Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban

<p>In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither.</p><p><br></p><p>Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic (YC W16), the startup building America’s first supersonic airliner, to change that. At Startup School 2026, he shares how a cardboard mockup with Office Depot seats became XB-1, the first independently developed jet to break the sound barrier, and why founders have to build for both the worst day and the best day.</p><p><br></p><p>He also answers founder questions about teaching yourself hard things, breaking into hardware without the right resume, and finding work-life harmony while building something ambitious.</p>

Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

<p>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 founders dinner. Twenty years later, as co-founder &amp; CEO of OpenAI, he closed Startup School 2026 in conversation with YC&#39;s Garry Tan — on agents, ambition, and why the ceiling for what a startup can take on has never been higher.</p>

Boris Cherny: Building Claude Code

<p>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, how Claude Code came to be, and what it means to build products when the underlying capabilities keep accelerating.</p>

Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

<p>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 breakthroughs in modern computing.At Startup School 2026 at Chase Center, Garry Tan sits down with Founder and CEO Jensen Huang to talk about confronting reality, learning your way into new domains, and why resilience — getting through one day at a time — matters more than anything else.</p>

World Models, Explained

<p>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 one of the great open challenges in modern AI. World models, which give AI an internal simulation of its environment, are one of the most promising paths forward.In this episode of Decoded, YC&#39;s Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard discuss the intuition and math behind world models, new research, and current applications in self-driving, robotics, and more.</p><p><br></p><p>Full Transcript: <a href="https://ycrootaccess.substack.com/p/world-models-an-intuitive-introduction" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://ycrootaccess.substack.com/p/world-models-an-intuitive-introduction</a></p>

How To Better Understand Your Users

<p>Most founders obsess over dashboards and aggregate metrics, but some of the best product insights come from understanding how individual users actually use their product.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of Startup School, YC&#39;s David Lieb walks through one of his favorite tools for better understanding your users, the dot plot. It&#39;s a simple two-dimensional grid that reveals usage patterns no aggregate chart can show you.</p><p><br></p><p>He’ll cover why it gives founders a better sense of product health, what patterns to look for, and real-world exam</p>

Why Domain Experts Are Winning In The Age Of AI

<p>Bryant Chou co-founded Webflow, which today powers around 1% of all websites on the internet. Now he&#39;s back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI-powered website and marketing platform that doesn&#39;t just build your site — it connects to your analytics, CRM, and search console to optimize your marketing while you sleep. In this episode of the Lightcone he explains how he built Ploy to be “anti slop,” how building today compares to his first startup, and why founders with domain expertise are making a comeback.Chapters:00:00 — What Experience Gives You in the Age of AI00:38 — Meet Bryant Chou, Co-Founder of Webflow01:22 — His New Startup Ploy02:47 — Rebuilding the Posterous website From 200803:27 — Rebuilding the Scribd website From 200705:04 — Rebuilding the Auctomatic website From 200706:19 — Rebuilding the Escher Reality website From 201707:11 — 12% of the YC Batch Uses Ploy08:26 — The D&amp;D Theory of Founder Skills10:05 — Democratizing Marketing and Growth10:50 — Live Demo: The Design Slurper13:21 — Your Website Should Work for You While You Sleep14:26 — Integrations, Analytics, and the Marketing Brain17:27 — Ploy&#39;s Anti-Slop Engine: 3,500 Curated Design Prompts20:05 — The Andy Warhol Theory of AI22:35 — Webflow Origin Story24:26 — Building in a Competitive Market Then vs. Now26:01 — First Three Months: Webflow 2013 vs. Ploy 202527:17 — What Experience Teaches You That Models Can&#39;t28:51 — Will Better Models Kill Products Like Ploy?30:32 — The Competitive Moat of Purpose-Built AI33:01 — Agents as Customers: CLI, MCP, and AEO35:02 — Young Founders vs. Experienced Founders36:36 — The Idea Maze and Cloning Yourself With AI42:37 — The Magnifying Glass MomentApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p>

