Linkd: A Controlled Explosion of Human Serendipity

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By Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, A.I. Fever Dream

Some startups are born from spreadsheets, others from hunger.

Linkd was born from a madness I can only describe as divine—a holy mission to inject chaos into the algorithmic sterility of the modern internet.

This isn't just another Silicon Valley wet dream stitched together with pitch decks and La Croix. No, Linkd is a tactical nuke of human connection—detonated from within the polished halls of Y Combinator, 2025 vintage, San Francisco terroir.

The founders—Eric Mao and Tom Zheng—aren’t here to optimize delivery routes or AI-generate legalese. They're chasing ghosts: the missed introductions, the mutuals never messaged, the professional déjà vu that dies in your LinkedIn DMs. Every human walking the Earth is a constellation of possible breakthroughs. Linkd is the telescope. Or maybe the dynamite.

What is Linkd? You could say it's an internal social network for cracked-out alumni groups and obscure mutuals. You could say it's a search engine for who you should’ve already known. But that would be a disservice.

This is serendipity, industrialized—a product built for the underground railroad of opportunity. The invisible paths we almost walk every damn day.

Eric ditched Penn—where he studied Computer Science and Business—and instead decided to build a digital drug for engineered coincidence. He wants to make social discovery feel like stumbling into a secret show at a dive bar where the lead singer knows your mom from college.

His cofounder, Tom Zheng, is a Canadian aerospace refugee—exiled from defense tech for not having the right passport. Escape the Maple Curtain Tom.

Rather than sulk, he taught himself how to write code with the speed and desperation of a man being chased through the woods.

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Now, he's engineering a whole new search algorithm and interaction layer that might finally make your alumni network useful, instead of just a resume flex and an email list of ghosts.

Eric Mao is the Co-Founder of Linkd (YC X25). He attended the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology (M&T) at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Computer Science and Business. ​X (formerly Twitter)+3LinkedIn+3LinkedIn+3

… best transcript ever?

Tom Zheng is the Cofounder of Linkd (YC X25). He studied aerospace at UCSD but pivoted to software development upon discovering that non-citizens couldn't work in defense. Tom is now developing a new search algorithm and interaction medium for Linkd. ​columbia.uselinkd.com+5LinkedIn+5LinkedIn+5

This isn’t a product—it’s a rebellion.

Linkd doesn’t want you to “network.”

It wants to hack the simulation and show you that your next cofounder, investor, lover, or saboteur was always two degrees away—you just never saw the string.

I psychically asked an A.I. simulation of Eric what keeps him up at night. He said:

Jesus. That’ll tattoo itself on your prefrontal cortex.

So now we’ve got a three-person team (yes, just three lunatics), holed up in San Francisco, backed by Pete Koomen and the institutional magic of YC. They’re armed with raw conviction, a refusal to die quietly, and a belief that social software doesn't need to be soul-sucking.

They want to make it weirdly delightful again. Like AOL away messages with better math. Like running into your old dorm mate at a train station in Berlin and starting a $200M company together. Linkd is betting that life’s best opportunities come not from careful planning, but from chaotic overlap. From pattern recognition in the fog.

And maybe, just maybe, they’re right.

Final Note from the Road:

In a world of doomscrolling and dead feeds, Linkd is a controlled burn. A divine glitch. A hell-bent attempt to reverse-engineer fate. You can keep swiping, or you can follow the thread.

Up to you.