Nate Yu
CEO and Founder
at Butter
Nate Yu is the CEO and founder of Butter – an AI-native creative platform used by thousands of brands and agencies to make better content faster.
He was on the early team at Grubwithus (YC W12), which pivoted into GOAT and led growth teams at venture-backed startups Shyp and Athos. Nate invests and advises companies on growth and product including Headspace, Mozilla, Harry’s, Blockfolio, and WeWork.
His areas of focus are building product led growth loops, improving user retention, finding emerging acquisition channels, and scaling creative testing using AI.
Articles by Nate Yu
7 Steps to Build a Product That Sells Itself
The Founder’s Mental Health Playbook: What I Learned After Nearly Burning Out
A hard-won guide to staying mentally healthy while building a startup I founded Stitcher, the podcast platform, in 2007 and ran it for seven years until we sold in 2014....
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for Early Stage Companies
In our latest session from the Mucker Growth Series featuring Ethan Smith from Graphite, we explored AEO, a significant new approach for optimizing visibility in AI-driven search, particularly relevant as...
Startup Guide to AI Visibility: Be the Brand ChatGPT Recommends
Introduction Today, users aren’t just searching on Google. They’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI systems for advice. AI visibility is the new frontier of brand awareness....
Practical Uses of AI & Automation for Startup Operations
In a recent Mucker Growth Series session, we invited Rock Vitale, Founder & CEO of Easie, to share how he’s helped early-stage teams move from manual, fragmented workflows to streamlined,...
2025 New York Tech Week Recap Of Mucker Sessions
Last week during New York Tech Week 2025, we joined more than 1,000 events hosted by founders, investors, and VCs. This post is a full Mucker recap of the three...