Y Combinator Startup Podcast
Episodes
How To Pick A Startup Idea
17 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
"The CEO Must Be the Chief AI Officer"
10 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 ju...
How to Build an AI-Native Services Company
03 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Some of the biggest companies of the next decade won't be software businesses, they'll be services companies like insurance carriers, law firm...
How To Build Superintelligence Inside Your Company
27 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Building superintelligence inside a company isn't about adding AI as a feature. It's about making it the operating system the whole organizati...
How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot
25 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Main Function Garry sits down with Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup", about his new book, "Incorruptible: ...
Paul Graham: Should you move to Silicon Valley?
13 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Personal AI Is the Next Platform Shift
08 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
Beyond Bigger Models: Recursion As The Next Scaling Law In AI
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A 7-million parameter model outperforming models a thousand times its size on tasks like ARC Prize. That's what recursive reasoning unlocks.In thi...
How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis
29 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
25 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
24 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
22 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
16 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 rob...
This Startup Wants To Catch Cancer Before It Spreads
06 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 s...
This Startup Secretly Detects Fraud For Fortune 500s
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 under...
Inside The Startup Reinventing America’s Trillion Dollar Chemical Industry
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 benchma...
The AI Agent Economy Is Here
21 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 explosiv...
Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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
14 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the AI era, startups aren't winning by hiring faster — they're winning by automating as many internal functions as possible. In this epis...
OpenClaw And The Future Of Personal AI Agents
07 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
You’ve probably already heard all about OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot). The viral sensation is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your o...
We're All Addicted To Claude Code
06 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings? Maybe they're addicted to coding agents! In this episode of Lightco...
How To Get Your First Customers
14 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets
08 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Stoke Space is racing to build the world's first fully reusable rockets that can launch, survive reentry, and fly again and again. In this episode...
What Surprised Us Most In 2025
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
How Intelligent Is AI, Really?
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
ARC-AGI is redefining how to measure progress on the path to AGI - focusing on reasoning, generalization, and adaptability instead of memorization or ...
The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide
12 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Head of Design Ryo Lu helped transform Cursor from a feature-layer on top of VS Code into one of the world's leading AI code editors.He joins YC&#...
From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In just a few years, James Hawkins took PostHog from an idea hacked together right before YC's W20 deadline to a unicorn powering product analytic...
The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were "Impossible" Until Now
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every major shift in consumer tech has a moment when it suddenly becomes accessible to millions. Michael Mignano helped spark one of those moments wit...
Cursor Head of Design Reviews Startup Websites
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 produc...
Inside The Startup Launching AI Into Space
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 sp...
How To Recruit The Best Engineers And Sales Reps
07 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most founders think hiring is about interviewing. But it's actually about selling.For Startup School, Juicebox co-founder & CEO David Paffenho...
From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jake Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million.In ...
Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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's Ank...
YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For years, we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work, the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nua...
How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 firs...
The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something that’s never been done before.They're building mobile carbon capture devices for co...
Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions
07 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jordan Fisher is the co-founder & CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on...
Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model?YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with Nick Joseph, Anthropic's Head of Pre...
Fintech 3.0: Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 buil...
Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit, now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He's spent nearly a decade making programming ...
The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
GPT-OSS vs. Qwen vs. Deepseek: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures
29 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
OpenAI recently released its first open-weights model since GPT-2, entering a field led by DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen.YC's Ankit Gupta breaks...
How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 faste...
The Sales Playbook for Founders | Startup School
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Navigating B2B sales for the first time can feel slow and overwhelming.Drawing from his experience founding Monzo and GoCardless, YC's Tom Blomfie...
Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design
08 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 multi...
The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Brothers Chaz and Arnie Englander started Model ML after building and selling two YC companies. What began as a tool to help them analyze deals has gr...
Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen
25 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Karri Saarinen, co-founder & CEO of Linear, one of the top designer-founders ...
Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 method...
Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Coding Agents, Autonomy, and the Future of Work
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 pus...
John Jumper: AlphaFold and the Future of Science
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
John Jumper on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.John Jumper is a physicist-turned-computational biologist who led DeepMind’s Alph...
Aravind Srinivas: The Race to Build the AI Browser of the Future
11 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, b...
Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
François Chollet: The ARC Prize & How We Get to AGI
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
François Chollet on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.François Chollet is a leading voice in AI. He's the creator of the Ker...
Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 goo...
Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades — from Warby Parker to Chi...
Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware
21 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 k...
Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful
21 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 bo...
Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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. Soft...
Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents And Why Taste Still Matters
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Fusion Energy Is Tech's Next Big Unlock
06 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 breakthroug...
