demo Day - Probably Largest Seed In YC History · · The Founder Initiative
“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.”
On , Alan Yan, Cofounder at Lonk, spoke about customer traction during $30M Seed Raised Out of YC Demo Day - Probably Largest Seed In YC History on The Founder Initiative.
About Alan Yan
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 experience—including placing the first engineer at Brex—with 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.