Y Combinator Startup Podcast

The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street

<p>Brothers Chaz and Arnie Englander started Model ML after building and selling two YC companies. </p><p><br></p><p>What began as a tool to help them analyze deals has grown into a full AI-powered workspace purpose-built for financial services, empowering firms to create automations and workflows that reflect exactly how their teams operate. And it&#39;s already being used by 10% of the world&#39;s top investment banks and private equity firms to automate everything from client-ready PowerPoint decks to deep-dive research and due diligence—by orchestrating AI agents that work like expert team members. </p><p><br></p><p>In this conversation with YC Partner Gustaf Alstromer, they discuss going from internal tool to production platform, the power of perseverance, and their ambition to build a billion-dollar company with just ten people.</p>

Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan

<p>Jared Kaplan on June 16th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Jared Kaplan started out as a theoretical physicist chasing questions about the universe. Then he helped uncover one of AI’s most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable, almost physical way.That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language models—and led him to co-found Anthropic.In this talk, he walks through how that discovery reshaped the path to human-level AI, what it means for future models like Claude, and why even the dumbest questions can lead to the biggest breakthroughs. He reflects on memory, oversight, and what’s left to solve as models grow smarter—and longer-horizon tasks come within reach.</p>

Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen

<p>For this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Karri Saarinen, co-founder &amp; CEO of Linear, one of the top designer-founders working today. Together, they'll review several sites from the YC community with an eye for how to build and maintain a high-quality brand.</p><p><br /></p><p>Thank you to these companies for volunteering to have their sites reviewed*:Sprites AI (https://www.sprites.ai)GigaML (https://gigaml.com)UnReal Milk (https://www.unrealmilk.com)Confident AI (https://www.confident-ai.com)Dropback (https://www.dropback.com)*Some of the featured websites may be updated between the time we film and publish</p>

Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything

<p>Chelsea Finn on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley, where she pioneered meta‑learning methods, and Google Brain, Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and co‑founder of Physical Intelligence, she’s using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy, real-world environments rather than confined lab setups.In this talk, Chelsea traces the evolution of her team’s work—from early experiments on robotic grasping and vision to today’s ambitious efforts at folding laundry, tidying kitchens, and generalizing across tasks—all without hand-crafted code. Instead, they used scalable foundation models and massive datasets, teaching robots physical common sense as they learn by doing. She shares stories of the rocky setbacks, the surprises hidden in data, and the moment it all clicked: robots equipped with generalizable physical intelligence can indeed adapt and assist in the unpredictable world around us.</p>

Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Coding Agents, Autonomy, and the Future of Work

<p>Amjad Masad started Replit to make programming accessible to anyone, anywhere. What began as a tool for learning to code has grown into a platform pushing the limits of AI-assisted software creation and recently surpassed $100M in ARR.On The Breakdown with Tom and Dave, Amjad shares the journey from his early days in Jordan, working on open-source projects, to leading Replit through major pivots from &quot;teach a billion people to code&quot; to &quot;let anyone build software.&quot; He discusses the evolving nature of programming, the future of work, and the next generation of human-computer collaboration.</p>

John Jumper: AlphaFold and the Future of Science

<p>John Jumper on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.</p><p><br></p><p>John Jumper is a physicist-turned-computational biologist who led DeepMind’s AlphaFold team—and earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving protein folding, a decades-old scientific challenge. </p><p><br></p><p>In this talk, he shares how a deep learning breakthrough at CASP14 turned into AlphaFold 1 and then AlphaFold 2, delivering atomic accuracy predictions and revolutionizing biology. He explains the scientific puzzle behind protein folding, the key algorithmic breakthroughs, and the impact of making millions of protein structures accessible to researchers worldwide.</p>

Aravind Srinivas: The Race to Build the AI Browser of the Future

<p>Aravind Srinivas on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Aravind Srinivas started Perplexity with one goal: to rethink how we search, browse, and interact with information online. In this conversation, he shares the journey from hacking together a natural-language-to-SQL search tool to building a product used by millions around the world.He talks about the big bet on the AI-powered browser, why agents—not just chatbots—are the next step, and how speed, accuracy, and focus help a startup compete against giants. Along the way, he reflects on co-founder dynamics, early technical challenges, and what it takes to keep building when the biggest players in the world are racing alongside you.</p>

Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI

<p>Andrew Ng on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Andrew Ng has helped shape some of the most influential movements in modern AI—from online education to deep learning to AI entrepreneurship. In this talk, he shares what he’s learning now: why execution speed matters more than ever, how agentic workflows are changing what startups can build, and why concreteness beats vagueness when turning ideas into products. He reflects on the rise of AI coding assistants, the shifting bottlenecks in product development, and why, despite faster software, it’s still human judgment and responsibility that will shape what comes next.</p>

