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.
In this podcast, David Paffenholz, co-founder and CEO of Juicebox, shares his expertise on sourcing and hiring engineering and sales talent for startups. He emphasizes the importance of early hires in shaping company culture and velocity, and discusses strategies for attracting candidates from Big Tech, growth-stage co...
The podcast features a speaker sharing insights on building a successful AI application, drawing from their experience in creating and selling a company for $650 million. The discussion covers three main areas: idea selection, development, and marketing/sales strategies. The speaker emphasizes identifying problems that...
The podcast episode traces the historical development of the Transformer architecture, which underpins modern AI systems like ChatGPT. It begins by explaining the Transformer's function in processing sequential data and highlights three key predecessors: Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs), sequence-to-sequence (Se...
In this episode of Office Hours, Brad Flora and Nicolas Dessaigne address questions from the YC community, focusing on AI go-to-market strategies, pivoting, and hiring. They discuss three approaches for integrating AI into legacy industries, emphasizing the importance of automating processes and tracking automation rat...
The podcast addresses the debate on whether AI will make human labor obsolete, arguing that both extreme views—universal unemployment or minimal impact—are flawed. Citing the example of radiologists, where AI increased demand for their services due to Jevons Paradox, the speaker explains that technological efficiency o...
In this episode of Design Review, Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, shares his insights on prioritizing high-quality design in startups. He discusses Linear's focus on integrated workflows for product building, emphasizing the importance of design and speed. Drawing from his experiences at Y Combinator, Coi...
In this interview, Paul Gross, the founder and CEO of Remora, discusses his company's innovative approach to carbon capture technology for vehicles, particularly semi-trucks and locomotives. Remora retrofits these vehicles with systems that extract and purify CO2 from their exhaust, producing beverage-grade CO2 that ca...
The podcast features a speaker presenting a series of questions about the impact of rapidly advancing AI on startups, strategy, product development, team building, and society. The speaker emphasizes the need for founders to consider the implications of AGI, focusing on themes like commoditization of software, the evol...
This interview features a conversation with Nick Joseph, the head of pre-training at Anthropic, who discusses his background, including his time at Vicarious and OpenAI, and how he became involved in AI safety. The discussion covers the basics of pre-training, its role in AI model development, and Anthropic's approach ...
In this interview, Jesse Pollak, founder of Base, joins Harj Taggar to discuss the exciting opportunities for startups in the crypto world, particularly with the joint request for startups from Y Combinator and Coinbase. They explore the evolution of Fintech, the current state of crypto, and the impact of regulatory cl...
In this interview, Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, discusses the parallels between the cloud computing revolution and the current AI boom, noting that unlike cloud adoption, AI's potential is already widely accepted in enterprises. Levie argues that AI agents can automate many non-strategic tasks, freeing up employees...
Amjad Masad discusses the future of software development, focusing on Replit's vision of making software creation accessible to everyone through AI agents. He draws parallels between the evolution of computing from mainframes to PCs and the current shift in software engineering from expert-only to a more democratized f...
In this episode of The Light Comb, Harj Taggar and Blake Scholl interview Bob McGrew, formerly of OpenAI and Palantir, about the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model. McGrew explains the origins of the FDE model at Palantir, where engineers were embedded at customer sites to customize the product and drive product dis...
Michael Truell discusses the origin story of Cursor, starting from his early interest in programming and AI, driven by a desire to create mobile games and later, a robot dog. He recounts early projects, including a viral app for spoofing game high scores and building robots with reinforcement learning. Truell explains ...
This podcast episode analyzes and compares three open-source large language models (LLMs): OpenAI's GPT-OSS, Alibaba Cloud's Qwen3, and DeepSeek's v3. It delves into their architectural differences, training methodologies, and unique features. The discussion covers model sizes, context length extension techniques like ...
In this interview, Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of Legora, discusses with Nicolas Dessaigne how Legora is transforming the legal workspace with its AI-powered tools. Max explains how Legora helps lawyers with reviewing, drafting, and researching, and how it addresses the fragmented legal software space. He shares...
In this monologue podcast, Tom Blomfield discusses common mistakes B2B founders make in the sales process, particularly focusing on early-stage companies. He outlines the typical progression from poorly defined, lengthy, unpaid design partnerships to a rapid, well-defined sales process resulting in recurring revenue. B...
In this podcast episode, Dylan Field, the founder of Figma, discusses the origin and evolution of Figma, from its early days as a project exploring WebGL to its current status as a leading design tool. He shares insights on the importance of collaboration, seeking user feedback, and iterating quickly, while also emphas...
In this interview, Nicolas Dessaigne speaks with Arnie and Chaz Englander, the founders of Model ML, an AI workspace for financial services. They discuss how Model ML helps financial firms automate manual and repetitive tasks by providing an AI workspace that mimics human access to data and tools, significantly improvi...
Jared Kaplan discusses scaling laws in AI, highlighting the importance of pre-training and reinforcement learning phases for AI model improvement. He touches on the increasing flexibility and capability of AI, emphasizing the potential for AI to handle longer and more complex tasks. Kaplan also addresses the need for A...
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