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.
73episodes
Episodes
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We're All Addicted To Claude Code
Feb 600:45:59Tap to summarizeWondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings? Maybe they're addicted to coding agents! In this episode of Lightcone, Calvin French-Owen — a co-founder of Segment and former engineer on OpenAI's Codex team — joins us to talk about why coding agents suddenly feel so powerful, the differences between Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, and what the future of work will look like.
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How To Get Your First Customers
Jan 1400:05:41Tap to summarizeWhen 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 the needs of those critical early customers. In this episode of Main Function, YC General Partner Ankit Gupta offers an update to the classic MVP playbook. He’ll outline strategies for getting your first customers, the power of adaptability and how feedback from early users will ultimately shape the future of your product and your company.Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobsChapters:00:00 – The Minimum Evolvable Product00:46 – Finding the First Believers01:29 – Counterintuitive Rules To Get Early Users02:10 – Learn Fast, Don’t Fear Churn02:52 – How Early Users Shape the Market You Enter04:22 – Tesla Case Study05:14 – How To Build To Evolve
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Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets
Jan 800:15:43Tap to summarizeStoke 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 of Hard Tech, YC’s Aaron Epstein sits down with Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman to find out why they chose to take on one of the hardest problems in rocket science, how an obsession with efficiency gives them an edge, and what full reusability could unlock for the future of spaceflight.Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
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Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions
Oct 7Tap to summarizeJordan 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 June 17th, 2025, he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answers—asking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away.He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right now? What happens when software becomes commoditized? How do you build trust as teams shrink and AI takes on more responsibility?
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How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)
Aug 26Tap to summarizeIn this episode of Founder Firesides, YC General Partner Gustaf Alströmer is joined by Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups in the world. In just 13 months, Max and his team scaled from 10 to 100 people, raised $80M, and cracked the challenge of selling to one of the most skeptical industries. Max shares insights on building a successful vertical AI company, selling to conservative markets, and sheds light on what the future of legal tech looks like.
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Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
Jun 19, 2025Tap to summarizeAndrej 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.Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing
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Enterprise Sales with Pete Koomen | Startup School
Nov 16, 2024Tap to summarizeY Combinator Partner Pete Koomen led his startup, Optimizely, to $100M ARR. In this video, Pete breaks down the enterprise sales funnel and shares his top tips on how a technical founder can start closing real deals for their startup.
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B2B Startup Metrics with Tom Blomfield | Startup School
Jan 8, 2024Tap to summarizeIn this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield discusses one of the most important elements of running any startup: metrics! Tom shares what key metrics to track and how to use them to make the best decisions for your company. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs
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Does Your Startup Need To Be In San Francisco?
Aug 29, 2023Tap to summarizeShould you and your startup live in San Francisco? Y Combinator Partners, Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell, debate their different opinions on whether startups are more likely to succeed in the Golden City or elsewhere. Where do they find common ground? Watch to find out. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs
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Inside The Most Powerful Startup Community In The World
Apr 21, 2023Tap to summarizeY Combinator is well-known for producing companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase and more. But what's the real story behind the success of YC and the companies they fund? This is everything you need to know about the program. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/MainFunction-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/MainFunction-jobs
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