How To Pick A Startup Idea

<p>Many founders get stuck trying to find the perfect startup idea before they commit. But the perfect idea doesn&#39;t exist in the abstract. The only way to find what works is to pick one, go deep, and get feedback from real customers.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of Startup School, YC&#39;s Jon Xu breaks down how to choose what to build, &quot;burn the other boats,&quot; and go deep enough to practically run your customer&#39;s business— and why that depth is what surfaces the better idea underneath.</p>

"The CEO Must Be the Chief AI Officer"

<p>Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn&#39;t just another tool, it&#39;s a new foundation for building products, teams, and companies.In this episode of Lightcone, Pedro shares why he thinks we&#39;re only months into a platform shift as significant as the invention of electricity, how AI has changed the way he works, and why every founder should be &quot;token maxing&quot; to understand the limits of the technology firsthand.He explains why the CEO needs to be the chief AI officer, how Brex is rebuilding itself around AI, and why founders should rethink what&#39;s possible when intelligence is available on demand.</p>

How to Build an AI-Native Services Company

<p>Some of the biggest companies of the next decade won&#39;t be software businesses, they&#39;ll be services companies like insurance carriers, law firms, and tax practices rebuilt from scratch with AI doing most of the work. In this episode of Startup School, YC Visiting Partner Charlie Warren walks through the playbook for building AI native services companies, covering how to pick a market with the right traits, why variance kills these businesses faster than anything else, and the P&amp;L math that’ll transform your business model.Chapters:00:00 — Intro to AI Services Companies01:01 — Picking the Right Market02:55 — Markets YC Likes Right Now03:43 — The Sam Altman Test04:35 — The Right Founding Team05:28 — Building the Product06:19 — Variance Is the Existential Problem07:08 — The Early Demand Trap07:53 — How to Price AI Services08:41 — The P&amp;L Walkthrough09:33 — AI Operating Leverage10:27 — Don&#39;t Buy Your Way InApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p>

How To Build Superintelligence Inside Your Company

<p>Building superintelligence inside a company isn&#39;t about adding AI as a feature. It&#39;s about making it the operating system the whole organization runs on. In this episode of the Lightcone, we sat down with YC&#39;s Pete Koomen to talk for the first time about how he led the effort to build YC&#39;s internal agent infrastructure from the ground up. We cover how giving agents unrestricted access to one database changed everything, the self-improving skill loops that get smarter overnight and why he thinks we&#39;ve arrived at the personal computer moment for AI.Chapters:00:00 — Intro00:39 — YC&#39;s AI Stack02:15 — The Finance Team Problem That Started It All05:07 — SQL Access Changes Everything07:20 — One Database to Rule Them All09:14 — Jevons Paradox 10:07 — Denormalizing for Agents (G-Brain)12:15 — The Single-Player Era of Agents14:16 — 350 Tools and a Shared Registry16:24 — Skillify, DRY, and MECE Resolvers18:23 — The Self-Improving Dream Cycle20:26 — The Two-Sentence Pitch Skill23:06 — How Super Intelligence Compounds25:10 — Recording Everything as a Building Layer27:10 — The Shared Organizational Brain29:18 — Trust-Default Culture as a Requirement30:44 — Raising the Floor for New Employees32:35 — Horseless Carriages Essay Explained34:24 — Why Chat Is the Best Interface for Agents36:10 — Garry&#39;s List → G-Brain Rewrite38:50 — Just-in-Time Software40:49 — Centralizing vs. Decentralizing AI43:32 — The Personal AI RevolutionApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p>

How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot

<p>In this episode of the Main Function Garry sits down with Eric Ries, author of &quot;The Lean Startup&quot;, about his new book, &quot;Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad And How Great Companies Stay Great&quot;. Ries breaks down why shareholder primacy often leads to company and product degradation, how founders can lose control of the companies they build, and what legal structures and governance models can protect a company&#39;s core mission from outside threats. </p>

Paul Graham: Should you move to Silicon Valley?

