In this episode of Building Blocks, we're joined by Michelle Marcelline, co-founder of The Prompting Company (YC S25), on her 3rd startup with the same founding team she met in a college CS101 class. Michelle traces her path to entrepreneurship back to watching The Social Network in middle school in Indonesia, a moment that led her to convince her parents to send her to school in San Francisco with one explicit goal: become a founder.She and her co-founders built their first real win in 2017, arbitraging a 20% Bitcoin price gap between the U.S. and Indonesia, before going through Y Combinator's W20 batch, pivoting away from a stock-investing idea, building a passwordless auth company called Cotter (acquired by Stych), and then Type Dream, an AI website builder eventually acquired by Beehiiv.Michelle now leads The Prompting Company, helping products get discovered and used by AI agents through what the industry calls Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), being the answer language models give, not just the top Google result. Michelle and Daivik dig into the mechanical difference between SEO and GEO, her first-ever agentic purchase at Stripe's Tempo event, working with NVIDIA's under-the-radar developer tools, and the lessons that only really sink in once you've been through the hard parts yourself.Guest: Michelle MarcellineLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michelle-marcellineConnect with Daivik: https://bento.me/daivikFollow the Podcast: https://bento.me/thebbpodTopics:00:01 — Guest background: how The Social Network sparked a founder obsession01:32 — Meeting her co-founders: shared immigrant ambition and lasting team chemistry03:12 — Early ventures before YC: 10+ failed experiments including Bitcoin arbitrage08:05 — Getting into YC and pivoting away from US stocks for Indonesia09:23 — Building Cotter: passwordless auth pivots to US market, sold to Stitch15:16 — Building Type Dream: Notion-like website builder gains traction, sold to Beehiiv20:43 — Why start a third company: builders at heart, the SF effect23:22 — What The Prompting Company does: Generative Engine Optimization explained25:26 — SEO vs GEO, agentic commerce, NVIDIA collaboration, seed round & customers40:32 — Closing: book reco and what's next for the Prompting Company#AI #GenerativeEngineOptimization #Startups #YCombinator #Entrepreneurship #Founders #BuildingBlocksPodcast #podcast#thepromptingcompany
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