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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

00:27:12

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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00:16:39

How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/04/25

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 month building side projects with tools like Claude Code, Windsurf, and Aqua, seeing just how far you can push modern LLMs. From writing full-stack apps to debugging with a single paste of an error message, AI is becoming a legit collaborator in the dev process. This is a playbook for anyone who wants to get the most out of vibe coding and build faster.

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00:38:23

How Zepto Became India’s Fastest Growing Startup

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/04/18

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 company in India. In this episode of How To Build The Future, Garry sits down with Aadit Palicha, the co-founder and CEO of Zepto, to discuss how they got started in a Whatsapp group, what it’s like going up against incumbents like Amazon and Zomato and how the future of e-commerce is changing in the age of intelligence.

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00:34:12

Why America Stopped Innovating - And How We Can Start...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/04/04

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 get big things done.Still, there’s a growing movement to turn that around — to build faster, smarter, and better than ever before.In this episode of The Main Function, Garry sits down with Atlantic staff writer and Plain English podcast host Derek Thompson to discuss his new book Abundance (co-authored with Ezra Klein). They discuss how we got here,

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00:20:43

Why Every Founder Should Care About Design

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/03/28

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 founder, why illustration is an important first step when building a new product, and what ultimately makes designers uniquely qualified to start a company today.

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00:31:32

How to Build the Future: Tony Xu

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/03/26

12 years after starting DoorDash, co-founder & CEO Tony Xu and his employees still do deliveries every year, staying true to their core value: customer obsession.Today, DoorDash is the largest food delivery platform in the US.In this episode of How to Build the Future, Tony explains how their unwavering long-term vision won — helping create a new market while surviving near death and a global pandemic along the way.

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00:24:58

Customer Obsession Made Gusto A $9.6 Billion Company

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/03/18

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 Reeves joined YC's Harj Taggar to share how they built a payroll company from scratch and their customer-first approach to product design and culture.

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315 results

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