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PODCAST

Y Combinator Startup Podcast

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.

technology

All Episodes

00:40:36

Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/08/08

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 multiplayer. From a meme maker built on WebGL to a design platform powering millions, Figma’s journey hit a major milestone with its IPO last week.In this conversation, Dylan shares the early challenges of building in the browser, the early risks and pivotal choices that shaped Figma’s growth, the principles that guided its product and community, and how he

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00:46:15

The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/31

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 grown into a full AI-powered workspace purpose-built for financial services, empowering firms to create automations and workflows that reflect exactly how their teams operate. And it's already being used by 10% of the world's top investment banks and private equity firms to automate everything from client-ready PowerPoint decks to deep-dive

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00:40:47

Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/29

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 universe. Then he helped uncover one of AI’s most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable, almost physical way.That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language models—and led him to co-found Anthropic.In this talk, he walks through how that discovery reshaped the path to human-level AI, what it means for future

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00:43:41

Building a Brand People Will Care About | Karri...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/25

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 working today. Together, they'll review several sites from the YC community with an eye for how to build and maintain a high-quality brand.Thank you to these companies for volunteering to have their sites reviewed*:Sprites AI (https://www.sprites.ai)GigaML (https://gigaml.com)UnReal Milk (https://www.unrealmilk.com)Confident AI

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00:44:52

Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/22

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 methods, and Google Brain, Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and co‑founder of Physical Intelligence, she’s using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy, real-world environments rather than confined lab setups.In this talk, Chelsea traces the evolution of her

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00:35:50

Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Coding Agents, Autonomy, and...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/17

Amjad Massad started Replit to make programming accessible to anyone, anywhere. What began as a tool for learning to code has grown into a platform pushing the limits of AI-assisted software creation and recently surpassed $100M in ARR.On The Breakdown with Tom and Dave, Amjad shares the journey from his early days in Jordan, working on open-source projects, to leading Replit through major pivots from "teach a billion people to code" to "let anyone build software." He discusses

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00:27:12

John Jumper: AlphaFold and the Future of Science

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/15

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 AlphaFold team—and earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving protein folding, a decades-old scientific challenge. In this talk, he shares how a deep learning breakthrough at CASP14 turned into AlphaFold 1 and then AlphaFold 2, delivering atomic accuracy predictions and revolutionizing biology. He explains the scientific puzzle behind protein

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00:43:12

Aravind Srinivas: The Race to Build the AI Browser of...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/11

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, browse, and interact with information online. In this conversation, he shares the journey from hacking together a natural-language-to-SQL search tool to building a product used by millions around the world.He talks about the big bet on the AI-powered browser, why agents—not just chatbots—are the next step, and how speed, accuracy, and focus help a

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00:43:57

Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/10

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 online education to deep learning to AI entrepreneurship. In this talk, he shares what he’s learning now: why execution speed matters more than ever, how agentic workflows are changing what startups can build, and why concreteness beats vagueness when turning ideas into products. He reflects on the rise of AI coding assistants, the shifting bottlenecks

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00:34:47

François Chollet: The ARC Prize & How We Get to AGI

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/03

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 Keras library, author of Deep Learning with Python, and the founder of the ARC Prize, a global competition aimed at measuring true general intelligence.He's spent years thinking deeply about what intelligence actually is—and why scaling up today’s AI models isn’t enough to reach it.In this talk, he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized

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00:44:21

Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/07/01

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 good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it, she was helping build the foundation.In this fireside, she recounts the creation of ImageNet, a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods, the shock of seeing convolutional

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00:35:46

Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/06/27

Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades — from Warby Parker to Chime to Dollar Shave Club. In this conversation with Garry, she shares how great products (not marketing tricks) still win, why AI is unlocking a new kind of emotional relationship between consumers and technology, and what founders can learn from the messy creative stage we're in right now. She also breaks down how shifts in distribution, wellness,

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00:40:29

Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling,...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/06/25

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 decades later, he’s now Chairman & CEO, navigating the company through one of the most profound technological shifts yet: the rise of AI.In this conversation, he shares how Microsoft is thinking about this moment— from the infrastructure needed to train frontier models, to the social permission required to use that compute. He draws parallels to

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00:42:44

Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins,...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/06/21

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 kid, and dropped out to start his first company before turning 20.In this conversation, he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAI—sharing what he’s learned about ambition, the weight of responsibility, and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career, the limits of

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00:49:40

Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/06/21

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 borrow internet. In this candid talk, he walks through the early days of Zip2, the Falcon 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the “miracle” of Tesla surviving 2008. He shares the thinking that guided him—building from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that we’re in the middle of an intelligence big bang.

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00:39:31

Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/06/19

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. 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:

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00:37:28

Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/06/11

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 all time—and why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool

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00:08:07

Fusion Energy Is Tech's Next Big Unlock

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/06/06

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 breakthrough may finally be close.For Decoded, YC General Partner Gustaf Alstromer traces the history of fusion, the physics behind it, and the engineering challenges that stalled it for nearly a century. He also looks at how Helion is approaching the problem differently, as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by 2028.

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00:30:07

AI Apps Are Broken — Here's How To Fix Them

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/05/23

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 work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software, but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don't want to do. From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators, they dig into what it means to build AI-native software—and why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to

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00:19:11

How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/05/09

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 coding tools are transforming software development, why small, high-agency teams will be able to do what once took armies of engineers, and why there's never been a better time to start something new. They explore the bigger picture too: a future where there's abundance, knowledge work becomes more accessible, and founders have more leverage than

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301 results

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