François Chollet: The ARC Prize & How We Get to AGI

<p>François Chollet on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.</p><p>François Chollet is a leading voice in AI. He&#39;s the creator of the Keras library, author of Deep Learning with Python, and the founder of the ARC Prize, a global competition aimed at measuring true general intelligence.</p><p>He&#39;s spent years thinking deeply about what intelligence actually is—and why scaling up today’s AI models isn’t enough to reach it.</p><p>In this talk, he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized skills, and lays out a path toward true general intelligence—AI that can adapt on the fly, reason in new situations, and invent novel solutions. He explains why abstraction and compositionality matter, how ARC became the benchmark for progress, and what his team at a new research lab called Ndea is building next.</p>

Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI

<p>A fireside with Dr. Fei-Fei Li on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Dr. Fei-Fei Li is often called the godmother of AI—and for good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it, she was helping build the foundation.In this fireside, she recounts the creation of ImageNet, a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods, the shock of seeing convolutional networks outperform expectations in 2012, and how those breakthroughs led to captioning, storytelling, and ultimately, generative models.Now, she’s taking on one of AI’s hardest frontiers: spatial intelligence. Fei-Fei shares why modeling the 3D world is essential for AGI—and why it may be even more difficult than language.</p>

Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products

<p>Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades — from Warby Parker to Chime to Dollar Shave Club. </p><p><br></p><p>In this conversation with Garry, she shares how great products (not marketing tricks) still win, why AI is unlocking a new kind of emotional relationship between consumers and technology, and what founders can learn from the messy creative stage we&#39;re in right now. She also breaks down how shifts in distribution, wellness, and digital behavior are reshaping what it means to build for real human needs.</p>

Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs

<p>A fireside with Satya Nadella on June 17, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Satya Nadella started at Microsoft in 1992 as an engineer. Three decades later, he’s now Chairman &amp; CEO, navigating the company through one of the most profound technological shifts yet: the rise of AI.In this conversation, he shares how Microsoft is thinking about this moment— from the infrastructure needed to train frontier models, to the social permission required to use that compute. He draws parallels to the early PC and internet eras, breaks down what makes a great team, and reflects on what he’d build if he were starting his career today.</p>

Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware

<p>A fireside with Sam Altman at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Sam Altman grew up obsessed with technology, broke into the Stanford mainframe as a kid, and dropped out to start his first company before turning 20.In this conversation, he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAI—sharing what he’s learned about ambition, the weight of responsibility, and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career, the limits of personal productivity, and why, in the end, it's all still about finding people you like working with and doing something that matters.</p>

Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful

<p>A fireside with Elon Musk at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Before rockets and robots, Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk, he walks through the early days of Zip2, the Falcon 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the “miracle” of Tesla surviving 2008. He shares the thinking that guided him—building from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that we’re in the middle of an intelligence big bang.</p>

Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)

<p>Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We’ve entered the era of “Software 3.0,” where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest.He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itself— that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer.</p><p><br /></p><p>Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing</p>

Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents And Why Taste Still Matters

<p>Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he&#39;s betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor&#39;s breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.</p>

Fusion Energy Is Tech's Next Big Unlock

<p>Fusion may still sound like science fiction— but it might not be for much longer. With AI pushing demand for clean power to new highs, a breakthrough may finally be close.</p><p><br></p><p>For Decoded, YC General Partner Gustaf Alstromer traces the history of fusion, the physics behind it, and the engineering challenges that stalled it for nearly a century. </p><p><br></p><p>He also looks at how Helion is approaching the problem differently, as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by 2028.</p>

AI Apps Are Broken — Here's How To Fix Them

<p>In this episode of The Breakdown, Tom and Dave are joined by fellow YC General Partner Pete Koomen to lay out a new vision for how AI should actually work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software, but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don&#39;t want to do. </p><p>From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators, they dig into what it means to build AI-native software—and why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think.</p>

How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job

<p>Coding agents are no longer a distant idea—they&#39;re already starting to reshape how we work.</p><p><br></p><p>YC&#39;s Tom Blomfield and David Lieb discuss how AI coding tools are transforming software development, why small, high-agency teams will be able to do what once took armies of engineers, and why there&#39;s never been a better time to start something new. </p><p><br></p><p>They explore the bigger picture too: a future where there&#39;s abundance, knowledge work becomes more accessible, and founders have more leverage than ever before.</p><p><br></p><p>If you&#39;re thinking about building, there&#39;s no better moment than right now.</p>

