PODCAST · technology
Y Combinator Startup Podcast
by Y Combinator
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.
Episodes
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Robot-Use Agents: Why General-Purpose Models May Win in Robotics
One of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software. In a recent essay, MIT professor Philip Isola argued that we may be entering the era of robot-use agents: general-purpose models that can control different robots, write…
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The State of Startups in 2026
YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than…
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8 Ways To Improve Your Outbound Sales
The best outbound starts before you automate anything. Founders need to learn who actually has the problem, what gets their attention, and what makes them reply. YC Visiting Partner Christina Gilbert recommends doing at least your first 100 outreaches by hand so you can learn those things…
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Open Models Change The Economics of AI
Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing.Right now, the biggest shift he sees is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling...
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Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders
YC Visiting Partner Vivian Shen sits down with Paul Graham at the original YC office in Mountain View to talk about startups, AI, ambition, and what makes great founders.
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The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew
Heart Aerospace (YC W19) just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown — a 100-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and $5 of electricity to get it off the ground. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Gustaf Alströmer visits Heart's pilot plant in LA and sits down with co-founder...
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Max Junestrand: You Need The Willingness To Learn Faster Than Anyone Else
Today, more than 3% of the world’s lawyers use Legora, and the company has grown from $1 million to $100 million in ARR since launching in October 2024.At Startup School 2026, Legora co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand shares how they built one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies…
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Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac
Susan Kare joined Apple as an art history PhD who barely knew anything about computers. She went on to design many of the icons, typefaces, and symbols that helped make the original Macintosh feel understandable and human, defining a visual language for personal computing that still influences...
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Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics
Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, for long periods of time, without a human babysitting them. At Startup School 2026, Physical Intelligence cofounder Chelsea Finn explains what it…
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Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"
Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few months later, OpenClaw had exploded into one of the biggest open source AI projects in the world, with nearly 3,000 contributors and a peak of 4.7...
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Max Hodak: How Startups Build Speed
Science is building a retinal implant that restores vision to people who have gone blind. One patient has already used it to read a 300-page novel.Building a company like that requires a lot more than getting the technology right. At Startup School 2026, Science CEO Max Hodak explains how the...
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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 Review, Stephen Haney, founder of AI-native design tool Paper, joins YC General Partner Aaron Epstein to demo the agent-first workflow that's making Paper one of the...
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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 Tan explains why we're entering the era of personal AGI: AI agents that run on your own infrastructure, compound your knowledge over time, and dramatically increase…
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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 launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space. They've since raised $200 million, hit a billion-dollar valuation just 17...
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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 fully autonomous miles across fifteen cities, with 17 times fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers. At Startup School 2026, Waymo co-CEO...
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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 Stripe. The reasoning, as Patrick remembers it, was that “we might as well because it probably won't be that hard.” It took two years to launch....
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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 search got fast. In 2013, another napkin calculation showed that three minutes of daily speech recognition per user would require doubling Google’s...
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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 the noise. At Startup School 2026, the Scale AI (YC S16) founder — now leading Meta's Superintelligence Labs — talks with Garry Tan about rebuilding…
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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 (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...
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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 founders dinner. Twenty years later, as co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, he closed Startup School 2026 in conversation with YC's Garry Tan — on agents…
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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, how Claude Code came to be, and what it means to build products when the underlying capabilities keep accelerating.
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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 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...
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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 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...
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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 actually use their product. In this episode of Startup School, YC's David Lieb walks through one of his favorite tools for better understanding your…
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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-powered website and marketing platform that doesn't just build your site — it connects to your analytics, CRM, and search console to optimize your...
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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 to find what works is to pick one, go deep, and get feedback from real customers. In this episode of Startup School, YC's Jon Xu breaks down how to...
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"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 another tool, it's a new foundation for building products, teams, and companies.In this episode of Lightcone, Pedro shares why he thinks we're only...
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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 tax practices rebuilt from scratch with AI doing most of the work. In this episode of Startup School, YC Visiting Partner Charlie Warren walks…
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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 on. In this episode of the Lightcone, we sat down with YC's Pete Koomen to talk for the first time about how he led the effort to build YC's…
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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 Companies Go Bad And How Great Companies Stay Great". Ries breaks down why shareholder primacy often leads to company and product degradation, how…
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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, and is one of the most influential voices in the startup world. In this talk at our YC | Stockholm event last month, Paul walks through why ambitious...
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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 episode of Lightcone, the hosts break down the rise of AI coding agents, "tokenmaxxing", and the emerging workflows behind tools like Claude Code…
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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 episode of Decoded, YC's Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard break down two recent papers on recursive AI models, HRMs and TRMs, that are achieving...
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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 in neuroscience and going on to found DeepMind. His lab cracked Go, solved protein structure prediction with AlphaFold, and then gave it away free...
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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 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...
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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 explains what it means to build an AI-native company, where AI isn't just a tool but the operating system your company runs on. She breaks down how to…
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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 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…
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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 robotics. The company's cross-embodiment approach trains across many different robot platforms, and recent results show tasks being performed zero-shot...
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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 simple but radical idea—detecting rare fragments of fetal DNA in a mother's blood—into one of the most widely used prenatal tests in the U.S. And…
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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 stealth and announcing their $21 million Series A. Variance builds purpose-built AI agents for risk and compliance — automating fraud detection,...
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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 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…
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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 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...
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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 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...
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The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces with Science's 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 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...
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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 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…
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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 by layering a recursive self-improvement system on top of existing models. In this episode of Lightcone, Poetiq's Founder & CEO Ian Fischer joined…
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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 look at the explosive growth of AI dev tools and whether the time has come for builders to make something agents want.
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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 developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era.
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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 Main Function, Garry breaks down how tiny teams are beating companies 20x their size by building automations into every workflow, from engineering to...
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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 device, connects with messaging apps you already use, and goes beyond chat to actually execute tasks like managing your email, calendars, files,...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
Y Combinator
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Y Combinator Startup Podcast have?
Y Combinator Startup Podcast currently has 309 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Y Combinator Startup Podcast about?
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.
How often does Y Combinator Startup Podcast release new episodes?
Y Combinator Startup Podcast publishes regularly with 309 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Y Combinator Startup Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Y Combinator Startup Podcast?
Y Combinator Startup Podcast is created and hosted by Y Combinator.
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