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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

00:05:41

How To Get Your First Customers

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2026/01/14

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 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

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00:15:43

Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2026/01/08

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 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:

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00:30:22

What Surprised Us Most In 2025

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/12/22

2025 was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode, the YC partners break down the surprises of the year, from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the application layer, and why the next wave of AI startups may be just getting started.

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00:11:59

How Intelligent Is AI, Really?

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/12/17

ARC-AGI is redefining how to measure progress on the path to AGI - focusing on reasoning, generalization, and adaptability instead of memorization or scale.During this month's NeurIPS 2025 conference, YC's Diana Hu sat down with ARC Prize Foundation President Greg Kamradt to find out why most AI benchmarks fail, how ARC-AGI reveals the limits of today’s models, and why measuring intelligence may be harder than building it.

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00:42:19

The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/12/12

Head of Design Ryo Lu helped transform Cursor from a feature-layer on top of VS Code into one of the world's leading AI code editors.He joins YC's Aaron Epstein on Design Review to talk about the path that brought him to Cursor, how rapid prototyping reshaped the core product and how he's breaking down the barriers that once separated designers and coders.

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00:38:46

From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/12/10

In just a few years, James Hawkins took PostHog from an idea hacked together right before YC's W20 deadline to a unicorn powering product analytics for thousands of teams.He joins YC's Brad Flora to talk about surviving six months of "pivot hell," why open-source analytics was the breakthrough, and how PostHog grew from fighting for its first users to launching full product lines—plus what he's learned about momentum, staying close to customers, and using transparency and humor

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00:39:35

The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were "Impossible"...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/11/28

Every major shift in consumer tech has a moment when it suddenly becomes accessible to millions. Michael Mignano helped spark one of those moments with Anchor, making podcast creation something anyone could do with a tap. Now at Lightspeed, he sees AI bringing a similar leap to music, media, and everyday apps.In this conversation, he and Garry trace the arc from the early days of social audio to today's consumer AI boom—and dig into what founders should focus on as the next generation of

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00:35:34

Cursor Head of Design Reviews Startup Websites

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/11/20

Cursor Head of Design Ryo Lu has spent his career at the intersection of design and engineering—from building fan sites as a kid to designing products at Stripe, Asana, and Notion. Now he's rethinking how software itself gets made.On this episode of Design Review, Ryo joins YC's Aaron Epstein to break down how great product websites communicate what a company does. They walk through sites from early-stage startups, calling out the small choices in structure, clarity, and brand that help

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00:12:55

Inside The Startup Launching AI Into Space

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/11/13

Starcloud recently made history by launching a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 into orbit — the first time a GPU that powerful has ever operated in space. It's the first step toward building AI data centers in orbit, powered by continuous sunlight and cooled by radiating heat into deep space.Their approach could one day rival the world's biggest data centers while using less energy, zero fresh water, and far lower emissions.In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Aaron Epstein visits

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00:43:20

How To Recruit The Best Engineers And Sales Reps

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/11/07

Most founders think hiring is about interviewing. But it's actually about selling.For Startup School, Juicebox co-founder & CEO David Paffenholz joins YC's Harj Taggar to share how early-stage founders can find, pitch, and close top engineering and sales talent— from crafting better outreach to winning great hires from Big Tech— even when you're an unknown startup.

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00:39:24

From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/10/28

Jake Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million.In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he shared how his team did it—from picking the right idea to building AI products that actually work—and how founders can turn a cool demo into a reliable tool used by real customers.

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00:09:18

Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/10/23

Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the Transformer.In this video, YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language — from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need — the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era.

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00:38:32

YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/10/21

Every founder faces moments where they’re not sure what to do next — such as how to go to market with AI products, when to pivot, and who/when to hire.In this episode of Office Hours, YC partners Pete Koomen, Brad Flora, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Gustaf Alströmer answer real questions from founders and share stories about how great teams build conviction, learn faster, and make better decisions as they grow.

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00:08:00

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/10/14

For years, we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work, the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced, and more hopeful.From radiology to software engineering, the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster, demand for human creativity and judgment grows.YC's Garry Tan explores what history, economics, and real companies show us— that technology doesn't replace people, it redefines what we can do.

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00:35:49

How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/10/13

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the issue tracking tool used by thousands of high-growth companies. Before Linear, he was the first designer at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb.On Design Review with YC's Aaron Epstein, Karri shares how his design background shaped Linear’s product philosophy, why quality and craft matter from day one, what founders should look for when hiring, and how AI is changing the way teams build. It’s a deep dive into building products that

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00:12:46

The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/10/09

Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something that’s never been done before.They're building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains—capturing CO2 from moving vehicles before it enters the atmosphere, then turning those emissions into revenue by selling it to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products.In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Gustaf Alströmer visits Remora's headquarters outside Detroit to see how a recent college grad with

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00:40:35

Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/10/07

Jordan 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

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01:04:04

Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws,...

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/10/01

Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model?YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with Nick Joseph, Anthropic's Head of Pre-training, to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claude—from managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws, data strategies, team composition, and why the hardest problems in AI are often infrastructure problems, not ML problems.

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00:42:00

Fintech 3.0: Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/09/23

We are entering the era of Fintech 3.0. Regulatory clarity, growing consumer adoption, and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto — and at YC, Base, and Coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. In this episode of Main Function, YC's Harj Taggar and Base's Jesse Pollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they're most excited to see, why this is such an exciting time in crypto, and what the future could look like onchain.More on our

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00:40:27

Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era

Y Combinator Startup Podcast ·

2025/09/16

For nearly two decades, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes work—guiding the company through the rise of mobile, the cloud, and now the age of AI.In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School, Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term, the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves, and why he believes AI represents the most transformative shift yet.

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307 results

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