AI Apps Are Broken — Here's How To Fix Them
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job
09 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Coding agents are no longer a distant idea—they're already starting to reshape how we work.YC's Tom Blomfield and David Lieb discuss how AI ...
How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School
25 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI can't yet one-shot an entire product—but with the rise of vibe coding, it's getting close. YC's Tom Blomfield has spent the last mont...
How Zepto Became India’s Fastest Growing Startup
18 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Why America Stopped Innovating - And How We Can Start Again
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 fou...
How to Build the Future: Tony Xu
26 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
12 years after starting DoorDash, co-founder & CEO Tony Xu and his employees still do deliveries every year, staying true to their core value: cus...
Customer Obsession Made Gusto A $9.6 Billion Company
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gusto (https://gusto.com) made payroll and HR painless for small businesses, growing into a $9.6B company along the way. Co-founder & CEO Josh Ree...
The Future Of Design With Figma's Dylan Field
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Design isn’t just about making things work—it’s about how they work, says Dylan Field, the co-founder & CEO of Figma.As AI transforms tech, ...
How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas
21 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Building A Supersonic Plane Company From The Ground Up
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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. Blake...
The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup
12 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Many startups fail because they run out of money. So how should you think about how to spend the money you raise?In this episode of Office Hours, YC G...
How To Build The AGI Future: Bob McGrew
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
According to OpenAI's former Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, reasoning and test-time compute will unlock more reliable and capable AI agents—...
How To Use AI In Your Startup
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI continues to improve at an exponential pace. So what can you do as a founder to take advantage of it? In this episode of Office Hours, YC Partner...
How To Build The Future: Parker Conrad
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of How to Build the Future, Garry sits down with Parker Conrad, Co-founder & CEO of Rippling, the all-in-one HR, Finance, and IT s...
Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Two-time founder Rujul Zaparde knows a thing or two about resilience and learning from failure. After dropping out of college to build FlightCar, he w...
How David Lieb Turned A Failed Startup Into Google Photos | Backstory
18 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
YC General Partner David Lieb’s story is all about perseverance. In 2008 he co-founded Bump, one of the hottest startups of the early iPhone era. Bu...
How To Start A Dev Tools Company with Nicolas Dessaigne | Startup School
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
YC's Nicolas Dessaigne was the co-founder and CEO of @algolia, a Search API used by millions of developers to build great search experiences into thei...
Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders | The Breakdown
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Since Twitter rebranded to X, the platform has added new features and implemented a few major updates to both its UX and algo. So what can founders i...
How To Build The Future: Sam Altman
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s fair to say that few people in tech are positioned to have a bigger impact on the future than Sam Altman. At OpenAI, Sam and his team have over...
How Do Billion Dollar Startups Start? | Office Hours
17 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The biggest companies in the world all had to start somewhere. In this episode of Office Hours, the Group Partners explore the humble origins of sever...
Why Design Matters: Lessons from Stripe, Lyft and Airbnb | Design Review
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Stripe, Airbnb and Lyft are a few of the most successful companies of the past decade. And there are at least two things they all have in common - gre...
How To Find A Co-Founder with Harj Taggar | Startup School
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Building a startup and trying to break into an established market is very difficult, especially if you’re trying to do it alone! That’s why it’s...
How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails with Aaron Epstein | Startup School
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Whether it's for sales, recruiting or making new connections, cold outreach is a necessary tool for helping build your startup. But as you probably kn...
How To Improve Cohort Retention with David Lieb | Startup School
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At YC our motto is make something people want. But how do you actually know if you’ve accomplished that in the early days? One of the best ways to m...
Co-Founder Equity Mistakes to Avoid with Michael Seibel | Startup School
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In order to get your startup off the ground it's critical to keep your co-founders motivated. One of the best ways to do that is to figure out a fair ...
How Nothing Founder Carl Pei Built A Multi-Million Dollar Smartphone Brand In Just 2 Years | Main Function
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After co-founding the successful Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus, Carl Pei felt the tech industry was missing the fun and wonder he remembered as a d...
How To Price For B2B with Tom Blomfield | Startup School
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you're a startup founder, how much should you charge for your product or service? It's a simple question that can make many lock up. What number sh...
Why Startup Founders Should Launch Companies Sooner Than They Think | Office Hours
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Launching a company is often pictured as a big splashy event with lots of media attention and hype. This can be scary! It also often results in founde...
Enterprise Sales with Pete Koomen | Startup School
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Y Combinator Partner Pete Koomen led his startup, Optimizely, to $100M ARR. In this video, Pete breaks down the enterprise sales funnel and shares his...