😸 Agents paying their own bills

gm legends, happy Wednesday.

Agents have their own wallets now; two Stanford dropouts — one came from NASA, one from McKinsey — are fixing recruiting; OpenAI is running ads; and we teamed up with YC to give builders who missed the deadline one more shot.

pay.sh is a payment gateway jointly built by the Solana Foundation and Google Cloud that lets AI agents autonomously discover and pay for APIs using stablecoins — the agent's Solana wallet replaces account creation, KYC, and billing relationships, with settlement via the x402 protocol and native support for Gemini, BigQuery, and Vertex AI alongside 50+ community APIs.

🔥 Our Take: The Google Cloud partnership is the specific thing that matters here. Solana has been building toward agent-native payments for a while, but until a major cloud provider puts its own APIs behind the same payment rail — Gemini, BigQuery, Vertex AI, pay-per-request, no credentials — the use case stays theoretical. That changed today.

We teamed up with YC to give builders one more shot. Launch on Product Hunt this Friday and tag your post "YC application" — Gustaf Alströmer will personally review the top launches, and one or more will get a YC interview even though the official deadline has already passed.

If you've been building something real and missed the window, this is the window.

Schedule your launch for Friday and get it in front of him.

It watches how you actually work. The apps you open before meetings, the reports you rebuild every week, the random routines you didn’t realize were routines.

Then it just… fixes them. Builds the workflow, sends the update, drops it where you already are. No prompts, no setup, no dashboard you forget to check.

Use code DEMOPH if your mornings feel like déjà vu.

Contrario is a YC W25 AI recruiting agency built by Stanford dropouts Arya Marwaha — ex-BCG, led product at five startups — and Aditya Sood, whose NLP research ran at NASA and was published through Stanford's AI Lab in collaboration with Anthropic, pairing AI agents with a network of human expert recruiters who handle sourcing, screening, and closing through Slack.

🔥 Our Take: Arya and Aditya are both technical enough to have built a pure-AI version and explicitly chose not to. Their thesis is that hiring is a trust transaction, and candidates respond differently to a human than to an algorithm. Profitable at the W25 stage and scaling toward $1M ARR suggests at least some hiring managers agree.

Ads in ChatGPT is OpenAI's self-serve advertising platform, adding cost-per-click bidding to its existing CPM model and opening to all US businesses — ads shown to Free and Go users in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with OpenAI targeting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year.

🔥 Our Take: Reuters reported OpenAI cleared $100M in ad revenue from the US pilot before opening it to self-serve. At that pace, $2.5B isn't a stretch. OpenAI spent years framing itself as the anti-ad internet. That positioning ended quietly.