Vercel is no longer the “deploy and forget” platform.
It has entered the “deploy and pray” era.

Hypergrowth always comes at a price.
Vercel is paying it right now.

While the company is trying to downplay it, the truth is brutal:
In their rush for hypergrowth and AI hype, Vercel completely neglected security and infrastructure.

Result:
Trust among developers has been shattered.
Many teams have already started planning their exit from Vercel.

Vercel Just Collapsed.

In April 2026, Vercel suffered a major security disaster.

Hackers gained access to their internal systems through a compromised third-party AI tool. This wasn’t a small data leak it was a full-blown security massacre.

Talk to people, listen carefully, and observe a lot. Don’t rush.
This is the most critical decision in your entire startup journey.

Solve the problem that people genuinely suffer from and are willing to pay for.
If you pick the right problem, everything becomes easier.
If you pick the wrong one, every step becomes 10 times harder.

Is the problem frequent and recurring?
Is the market growing?
Do you have a unique advantage in this problem?
Is the competition too crowded or is it a relatively empty niche?

The most important rule:
Don’t solve the problem you want to solve.

Problem Selection in Startups
Problem selection is the foundation of everything. Choose the wrong one and everything else becomes much harder.
Pay close attention to these:

Is there real pain? Are people actually suffering from this problem?
Are they willing to pay to solve it?

These aren't the easiest markets to crack, but that's exactly the point. The harder the problem, the deeper the moat.

YC clearly understands this so every ambitious founder should too.

10 out of 15 are building AI for regulated, complex industries.

That's not a coincidence; it's a signal.

Healthcare, legal, finance, construction, defence, manufacturing.

14- SuperNova → AI product development, Prague, Czechia ($9.2M raised) - Jiri Trecak, Oskar Koristka

15- Miniswap → marketplace for tabletop games, Cambridge, UK ($3.5M raised) - Will Hanna, Zak Singh

10 out of 15 are building AI for regulated, complex industries.

12- Cellbyte → AI for pharma drug launches, Munich, Germany - Felix Modesto Neto, Daniel Moreira

13- SalesPatriot → defence procurement, Warsaw, Poland ($5M raised) - Maciej Szymczyk

10- Lucis (YC P25) → preventive healthcare, Paris, France ($8.5M raised) - Max Berthelot, Baptiste Debever

11- Bitstack → Bitcoin savings for Europe, Paris, France - Alexandre BLANC

8- Mercura (YC W25) → AI quote automation for construction, Munich, Germany - Lukas Bock

9- Brickanta → AI construction estimation, Stockholm, Sweden ($8M raised) - Linus B., Lucas Otterling

6- Cerrion → manufacturing AI video agents, Zurich, Switzerland ($18M raised) - Nikolay Kobyshev, Karim Saleh

7- Model ML → AI for financial services, London, UK ($75M raised) - Chaz Englander, Arnie Englander

4- Lio (formerly askLio) → AI procurement automation, Munich, Germany ($30M raised) - Vladimir Keil, Lukas Heinzmann, Till Wagner

5- Oneleet → cybersecurity compliance, Amsterdam, Netherlands ($33M raised) - Bryan Onel, Ora Onel

2- voize → AI companion for nurses, Berlin, Germany ($50M raised) - Fabio Schmidberger, Marcel Schmidberger, Erik Ziegler

3- HappyRobot → AI agents for logistics, Madrid, Spain ($44M raised) - Pablo Palafox, Javi Palafox, Luis Paarup

Y Combinator’s strong push into Europe is now impossible to ignore 🇪🇺

Here are 15 remarkable startups they've backed in the last 7 months:

1- Legora→ legal tech AI, Stockholm, Sweden ($5.5B valuation) - Max Junestrand, Sigge Labor

Over-engineering and premature complexity killed my first startup.

I now build everything much simpler and user-first.

Never give up..

I built a very modern and technically impressive product.
But it was way too complicated and heavy for individual users.
Nobody used it.

The lesson was painful but clear:
For B2C products, simplicity is everything.

The worst mistake was this:
Instead of talking to real users and getting feedback, I built features based on my own assumptions. I spent weeks developing complex systems like “advanced filtering” because I thought users would definitely need it.

Result:

I jumped straight into:

-Microservices architecture

-Kubernetes and Docker Swarm

-6 separate services

-Kafka, gRPC, Terraform, and other heavy tools

Trendy stack: NestJS, TimescaleDB, Elasticsearch, LangChain

The Biggest Mistakes I Made 2 Years Ago

When building BinerGo I made some serious errors.

We had only one core feature - automatically turning user data into clean reports and insights. But instead of building a simple MVP, I tried to create a full enterprise-grade system from day one.

If any one of them is weak, the others lose most of their value. When all four are strong and aligned, your odds multiply..

Master these four and everything else becomes much easier. Ignore or underestimate any of them and the whole journey becomes ten times harder.

Speed and clarity here determine how quickly you learn.

Marketing is the oxygen that makes everything visible. The best niche, team and product mean nothing if nobody knows they existt.

These four elements are not just important. They are everything in a startup.

A wrong niche makes even the best team and product struggle.

Building the right team turns that niche into reality. Without strong people you cannot move fast or execute well..

Creating a clean and fast MVP is how you test your assumptions in the real world.

Niche selection, team building, MVP creation and marketing are not separate steps.

They are tightly connected and each one multiplies the power of the others.

Choosing the right niche is the foundation. It makes every subsequent step easier and dramatically increases your chances of success.

This is one of the harshest and most real truths of being a founder.

Success brings loneliness with it.

If you don’t accept it, you’ll break halfway.

At the top, almost no one truly understands what you’re going through.

Nobody fully gets the pressure, the loneliness, or the weight you carry.

The higher you climb, the lonelier it gets.

What used to be “we” slowly turns into “I.” People become more careful around you.

They hesitate to speak their real thoughts. And you can’t be fully open with them either, because every word you say now carries more weight.

The hardest part is this:

Now I make the tough calls alone.

The strategy battles, investor pressure, internal politics, and the regret of hiring the wrong person I carry all of it by myselff.

As the team gets bigger, the distance between us grows.