Y Combinator Startup Podcast

The New Way To Build A Startup

<p>In the AI era, startups aren&#39;t winning by hiring faster — they&#39;re winning by automating as many internal functions as possible. In this episode of Main Function, Garry breaks down how tiny teams are beating companies 20x their size by building automations into every workflow, from engineering to ops to customer support.</p>

OpenClaw And The Future Of Personal AI Agents

<p>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 device, connects with messaging apps you already use, and goes beyond chat to actually execute tasks like managing your email, calendars, files, workflows, and more. Now meet the man behind it. YC’s Raphael Schaad sat down with Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, to discuss the “aha” moment behind the viral personal AI agent, why local-first agents could replace many of today’s apps, and how personal agents will reshape the future of software.</p><p>Chapters:</p><p>00:00 – OpenClaw takes over the internet</p><p>00:44 – Life after going viral</p><p>01:28 – Why OpenClaw took off, what sets it apart</p><p>02:56 – Bots talking to bots (and hiring humans)</p><p>04:11 – From “God AI” to swarm intelligence</p><p>05:07 – Peter’s original “aha” moment</p><p>06:38 – Rebuilding the agent as a conversation</p><p>07:38 – The moment it exceeded expectations</p><p>10:21 – Are apps going to disappear?</p><p>12:31 – Memory, data silos, and ownership</p><p>14:39 – The privacy reality of personal agents</p><p>15:05 – Letting the bot loose in public Discord</p><p>16:55 – Giving an agent a personality</p><p>18:19 – Contrarian building philosophy</p><p>20:09 – CLIs vs MCPs</p><p>21:28 – Building for humans first</p><p>21:46 – The road ahead</p><p>Apply to Y Combinator:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbTZ3OERsWV9JSi1YdHl5b2x6djc0Z0hXZWltd3xBQ3Jtc0tuYmNuUmhhOE9oSlpEeDJZR21HV3pZeXQwZGR0Q2RvbEhhWS1vTzBQTUVMcUxMaldGbWZBZkpuNlNfempOWThzLWcxaWJlVC1MSG5yM0ZIZzhLVTZTakpiUXh2dnBnZUlOSkwtOTM5NlhBa1FuUklIaw&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ycombinator.com%2Fapply&v=qwmmWzPnhog"> https://www.ycombinator.com/apply</a></p><p>Work at a startup:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbDV6UUplM3ZfMW1td2RORWpfaXVHN1BpdWt0Z3xBQ3Jtc0ttX0VqQ1FNRXZuQ09wRlMxZGVBME41VFN2ellJYk9wbVlVeE54SFRnbW85LUdHa21yTUZ3aHZOME1UQkI0OFM0STdOajRKemxNVmhPM1drTWdrS2hkSnNOSEVhbllHdmRBaXVGb1JCOXc3N1RvVlVJcw&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ycombinator.com%2Fjobs&v=qwmmWzPnhog"> https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</a></p><p><br></p>

We're All Addicted To Claude Code

<p>Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings? Maybe they&#39;re addicted to coding agents! In this episode of Lightcone, Calvin French-Owen — a co-founder of Segment and former engineer on OpenAI&#39;s Codex team — joins us to talk about why coding agents suddenly feel so powerful, the differences between Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, and what the future of work will look like.</p>

How To Get Your First Customers

<p>When you're starting out, it isn’t enough to just build a minimum viable product. You also need a minimum evolvable product - one that can adapt to the needs of those critical early customers. In this episode of Main Function, YC General Partner Ankit Gupta offers an update to the classic MVP playbook. He’ll outline strategies for getting your first customers, the power of adaptability and how feedback from early users will ultimately shape the future of your product and your company.</p><p>Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply</p><p>Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p><p>Chapters:</p><p>00:00 – The Minimum Evolvable Product</p><p>00:46 – Finding the First Believers</p><p>01:29 – Counterintuitive Rules To Get Early Users</p><p>02:10 – Learn Fast, Don’t Fear Churn</p><p>02:52 – How Early Users Shape the Market You Enter</p><p>04:22 – Tesla Case Study</p><p>05:14 – How To Build To Evolve</p>

Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets

<p>Stoke Space is racing to build the world&#39;s first fully reusable rockets that can launch, survive reentry, and fly again and again. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC’s Aaron Epstein sits down with Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman to find out why they chose to take on one of the hardest problems in rocket science, how an obsession with efficiency gives them an edge, and what full reusability could unlock for the future of spaceflight.</p><p>Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply</p><p>Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

What Surprised Us Most In 2025

<p>2025 was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode, the YC partners break down the surprises of the year, from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the application layer, and why the next wave of AI startups may be just getting started.</p>

How Intelligent Is AI, Really?

