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.
Showing all 359 episodes · Only those about AI
Cisco is building AI infrastructure, from networking GPU clusters to securing agents, with its hyperscaler AI business reaching $9.3 billion in orders in two years. Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel joins Y Combinator…
This week’s Paper Club is all about alternative compute.
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…
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…
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…
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…
Harnesses get dismissed as just scaffolding, just prompt engineering, and not real research. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. The same model weights that score 30% on ARC-AGI score 95% with a better harness.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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.
This week's YC Paper Club is focused on data. Three domain experts give talks to break down the challenges and frontiers of training data, benchmarks, and multilingual pre-training.
Michael Kratsios has seen the AI boom from both sides: as COO of Scale AI and inside the White House. Today, as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, he helps shape America’s national strategy on AI…
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…
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.
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…
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…
This week's Paper Club is all about robotics. Every year for the last decade, someone has promised that the era of robotics is just around the corner. But we're still waiting. So we gathered a bunch of the top researchers working in AI and…
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.
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…
The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
At our latest YC Paper Club, researchers and builders presented on multi-GPU kernel optimization, intelligence per watt for local inference, AI-generated GPU kernels and benchmarking, heterogeneous inference infrastructure design, and…
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.
In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither.
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.
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…
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.
In this session from Startup School Paris, YC partners field questions from the audience on how founders should be operating in the AI era.
In this talk from Startup School Paris, AMI CEO Alexandre LeBrun talks about his journey building Vertos, selling Wit.ai to Facebook, and why the best advice for early founders is to pick an extremely narrow problem while holding an…
In this talk from Startup School Paris, Encord Co-CEO Eric Landau discusses leaving a lucrative quant career during the most profitable month his desk had ever seen, why PMF for Encord was a slow daily compound, and why founders should…
In this chat at Startup School Paris, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel reflects on his startup journey in New York, how staying close to raw customer feedback and support tickets keeps an 8,000 person company honest, and why moving faster on both…
Jay V is the founder and CEO of Opencode, an open-source alternative to Claude Code that works with any model you want. It's one of the fastest-growing products in AI: 13 million monthly active users, 20X growth this year, and more tokens…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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"…
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…
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…
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…
AI isn't just making teams more productive. It's changing how companies should be built.
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.…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
With the takeoff of OpenClaw and MoltBook, a new agent-driven economy is taking shape.
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.
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…
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…
Wondering 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…
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 the needs of those critical early customers. In this episode of Main Function, YC General…
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 of Hard Tech, YC’s Aaron Epstein sits down with Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom…