<p>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, and is one of the most influential voices in the startup world.</p><p><br /></p><p>In this talk at our YC | Stockholm event last month, Paul walks through why ambitious founders should move to Silicon Valley at least briefly, what makes it uniquely valuable — from serendipitous meetings and faster investor decisions to a deeply embedded pay-it-forward culture — and why returning home afterward may be one of the most powerful things a founder can do to help their local ecosystem, using Stockholm as a case study for what it would take to become the Silicon Valley of Europe.</p>

Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers

<p>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 episode of Lightcone, the hosts break down the rise of AI coding agents, "tokenmaxxing", and the emerging workflows behind tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw. They discuss why AI systems today feel less like productivity tools and more like collaborators, why the future of AI should be personal and user-controlled, and how founders are starting to build software in completely new ways.</p>

Beyond Bigger Models: Recursion As The Next Scaling Law In AI

<p>A 7-million parameter model outperforming models a thousand times its size on tasks like ARC Prize. That&#39;s what recursive reasoning unlocks.In this episode of Decoded, YC&#39;s Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard break down two recent papers on recursive AI models, HRMs and TRMs, that are achieving state-of-the-art results with a fraction of the parameters of today&#39;s largest models.They explain why standard LLMs hit a fundamental ceiling on certain reasoning tasks, how recursion at inference time gives small models the compute depth to break through it, and what happens when you combine these ideas with the power of large-scale foundation models.</p>

How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis

<p>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 in neuroscience and going on to found DeepMind. His lab cracked Go, solved protein structure prediction with AlphaFold, and then gave it away free to every scientist on earth. That work won him the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Today he leads Google DeepMind, pushing toward the same goal he set as a teenager: AGI. On this special live episode of How to Build the Future, he sat down with YC&#39;s Garry Tan to talk about what still needs to happen to get us to AGI, his advice for founders on how to stay ahead of the curve and what the next big scientific breakthroughs might be. Chapters:00:00 — Intro00:46 — Demis Hassabis: From Chess Prodigy to DeepMind01:48 — What’s Missing Before We Get To AGI?03:36 — Why Memory Is Still Unsolved06:14 — How AlphaGo Shaped Gemini08:06 — Why Smaller Models Are Getting So Powerful10:46 — The 1000x Engineer12:40 — Continual Learning and the Future of Agents13:32 — Why AI Still Fails at Basic Reasoning15:33 — Are Agents Overhyped or Just Getting Started?18:31 — Can AI Become Truly Creative?20:26 — Open Models, Gemma, and Local AI22:26 — Why Gemini Was Built Multimodal24:08 — What Happens When Inference Gets Cheap?25:24 — From AlphaFold to the Virtual Cells28:24 — AI as the Ultimate Tool for Science30:43 — Advice for Founders33:30 — The AlphaFold Breakthrough Pattern35:20 — Can AI Make Real Scientific Discoveries?37:59 — What to Build Before AGI ArrivesApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p>

The $9B Startup That Wants to Create a Billion New Developers

<p>Replit is the leading no-code app builder for consumers and enterprise, letting anyone with an idea build real, deployed software using natural language. The company just raised a $400 million Series D at a $9 billion valuation.In this episode of Founder Firesides, co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad sat down with YC&#39;s Andrew Miklas to talk about Replit&#39;s 10-year journey from browser IDE to vibe coding platform, why the people getting the most value aren&#39;t traditional developers but founders and domain experts closest to the problem, and what Agent 4 unlocks with parallel agents, built-in design, and the ability to run your entire company on Replit.</p>

The Playbook For Building An AI Native Company

<p>AI isn&#39;t just making teams more productive. It&#39;s changing how companies should be built.</p><p>In this episode of Startup School, YC Partner Diana Hu explains what it means to build an AI-native company, where AI isn&#39;t just a tool but the operating system your company runs on.</p><p>She breaks down how to make your company queryable so agents can improve across every function, why management hierarchies break down when an intelligence layer replaces human middleware, and why early-stage founders have a massive edge in building this way from day one. </p>

Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Breaks Down Their New Website

<p>Even the most successful websites eventually need a redesign. Take Stripe for example. After six years with the same homepage, they recently unveiled a brand new site that reflects how the fintech giant has evolved over the past few years. So when is the time right for a new landing page? And what should you prioritize in the redesign? In this episode of Design Review YC’s Aaron Epstein sat down Stripe’s Head of Design Katie Dill to pull the curtain back on their high profile redesign and to discuss how their team is evolving in a world dominated by new AI design tools.</p><p><br></p>