<p>ARC-AGI is redefining how to measure progress on the path to AGI - focusing on reasoning, generalization, and adaptability instead of memorization or scale.</p><p><br></p><p>During this month&#39;s NeurIPS 2025 conference, YC&#39;s Diana Hu sat down with ARC Prize Foundation President Greg Kamradt to find out why most AI benchmarks fail, how ARC-AGI reveals the limits of today’s models, and why measuring intelligence may be harder than building it.</p>

The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide

<p>Head of Design Ryo Lu helped transform Cursor from a feature-layer on top of VS Code into one of the world&#39;s leading AI code editors.He joins YC&#39;s Aaron Epstein on Design Review to talk about the path that brought him to Cursor, how rapid prototyping reshaped the core product and how he&#39;s breaking down the barriers that once separated designers and coders.</p>

From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn

<p>In just a few years, James Hawkins took PostHog from an idea hacked together right before YC&#39;s W20 deadline to a unicorn powering product analytics for thousands of teams.</p><p><br></p><p>He joins YC&#39;s Brad Flora to talk about surviving six months of &quot;pivot hell,&quot; why open-source analytics was the breakthrough, and how PostHog grew from fighting for its first users to launching full product lines—plus what he&#39;s learned about momentum, staying close to customers, and using transparency and humor to build a company that stands out.</p>

The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were "Impossible" Until Now

<p>Every major shift in consumer tech has a moment when it suddenly becomes accessible to millions. Michael Mignano helped spark one of those moments with Anchor, making podcast creation something anyone could do with a tap. Now at Lightspeed, he sees AI bringing a similar leap to music, media, and everyday apps.In this conversation, he and Garry trace the arc from the early days of social audio to today&#39;s consumer AI boom—and dig into what founders should focus on as the next generation of creative tools takes shape.</p>

Cursor Head of Design Reviews Startup Websites

<p>Cursor Head of Design Ryo Lu has spent his career at the intersection of design and engineering—from building fan sites as a kid to designing products at Stripe, Asana, and Notion. Now he&#39;s rethinking how software itself gets made.</p><p><br></p><p>On this episode of Design Review, Ryo joins YC&#39;s Aaron Epstein to break down how great product websites communicate what a company does. They walk through sites from early-stage startups, calling out the small choices in structure, clarity, and brand that help users understand a product instantly — and the ones that get in the way.</p>

Inside The Startup Launching AI Into Space

<p>Starcloud recently made history by launching a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 into orbit — the first time a GPU that powerful has ever operated in space. It&#39;s the first step toward building AI data centers in orbit, powered by continuous sunlight and cooled by radiating heat into deep space.Their approach could one day rival the world&#39;s biggest data centers while using less energy, zero fresh water, and far lower emissions.In this episode of Hard Tech, YC&#39;s Aaron Epstein visits Starcloud&#39;s HQ, where co-founders Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, and Adi Oltean explain how they built a working prototype in just 15 months — and why big tech is racing to space for AI compute.</p>

How To Recruit The Best Engineers And Sales Reps

<p>Most founders think hiring is about interviewing. But it&#39;s actually about selling.For Startup School, Juicebox co-founder &amp; CEO David Paffenholz joins YC&#39;s Harj Taggar to share how early-stage founders can find, pitch, and close top engineering and sales talent— from crafting better outreach to winning great hires from Big Tech— even when you&#39;re an unknown startup.</p>

From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups

<p>Jake Heller is the co-founder &amp; CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million.In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he shared how his team did it—from picking the right idea to building AI products that actually work—and how founders can turn a cool demo into a reliable tool used by real customers.</p>

Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution

<p>Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the Transformer.In this video, YC&#39;s Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language — from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need — the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era.</p>

YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours

<p>Every founder faces moments where they’re not sure what to do next — such as how to go to market with AI products, when to pivot, and who/when to hire.</p><p><br /></p><p>In this episode of Office Hours, YC partners Pete Koomen, Brad Flora, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Gustaf Alströmer answer real questions from founders and share stories about how great teams build conviction, learn faster, and make better decisions as they grow.</p>

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs

<p>For years, we&#39;ve heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work, the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced, and more hopeful.From radiology to software engineering, the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster, demand for human creativity and judgment grows.YC&#39;s Garry Tan explores what history, economics, and real companies show us— that technology doesn&#39;t replace people, it redefines what we can do.</p>

