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.
Francois Chollet, founder of the ARC prize and Ndea, discusses the current state and future directions of AI research. He introduces Ndea's focus on program synthesis, aiming to create concise, symbolic models as an alternative to deep learning's parametric curves. Chollet argues that while current LLM-based approaches...
Solugen's journey from a $10,000 prototype to a billion-dollar chemical company is explored, highlighting their innovative chemoenzymatic processing that combines biology and metal catalysts for efficient chemical reactions. The discussion emphasizes Solugen's unique approach of using enzymes derived from pancreatic ca...
The podcast explores how Emergent, an AI agent platform, enables non-technical users to build and ship production-ready software. Mukund and Madhav Jha, twin brothers and founders of Emergent, share their journey from developing coding agents for enterprises to empowering individuals globally. A key insight was recogni...
Max Hodak, co-founder of Neuralink and founder of Science, discusses the advancements and future of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Hodak details Science's retinal prosthesis, Prima, which restores sight by bypassing dead cells with a 2mm chip and laser-projected images, noting its potential approval later this year....
The podcast examines the impact of AI on website design, particularly focusing on the rise of easily implemented design trends and their potential drawbacks. It questions whether the ease of AI-assisted design leads to a homogenization of styles, diminishing brand originality. Examples such as purple gradients, hover e...
Poetiq is developing recursively self-improving AI reasoning systems for LLMs, offering a faster and cheaper alternative to training new LLMs from scratch. According to Ian Fischer, co-founder and co-CEO of Poetiq, their system, the Poetiq metasystem, generates systems that outperform underlying language models without...
The podcast explores the impact of AI agents on software development and the broader economy. It highlights the shift from developers choosing tools to AI agents making those decisions, influencing the go-to-market strategies for dev tools. The discussion points to the increasing importance of agent-friendly documentat...
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, discusses the evolution and impact of AI-assisted coding. Cherny emphasizes the importance of building for future AI model capabilities rather than the present, advocating for adaptability and continuous rewriting of code. He recounts the accidental origins of Claude Code as a term...
The emergence of "20X companies" marks a fundamental shift in startup operations, where tiny teams leverage comprehensive internal AI automation to outperform incumbents 20 times their size. This evolution of the "compound startup" model moves beyond automating single functions like customer support to integrating AI a...
Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, discusses the inspiration, development, and implications of his open-source personal AI agent. OpenClaw's key differentiator is its ability to run locally on a user's computer, granting it extensive control over devices and data, unlike cloud-based alternatives. Steinberger r...
The podcast explores the evolving landscape of coding agents, focusing on the shift towards CLI-based tools like Claude Code and Codex. Calvin French-Owen, formerly of OpenAI, shares insights on building coding agents, emphasizing the importance of effective context management and leveraging LLM superpowers. The discus...
Finding the first users for a new product is a search for specific "early adopters" rather than a mass-market persuasion effort. Success depends on identifying individuals with burning problems who prioritize solutions over brand reputation or price. Charging real money early is essential because paying customers provi...
Stoke Space founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman discuss their mission to create fully and rapidly reusable rockets, aiming to revolutionize space travel by decreasing costs and increasing reliability. They detail the design of their two-stage rocket, Nova and Andromeda, highlighting the unique heat shield technology th...
In this episode of The Light Cone, the hosts and a guest discuss the surprising trends and developments in the AI landscape of 2025. They explore the shift in preferred LLMs at YC, with Anthropic surpassing OpenAI, and the rise of Gemini. The conversation covers the stabilization of the AI economy, the potential AI bub...
In this interview at NeurIPS 2025, Diana Hu interviews Greg Kamradt, the president of the ARC Prize Foundation, about the foundation's mission to advance AI systems that generalize like humans. Greg discusses the ARC Prize's opinionated definition of intelligence, which focuses on the ability to learn new things, refer...
In this episode of Design Review, Ryo Lu, Head of Design at Cursor, discusses his journey into design, starting with building websites as a child and eventually leading design at Notion, Stripe, and Asana. Ryo shares his mission to empower designers to code using AI tools like Cursor, emphasizing a shift from pixel-per...
In this interview, James Hawkins, CEO and founder of PostHog, discusses the company's journey from its YC Winter 20 batch to becoming a unicorn with a $75 million Series E funding round. Hawkins details PostHog's initial product, a self-hosted product analytics tool born out of their own frustrations with repetitive an...
In this interview, Garry Tan speaks with Mike Mignano, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures and founder of Anchor, about consumer startups and how AI is reshaping media. Mignano shares his experience building Anchor, including pivots and near-death moments, and discusses the evolution of consumer platforms and the challeng...
In this episode of Design Review, a host and Ryo Lu, Head of Design at Cursor, review user-submitted websites built with Cursor, providing feedback on design, messaging, and overall effectiveness. They analyze sites like Crunched, Velvet, Clavis AI, and Code Crafters, focusing on clarity, visual appeal, and user experi...
The podcast discusses Starcloud's mission to build data centers in space, addressing the growing energy demands and cooling limitations of terrestrial data centers. Philip Johnston, co-founder of Starcloud, explains how they plan to use solar energy and the vacuum of space for cooling, aiming to create more efficient a...
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