Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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Y Combinator Startup Podcast
We help founders make something people want. The Y Combinator Podcast is where builders talk about building. From the earliest days of an idea to scaling a company that changes the world, YC partners and founders share real stories, lessons, and tactics from the frontlines.
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331 epizod
How To Design In The Agent Era
AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing how they build, ship, and stand out.
In this episode of Design Revi...
Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence
The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before.
At Startup School 2026, YC President & CEO Garry...
Building the First Data Centers in Space
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space.
In November 2025, Starcloud l...
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: "Move Fast And Ship Safely"
Waymo’s first autonomous demo took eighteen months. The product took fifteen years. Today, the Waymo Driver runs 500,000 trips a week — four million f...
Patrick Collison: "What If You Succeed?"
In 2009, Patrick and John Collison went to Startup School in Berkeley, got sushi in Potrero Hill afterward, and decided on the walk home to start Stri...
Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI
In 2001, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat did the math and realized Google’s entire search index would fit in RAM — then shipped it in a few days, and se...
Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity”
Alexandr Wang's advice to his 18-year-old self: develop your own internal compass for how the future will unfold, and hold conviction in it against th...
Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban
In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither.
Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic...
Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"
In 2005, Sam Altman was a Stanford sophomore in YC’s first batch, building a startup in a little Cambridge office while Paul Graham cooked the founder...
Boris Cherny: Building Claude Code
Fresh off the launch of Opus 5, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny joins Diana Hu at Startup School 2026 to talk about what the newest models can do, ho...
Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA
NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthr...
World Models, Explained
Why do even our best AI models need tens of thousands of examples to learn skills that a human picks up in a handful of tries?Solving this problem is...
How To Better Understand Your Users
Most founders obsess over dashboards and aggregate metrics, but some of the best product insights come from understanding how individual users actuall...
Why Domain Experts Are Winning In The Age Of AI
Bryant Chou co-founded Webflow, which today powers around 1% of all websites on the internet. Now he's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI-p...
How To Pick A Startup Idea
Many founders get stuck trying to find the perfect startup idea before they commit. But the perfect idea doesn't exist in the abstract. The only way t...
"The CEO Must Be the Chief AI Officer"
Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn't just a...
How to Build an AI-Native Services Company
Some of the biggest companies of the next decade won't be software businesses, they'll be services companies like insurance carriers, law firms, and t...
How To Build Superintelligence Inside Your Company
Building superintelligence inside a company isn't about adding AI as a feature. It's about making it the operating system the whole organization runs...
How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot
In this episode of the Main Function Garry sits down with Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup", about his new book, "Incorruptible: Why Good Compan...
Paul Graham: Should you move to Silicon Valley?
Paul Graham is a co-founder of Y Combinator. He's funded and mentored companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, DoorDash, and thousands of others through YC, an...
Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers
We're entering a new era of software where a single person, working with AI agents, can build products that previously required entire teams.In this e...
Beyond Bigger Models: Recursion As The Next Scaling Law In AI
A 7-million parameter model outperforming models a thousand times its size on tasks like ARC Prize. That's what recursive reasoning unlocks.In this ep...
How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis has had one of the most extraordinary careers in tech. He started as a chess prodigy and video game designer at 17 before getting a PhD...
The $9B Startup That Wants to Create a Billion New Developers
Replit is the leading no-code app builder for consumers and enterprise, letting anyone with an idea build real, deployed software using natural langua...
The Playbook For Building An AI Native Company
AI isn't just making teams more productive. It's changing how companies should be built.
In this episode of Startup School, YC Partner Diana Hu...
Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Breaks Down Their New Website
Even the most successful websites eventually need a redesign. Take Stripe for example. After six years with the same homepage, they recently unveiled...
The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here
Physical Intelligence is building a foundation model that can control any robot to do any task — what the team describes as the GPT-1 moment for robot...
This Startup Wants To Catch Cancer Before It Spreads
1 in 11 babies born in America this year will be screened by a genetic test that didn't exist a decade ago.Biotech startup BillionToOne turned a simpl...
This Startup Secretly Detects Fraud For Fortune 500s
In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC Managing Partner Jared Friedman talks to Karine Mellata, co-founder of Variance (W23), who is coming out of s...
How François Chollet Is Building A New Path To AGI
François Chollet has spent years asking a different question than most of the AI world. Instead of scaling what already works, he’s trying to understa...
Inside The Startup Reinventing America’s Trillion Dollar Chemical Industry
Solugen is reinventing the trillion-dollar chemical manufacturing industry by combining biology and chemistry in a new way. In this episode of Hard Te...
Building A Global AI Startup From India
In this episode of The Lightcone, we talk with Mukund and Madhav Jha, the founders of Emergent - an AI platform that lets anyone build and ship produc...
How To Build The Future: Max Hodak
YC alum Max Hodak is the co-founder of Neuralink and founder of Science, a company building brain-computer interfaces that can restore sight.Science h...
How To Avoid AI Design Slop
As no-code design tools become more common, so do the pitfalls. You know what they look like - the purple gradients, annoying hover effects, sections...
The Fastest Path To Super Intelligence
Poetiq is a new startup founded by former DeepMind researchers that recently achieved a major jump on the ARC-AGI and Humanity's Last Exam benchmark b...
The AI Agent Economy Is Here
With the takeoff of OpenClaw and MoltBook, a new agent-driven economy is taking shape.
In this episode of the Lightcone, we took a...
Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny
A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, sits down to share the incredible journey of developi...
The New Way To Build A Startup
In the AI era, startups aren't winning by hiring faster — they're winning by automating as many internal functions as possible. In this episode of Mai...
OpenClaw And The Future Of Personal AI Agents
You’ve probably already heard all about OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot). The viral sensation is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own...
We're All Addicted To Claude Code
Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings? Maybe they're addicted to coding agents! In this episode of Lightcone,...