How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

<p>Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the issue tracking tool used by thousands of high-growth companies. Before Linear, he was the first designer at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb.On Design Review with YC&#39;s Aaron Epstein, Karri shares how his design background shaped Linear’s product philosophy, why quality and craft matter from day one, what founders should look for when hiring, and how AI is changing the way teams build. It’s a deep dive into building products that truly stand out.</p>

The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device

<p>Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something that’s never been done before.</p><p><br></p><p>They&#39;re building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains—capturing CO2 from moving vehicles before it enters the atmosphere, then turning those emissions into revenue by selling it to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of Hard Tech, YC&#39;s Gustaf Alströmer visits Remora&#39;s headquarters outside Detroit to see how a recent college grad with no engineering background is helping transform the $2 trillion transportation industry.</p>

Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions

<p>Jordan Fisher is the co-founder &amp; CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answers—asking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away.He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right now? What happens when software becomes commoditized? How do you build trust as teams shrink and AI takes on more responsibility?</p>

Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI

<p>Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model?YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with Nick Joseph, Anthropic&#39;s Head of Pre-training, to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claude—from managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws, data strategies, team composition, and why the hardest problems in AI are often infrastructure problems, not ML problems.</p>

Fintech 3.0: Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto

<p>We are entering the era of Fintech 3.0. Regulatory clarity, growing consumer adoption, and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto — and at YC, Base, and Coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. In this episode of Main Function, YC&#39;s Harj Taggar and Base&#39;s Jesse Pollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they&#39;re most excited to see, why this is such an exciting time in crypto, and what the future could look like onchain.More on our latest RFS: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/build-onchain</p>

Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era

<p>For nearly two decades, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes work—guiding the company through the rise of mobile, the cloud, and now the age of AI.In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School, Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term, the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves, and why he believes AI represents the most transformative shift yet.</p>

The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad

<p>Amjad Masad is the co-founder &amp; CEO of Replit, now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He&#39;s spent nearly a decade making programming accessible to all—and with the rise of AI, that vision is closer than ever.In this talk from AI Startup School on June 17, 2025, Amjad traces the arc of computing from mainframes to personal computers to a future where AI agents can create software on demand. He predicts that the value of traditional software will approach zero, fundamentally reshaping how companies are built and how work gets done.</p>

The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

<p>Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir, and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model.</p><p>During his time at Palantir, he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today. </p><p>On this episode of The Lightcone, he explains how FDEs became central to today&#39;s startups, why &quot;doing things that don&#39;t scale at scale&quot; works, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for founders working in AI.</p>

Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students

<p>Michael Truell on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.At 25, Michael Truell has already built Cursor into one of the fastest-growing companies in AI coding, hitting $100M ARR in just a year. In this fireside chat with YC General Partner Diana Hu, he shares the lessons that came from years of failed projects with his co-founders, why he believes programming is still essential even as AI changes how we code, and how Cursor is taking on GitHub Copilot with the conviction that all of software development will flow through models.</p>

GPT-OSS vs. Qwen vs. Deepseek: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures

<p>OpenAI recently released its first open-weights model since GPT-2, entering a field led by DeepSeek and Alibaba&#39;s Qwen.YC&#39;s Ankit Gupta breaks down everything you need to know about these top OSS models, including what sets them apart under the hood. He’ll compare their approaches to mixture-of-experts, long-context training, and post-training techniques that shape reasoning and alignment—and explore how different design choices lead to surprisingly similar performance.</p>

How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)

<p>In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC General Partner Gustaf Alströmer is joined by Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups in the world. In just 13 months, Max and his team scaled from 10 to 100 people, raised $80M, and cracked the challenge of selling to one of the most skeptical industries. Max shares insights on building a successful vertical AI company, selling to conservative markets, and sheds light on what the future of legal tech looks like.</p>

The Sales Playbook for Founders | Startup School

<p>Navigating B2B sales for the first time can feel slow and overwhelming.Drawing from his experience founding Monzo and GoCardless, YC&#39;s Tom Blomfield shares his playbook for running a tight sales process that lands real, recurring revenue. He walks through each step—free and paid pilots, opt-out contracts, long-term deals—and shows how to prove value and close customers.</p>

Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design

<p>Dylan Field on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Dylan Field co-founded Figma to bring the design process online and make it multiplayer. From a meme maker built on WebGL to a design platform powering millions, Figma’s journey hit a major milestone with its IPO last week.In this conversation, Dylan shares the early challenges of building in the browser, the early risks and pivotal choices that shaped Figma’s growth, the principles that guided its product and community, and how he thinks about building tools that empower creativity at scale.</p>