How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School

<p>AI can&#39;t yet one-shot an entire product—but with the rise of vibe coding, it&#39;s getting close. YC&#39;s Tom Blomfield has spent the last month building side projects with tools like Claude Code, Windsurf, and Aqua, seeing just how far you can push modern LLMs. From writing full-stack apps to debugging with a single paste of an error message, AI is becoming a legit collaborator in the dev process. This is a playbook for anyone who wants to get the most out of vibe coding and build faster.</p>

How Zepto Became India’s Fastest Growing Startup

<p>Imagine ordering groceries and having them show up at your doorstep in just 10 minutes. That’s the promise of Zepto, the fastest-growing e-commerce company in India. </p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of How To Build The Future, Garry sits down with Aadit Palicha, the co-founder and CEO of Zepto, to discuss how they got started in a Whatsapp group, what it’s like going up against incumbents like Amazon and Zomato and how the future of e-commerce is changing in the age of intelligence. </p>

Why America Stopped Innovating - And How We Can Start Again

<p>Not long ago, America led the world in building and innovation. But over the past 50 years, bureaucracy and red tape have made it nearly impossible to get big things done.</p><p><br></p><p>Still, there’s a growing movement to turn that around — to build faster, smarter, and better than ever before.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of The Main Function, Garry sits down with Atlantic staff writer and Plain English podcast host Derek Thompson to discuss his new book Abundance (co-authored with Ezra Klein). They discuss how we got here, what needs fixing, and what a bold, more prosperous 2050 could look like.</p>

What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game

<p>In this special episode of Design Review, Aaron sits down with Raphael Schaad, the Head of Calendar at Notion to discuss his leap from designer to founder, why illustration is an important first step when building a new product, and what ultimately makes designers uniquely qualified to start a company today.</p>

How to Build the Future: Tony Xu

<p>12 years after starting DoorDash, co-founder &amp; CEO Tony Xu and his employees still do deliveries every year, staying true to their core value: customer obsession.</p><p><br></p><p>Today, DoorDash is the largest food delivery platform in the US.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of How to Build the Future, Tony explains how their unwavering long-term vision won — helping create a new market while surviving near death and a global pandemic along the way.</p>

Customer Obsession Made Gusto A $9.6 Billion Company

<p>Gusto (https://gusto.com) made payroll and HR painless for small businesses, growing into a $9.6B company along the way. </p><p><br></p><p>Co-founder &amp; CEO Josh Reeves joined YC&#39;s Harj Taggar to share how they built a payroll company from scratch and their customer-first approach to product design and culture.</p>

The Future Of Design With Figma's Dylan Field

<p>Design isn’t just about making things work—it’s about how they work, says Dylan Field, the co-founder &amp; CEO of Figma.<br>As AI transforms tech, he believes a designer&#39;s judgment, taste, and agency will matter more than ever.</p><p><br></p><p>Dylan sat down with YC&#39;s Garry Tan to discuss the evolving world of design in the age of AI, the challenging early days at Figma, and how his team forever changed the way designers and engineers collaborate.</p>

How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas

<p>YC General Partner David Lieb sits down with Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, to discuss his origins in Silicon Valley, what it&#39;s like to compete with Google, and what the future of search could look like.</p><p><br></p><p>Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply</p>

Building A Supersonic Plane Company From The Ground Up

<p>Imagine flying from NY to London in just a few hours. That’s the future that Blake Scholl and his team at Boom Supersonic are working towards. </p><p><br></p><p>Blake started as a software engineer and pivoted mid-career to aviation. Now, he’s at the forefront of trying to bring back supersonic travel for all of us. </p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of Hard Tech, YC’s Jared Friedman visited Blake in the Mojave desert to find out how someone who didn’t have a background in aerospace engineering was able to build the first-ever independently developed supersonic plane.</p>

The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup

<p>Many startups fail because they run out of money. So how should you think about how to spend the money you raise?</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode of Office Hours, YC General Partners Brad Flora, Pete Koomen, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Gustaf Alströmer discuss how to spend responsibly at each stage of a startup— including advice on when to hire, whether to invest in marketing and what spending mistakes to avoid.</p><p><br></p><p>Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply</p>

How To Build The AGI Future: Bob McGrew

<p>According to OpenAI&#39;s former Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, reasoning and test-time compute will unlock more reliable and capable AI agents— and a path to scale to AGI.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In this episode of How to Build the Future, YC&#39;s @garrytan sits down with Bob to discuss the lessons learned from his time at OpenAI, scaling laws, his advice for startups, and what all of this means for the jobs of the future.</p>