The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here

<p>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 robotics.</p><p>The company&#39;s cross-embodiment approach trains across many different robot platforms, and recent results show tasks being performed zero-shot that last year required hundreds of hours of data collection.</p><p>In this episode of The Lightcone, co-founder Quan Vuong sat down with Garry, Jared, Diana, and Harj to talk about why robotics is finally ready for its scaling moment, how PI runs its models in the cloud rather than on-device, and the playbook for what Quan sees as a Cambrian explosion of vertical robotics companies.</p>

This Startup Wants To Catch Cancer Before It Spreads

<p>1 in 11 babies born in America this year will be screened by a genetic test that didn&#39;t exist a decade ago.Biotech startup BillionToOne turned a simple but radical idea—detecting rare fragments of fetal DNA in a mother&#39;s blood—into one of the most widely used prenatal tests in the U.S. And they&#39;re not stopping there. The same approach could unlock something even bigger: early-stage cancer detection from a blood test, a breakthrough that could one day save millions of lives.In this episode of Hard Tech, YC&#39;s Jared Friedman sits down with David Tsao and Oguzhan Atay to hear how they went from half a lab bench to a $4B biotech company—and why they believe this is just the beginning of what their technology can do.</p><p><br></p>

This Startup Secretly Detects Fraud For Fortune 500s

<p>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 stealth and announcing their $21 million Series A. </p><p><br></p><p>Variance builds purpose-built AI agents for risk and compliance — automating fraud detection, content review, and identity verification for Fortune 500 companies and platforms like GoFundMe. They discuss why Variance built in the shadows for three years, detecting state-sponsored fraud rings, and the accident that nearly ended the company.</p>

How François Chollet Is Building A New Path To AGI

<p>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 understand what intelligence actually is—and how to build it from first principles. In this episode of Lightcone, he traces that path from his early work on deep learning to the creation of the ARC prize, and the launch of ARC V3, a new benchmark designed to measure something deeper than performance: the ability to learn, adapt, and reason efficiently in entirely new environments. He explains why today’s systems may be hitting limits, what recent breakthroughs really mean, and why reaching true general intelligence may require a fundamentally different approach.00:00 - AGI by 2030?00:31 - Introducing Ndea: A New Path Beyond Deep Learning01:08 - A New ML Paradigm 01:30 - Replacing neural nets with compact symbolic programs03:04 - Why Ndea Isn’t Competing With Coding Agents05:20 - Why Everyone Might Be Wrong About Scaling LLMs07:22 - Why Coding Agents Suddenly Work So Well08:50 - The Limits of LLMs in Non-Verifiable Domains10:48 - What AGI Actually Means (And Why Most Definitions Are Wrong)13:30 - Why Deep Learning Hits a Wall 14:00 - ARC’s Origin Story18:20 - ARC Benchmarks Explained: From V1 to V322:49 - The RL Loop Powering Coding Agents Today27:03 - ARC-AGI V3: Measuring “Agentic Intelligence”31:14 - Inside the ARC Game Studio35:31 - Could AGI Fit in 10,000 Lines of Code?44:01 - Building Ndea: From Idea to Compounding Research Stack46:46 - The Future of ARC: Benchmarks That Evolve With AI47:21 - Why There’s Still Huge Opportunity for New AI Paradigms53:37 - How to Build a Breakout Open Source Project - Lessons From Kera56:39 - Advice For How To Think About AIApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p>

