I was excited to meet with the founders of InstaAgent in San Francisco for dim sum (Harbourview is the best in SF!) and find out that they made it into the Y Combinator Summer 2026 batch. I thought it’d be great to have Hong Kong builders learn about this exciting new startup, how great they’re doing already, and how they got into YC and what they learned during their time there.
We’ll be doing a live event with the founder in the near future, but we thought this is a great way to launch our very first WyB building interview and to feature co-founder and CEO of InstaAgents Kyle Wong. We talk a little bit about starting in Hong Kong, his journey to YC and building an AI startup in the most exciting time for tech builders in history.
Kyle: I grew up in Hong Kong and studied at Cornell before joining Goldman Sachs, where I covered tech companies in China.
After eight years at Goldman, I decided to quit and start my own company. My first startup was a mobile gaming studio, which eventually led me into marketing and AI.
The idea came from our gaming studio, where we successfully used AI and social media marketing to acquire more than one million users in a single month. Through that experience, we saw firsthand how difficult it was to create high-quality, personalized AI content at scale. That insight led us to start our second company, InstaAgent.
InstaAgent helps consumer brands turn one campaign brief into hundreds of audience-specific social media creatives. We then help distribute and test them across platforms such as Meta and TikTok, using performance data to identify winners and improve the next campaign cycle.
We started by serving small and medium-sized businesses before moving upmarket. Today, we mainly work with B2C companies across categories such as consumer goods, health and technology. We have worked with more than 500+ brands, including some of the largest FMCG brands.
Watch our launch video below:
The YC interview lasted only around ten minutes. It was intense, but there were no trick questions. Most of the questions were fundamental:
What problem are you solving?
Who needs it?
What have you learned from customers?
Why could this become a large company?
The biggest lesson was the importance of explaining the business in very simple terms. YC also looks for insights that founders have gained through direct experience, rather than just an attractive market or impressive technology.
First, YC pushes founders to set much more ambitious targets. This forces you to identify the most important goal and find a way to overcome the obstacles standing in your way.
Second, YC strongly believes in doing things that do not scale. Working manually and talk to customers can reveal their true pain points. Ultimately, it is about building something people want.
Third, YC constantly brings founders back to real customer behaviour: Are customers paying? Are they staying? What features do they use the most? These can reveal important insights about your customers.
I would encourage almost any ambitious Hong Kong founders to apply. YC publishes “Request for Startups”, but it funds companies across a wide range of industries. Founders should not choose a vertical simply because they think YC will like it.
What matters more is whether the founders have a genuine interest in the problem, a strong insight into the market and the ability to move quickly.
There is no secret formula, but three things help:
explain the business simply
demonstrate a deep understanding of your customers
show evidence that you can execute quickly, such as meaningful traction.
A strong application should teach the YC partners something new about the market or customer. You do not need to have solved every problem, but you should demonstrate a distinctive insight and the ability to learn and execute faster than others.
Find out more about InstaAgent: https://www.instaagent.com
Subscribe to this newsletter to learn when our in-person event with Kyle happens this Fall.
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