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.
General-purpose LLMs are transforming robotics by acting as "robot-use agents" that generate code to control physical hardware. This shift moves away from rigid, fine-tuned Vision-Language-Action models toward flexible systems that leverage in-context learning and tool use to execute complex tasks. The "Platonic Repres...
Hard tech companies, spanning robotics, defense, and power infrastructure, have surged from 8% to 20% of YC batches, driven by the need for physical-world solutions and AI-accelerated research. Simultaneously, software has evolved from static point solutions to autonomous, end-to-end agents, enabling startups to reach ...
Founder-led outbound sales success relies on manual, personalized outreach before attempting automation. Prioritizing precise targeting over generic messaging ensures that communications reach individuals with the specific pain points a product solves. Effective outreach requires crafting concise, peer-level messages t...
Open-source AI models are rapidly transforming enterprise workflows by offering cost-effective, customizable alternatives to closed frontier models. Coding agents currently drive the majority of token consumption, with organizations like AT&T shifting significant portions of their workloads to open-source solutions. Ol...
Starting a startup remains a consistent, grueling process regardless of technological advancements like artificial intelligence. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, emphasizes that success hinges on "formidable" founders—individuals who possess the relentless drive to overcome obstacles and consistently achieve th...
Heart Aerospace is transforming regional aviation by developing hybrid-electric aircraft designed to lower the costs and environmental impact of short-haul travel. By replacing complex jet engines with simple, low-maintenance electric motors, the company addresses the inefficiencies inherent in traditional regional fli...
Legora, an agentic operating system for lawyers, has scaled from a small Swedish startup to a global enterprise with 100 million in annual recurring revenue. Founded by non-lawyers who leveraged the rise of large language models, the company overcame initial skepticism by focusing on deep customer integration and rapid...
Iconographer and designer Susan Kare shares her journey creating the original Macintosh interface, emphasizing that effective design prioritizes meaning and memorability over complexity. By adhering to strict constraints—such as 16x16 pixel grids—she developed intuitive icons and fonts like Chicago, New York, and Genev...
General-purpose robotics requires moving beyond task-specific training toward foundation models capable of long-term autonomy. Achieving this involves scalable reinforcement learning recipes that leverage human interventions to prevent dead-end trajectories and utilize general-purpose value functions to estimate task p...
OpenClaw emerged from a personal need to streamline AI agent interactions, rapidly evolving into a significant open-source project with over 111,000 interactions. The development journey highlights the tension between rapid feature expansion and the necessity of maintaining system stability and security. Scaling an ope...
Startup success hinges on the rate of iteration, which is fundamentally constrained by internal infrastructure rather than just technical innovation. Building custom operational systems—such as automated procurement, data-driven hiring funnels, and "eigenreview" performance metrics—enables organizations to maintain spe...
Paper is an agent-native design tool that leverages HTML and CSS as its rendering engine to streamline the workflow between designers and AI agents. By treating code as the source of truth, the platform enables seamless handoffs and allows users to generate, iterate, and refine visual elements like shaders and UI compo...
Personal AGI represents a fundamental shift in individual productivity, where AI agents act as extensions of one's own cognitive capacity rather than rented corporate tools. By building a personal library of context—diarized notes, emails, and project histories—individuals can create "skill files" that automate complex...
Building data centers in space offers a solution to the escalating energy and regulatory constraints facing terrestrial AI compute. By leveraging rapidly declining launch costs and the abundance of solar energy in orbit, Starcloud aims to deploy massive compute constellations that bypass Earth-bound infrastructure bott...
Building and scaling physical AI requires transitioning from successful demos to reliable, safety-critical products by climbing an exponential ladder of performance "nines." Unlike digital AI, physical agents must navigate the high costs of error, latency constraints, and the lack of a pre-labeled internet-scale datase...
Entrepreneurship in the age of AI requires balancing the outsourcing of technical tasks with the retention of deep, internal cognitive knowledge. While AI models can rapidly generate code and handle complex queries, maintaining foundational expertise provides a significant speed advantage in reasoning and problem-solvi...
AI development is shifting from simple model scaling to complex, agent-based systems capable of executing long-running, multi-step tasks. Jeff Dean, a key architect of Google’s infrastructure including MapReduce, Bigtable, and TPUs, emphasizes that the next frontier lies in "context engineering"—optimizing how models u...
Alexander Wang, founder of Scale AI, discusses the evolution of artificial intelligence and the critical role of data in building robust models. Starting from his early experiences at MIT and Y Combinator, he emphasizes the necessity of developing a personal compass for long-term vision, even when market consensus rema...
Supersonic passenger travel has stagnated for half a century, leaving the world less connected than it could be. Boom Supersonic addresses this by treating hardware development like software, utilizing digital simulation tools like "MakeBoom" and "Blade Runner" to iterate rapidly and reduce costs. By vertically integra...
Startups are entering a golden age where AI agents drastically reduce the time and cost required to build ambitious, world-changing companies. While early startup environments like the original Y Combinator batch were defined by scarcity and skepticism, current technological shifts allow founders to tackle previously i...
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