Inside The Startup Reinventing America’s Trillion Dollar Chemical Industry

<p>Solugen is reinventing the trillion-dollar chemical manufacturing industry by combining biology and chemistry in a new way. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Jared Friedman visits co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt at their Houston HQ to see how they went from a $7,000 PVC reactor to a billion-dollar company competing with industry giants. They cover the breakthrough behind their enzymatic + catalytic production, how they found their first customers, and why starting small and staying close to customers let them win in a capital-intensive industry.</p><p><br /></p><p>Chapters:00:00 - A New Kind of Chemical Plant01:02 - Fusing Biology + Chemistry In a New Way02:23 - The Eureka Moment: From Pancreatic Cancer to Hydrogen Peroxide03:30 - Using A Sugar Feedstock Over Oil and Gas 04:22 - Proving Enzymes Work at Scale In Chemical Manufacturing05:16 - The $7K PVC Reactor06:44 - Finding First Customers at YC08:12 - What The Co-founders Got Out of YC09:33 - Seed Round to Bio Forge10:32 - Scaling to a Full-Size Plant (Bioforge)11:57 - The Future of American Manufacturing12:29 - The Next Decade of Solugen</p><p><br /></p><p>Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p>

Building A Global AI Startup From India

<p>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 production-ready software. In just eight months, users have created more than 7 million apps on Emergent, with the number doubling in just the last 45 days. We discuss how they built one of the most powerful AI coding agents, why they focused on non-technical users and what it&#39;s like building in India for a global audience.</p><p><br></p><p>Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply</p><p><br></p><p>Chapters:</p><p>00:00 - Intro</p><p>01:06 - What Is Emergent?</p><p>01:18 - Founder Backstory</p><p>02:09 - From AI Testing to General Coding Agents</p><p>02:52 - Getting Ahead of the Market</p><p>04:18 - The Pivot to Non-Technical Users</p><p>05:22 - Why Second Movers Can Win in AI</p><p>09:04 - Building for Production, Not Just Prototypes</p><p>18:21 - Live Demo: Building Apps with Emergent</p><p>24:40 - How Emergent Hires and Runs a Lean Team</p><p>29:04 - Is SaaS Dead? The Rise of Personalized Software</p><p>34:04 - The Future: Niche Apps, Solo Builders and AI Agency</p>

The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces with Science's Max Hodak

<p>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 has developed a tiny retinal implant that stimulates cells in the eye to help blind patients see again. More than 40 patients have already received the treatment in clinical trials, including one who recently read a full novel for the first time in over a decade.In this episode of How to Build the Future, Max joined Garry to discuss how BCIs work, what it takes to engineer the brain, and why brain-computer interfaces may become one of the most important technologies of the next decade.</p>

How To Avoid AI Design Slop

<p>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 that fade as you scroll. So how do you avoid a site that feels vibe coded while still taking advantage of these new tools? In this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Visiting Partner Raphael Schaad, the founder and designer of Cron (now Notion Calendar). Together they’ll review user submitted sites with an eye for how to leverage these tools and avoid the common vibe coding mistakes.</p>

The Fastest Path To Super Intelligence

<p>Poetiq is a new startup founded by former DeepMind researchers that recently achieved a major jump on the ARC-AGI and Humanity&#39;s Last Exam benchmark by layering a recursive self-improvement system on top of existing models. In this episode of Lightcone, Poetiq&#39;s Founder &amp; CEO Ian Fischer joined us to discuss how small teams can build “reasoning harnesses” that outperform base models, what that means for startups and why automating prompt engineering may be one of the most powerful levers in AI today.Chapters:00:00 – Intro00:40 – What Is Poetiq?01:07 – Recursive Self-Improvement Explained02:07 – The Fine-Tuning Trap02:59 – “Stilts” for LLMs03:14 – Recursive Self-Improvement vs. Fine-Tuning05:05 – Taking the Top Spot on ARC-AGI06:37 – Beating Claude on Humanity’s Last Exam08:40 – How the Meta-System Works10:26 – Beyond RL: A New S-Curve11:32 – Automating Prompt Engineering13:37 – From 5% to 95% Performance14:50 – Early Access &amp; Putting Your Agent on Stilts16:17 – From YC Founder to DeepMind Researcher18:29 – Advice for Engineers in the AI EraApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs</p>

The AI Agent Economy Is Here

<p>With the takeoff of OpenClaw and MoltBook, a new agent-driven economy is taking shape.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of the Lightcone, we took a look at the explosive growth of AI dev tools and whether the time has come for builders to make something agents want.</p>

Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny

<p>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 developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era. </p>