Y Combinator

Agency and Independence

The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

In this episode of The Light Comb, Bob McGrew, formerly Chief Research Officer at OpenAI and an early executive at Palantir, discusses the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, which originated at Palantir and is now gaining traction among AI agent startups. McGrew explains that an FDE is an engineer who works at the ...

Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students

Michael Truell, co-founder of Cursor, details the evolution of his company from a series of failed experimental projects to a leading AI-powered code editor. After early attempts to build AI tools for mechanical engineers and secure messaging, the team recognized a fundamental shift in software development, leading the...

GPT-OSS vs. Qwen vs. Deepseek: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures

AI won’t make coding obsolete. It will make it universal.

How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)

Technical Expertise is Now the Missing Piece

Intellectual Fearlessness

Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design

In this episode of The Light Cone, Tom Brown, co-founder of Anthropic, discusses his journey from MIT to co-founding Anthropic. He shares his early career experiences at startups like LinkedLanguage and Mopo, his transition into AI research at OpenAI, and the events leading to the creation of Anthropic. Brown also disc...

The Sales Playbook For Founders | Startup School

Satya Nadella on Leadership

Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design

Where does your interest come from?

Using LLMs Instead of Government Consulting

AI Native Enterprise Software

Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems

The First 10-person, $100B Company

The speaker discusses how new AI tools are enabling small, high-agency teams and even solo founders to build multi-billion dollar companies with significantly less capital, drawing a parallel to the impact of cloud computing 15 years ago. They emphasize that future successful startups will optimize for "Revenue per emp...

The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street

Video Generation as a Primitive

Retraining Workers for the AI Economy