Podcast
Y Combinator Startup Podcast
Hosted by Y Combinator · EN
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.
32episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
How To Build Superintelligence Inside Your Company
6d ago00:46:29Summary readyBuilding 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 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've arrived at the personal computer moment for AI.Chapters:00:00 — Intro00:39 — YC'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'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
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How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot
1w ago00:50:04Summary readyIn 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 founders can lose control of the companies they build, and what legal structures and governance models can protect a company's core mission from outside threats.
SummaryPaul Graham: Should you move to Silicon Valley?
3w ago00:21:57Summary readyPaul 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 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.
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Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers
4w ago00:41:29Summary readyWe'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.
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Beyond Bigger Models: Recursion As The Next Scaling Law In AI
May 100:37:52Summary readyA 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 state-of-the-art results with a fraction of the parameters of today'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.
SummaryHow to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis
Apr 2900:40:56Summary readyDemis 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'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
SummaryThe $9B Startup That Wants to Create a Billion New Developers
Apr 2500:39:11Summary readyReplit 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's Andrew Miklas to talk about Replit's 10-year journey from browser IDE to vibe coding platform, why the people getting the most value aren'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.
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The Playbook For Building An AI Native Company
Apr 2400:10:27Summary readyAI 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 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.
SummaryStripe Head of Design Katie Dill Breaks Down Their New Website
Apr 2200:43:36Summary readyEven 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.
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The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here
Apr 1600:49:26Summary readyPhysical 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 that last year required hundreds of hours of data collection.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.
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