Y Combinator Startup Podcast
Y Combinator
22 episodes
How To Build The Future: Paul Graham & Amjad Masad
7 Nov · 44 min
- Paul Graham says Replit invented vibe coding in 2024; Masad says Replit first ran LLMs to completion.
- Replit's reversible file system and multiplayer design let an agent act as another user, winning enterprise deals.
How To Go From Researcher to Founder
4 Nov · 10 min
- Francois Chaubard says researchers must kill part of their academic identity because research skills held him back as a startup CEO.
- Chaubard says copying proven ideas beats novelty, citing Lyft versus Uber and Anthropic versus OpenAI.
What Happens When Everyone Can Build Software
30 Oct · 49 min
- Paul Copplestone says Supabase is now a default database inside Claude Code and Codex, with about 13m sign-ups as builders outside traditional engineering join.
- Paul Copplestone predicts enterprises will increasingly demand to inspect source code before adopting a vendor, favoring open platforms that agents and buyers can verify.
The New Full-Stack Designer
28 Oct · 1 h 6 min
- Marvin Schwaibold, who leads Shopify's product design studio, says designers now act like editors, curating AI output because AI can write code but cannot judge what looks good.
- Schwaibold says Shopify leadership decided last year that the company was entering a new era that needed design, and that prototypes persuade far better than product requirement documents.
This Is How You Should Actually Make Launch Videos
23 Oct · 47 min
- Farza Majeed says the old launch playbook is dead and founders should post daily demos on algorithmic platforms.
- Clicky's first launch video, recorded five minutes before dinner, got nearly 3m views, 7,000 downloads, and 100 retained users.
How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs
22 Oct · 48 min
- Magic Patterns is model agnostic, exporting to Figma or any coding agent, unlike Claude Design's Anthropic-only models and Claude Code-only exports.
- Magic Patterns' MCP, a hackathon side project, now sees explosive enterprise use pulling context from Cursor or Claude Code.
Robot-Use Agents: Why General-Purpose Models May Win in Robotics
26 Sept · 30 min
- MIT professor Philip Isola argues in a viral essay that general-purpose models may enter a robot-use agent era, with Waddle Labs and RoboCurve as early examples.
- Han Ming argues for one good foundational LLM to control robots rather than a robotics-specific model dependent on robot data.
The State of Startups in 2026
18 Sept · 36 min
- Hard tech now 20% of YC's batch, up from 8%, with median company hitting $20K MRR by demo day.
- Garry Tan says systems of record must become AI harnesses or lose data moats in the coming harness wars.
8 Ways To Improve Your Outbound Sales
13 Sept · 13 min
- OneSchema founder Christina Gilbert says founders should hand-write 100 outreaches before automating.
- Targeting beats messaging: Gilbert cites a YC company that emailed DevRel managers instead of the engineering leaders who buy infrastructure, getting zero replies.
Open Models Change The Economics of AI
12 Sept · 57 min
- AT&T has shifted 40% of its token consumption to open models, according to The Information.
- Ollama Cloud's token usage is up 150x since the start of the year, driven by coding agents and OpenClaw.
Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders
5 Sept · 21 min
- Paul Graham calls OpenAI the "new Google," noting it was incubated at Y Combinator as a Sam Altman side project.
- Graham says fear of failure motivates founders day to day, and ambition is mostly inborn.
The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew
4 Sept · 15 min
- Heart Aerospace's electric aircraft, the largest ever flown, has a 100-foot wingspan and uses about $5 of electricity per takeoff.
- Its ES30 successor will fly 125 miles on battery alone and 500 miles as a hybrid, recharging in about 30 minutes.
Max Junestrand: You Need The Willingness To Learn Faster Than Anyone Else
29 Aug · 1 h 0 min
- More than 3% of the world's lawyers now use Legora, which reached $100M ARR after launching in October 2024.
- After Benchmark and Redpoint backed it, Legora froze sales for six months and grew ARR from $1M to $100M.
Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac
28 Aug · 52 min
- Susan Kare designed the original Macintosh's 16-by-16 icons and the nine-pixel Chicago font.
- Mentor Paul Rand said make things meaningful and memorable, then charged NeXT $100,000 for one logo.
Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics
13 Aug · 58 min
- Physical Intelligence's reinforcement learning recipe doubles throughput and its latte policy ran 13 hours straight.
- Pi0.7 opens an air fryer seen in only three episodes and folds clothes on a UR5E with no folding data.
Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"
11 Aug · 42 min
- OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger's open source agent, began as a WhatsApp relay, drew more than 18,000 issue or pull request contributors, and was renamed after Anthropic demanded it.
- Steinberger nearly deleted OpenClaw after his phone number leaked, but NVIDIA's early security help brought the joy back by May.
Max Hodak: How Startups Build Speed
10 Aug · 57 min
- Science's retinal prosthesis finished major clinical trials in 2025, and one patient finished a 300-page novel with it.
- Max Hodak says deep tech startups more often fail on organizing humans than on technology, and speed is built through infrastructure.
How To Design In The Agent Era
7 Aug · 56 min
- Stephen Haney says Paper uses HTML and CSS and an MCP server so agents edit designs faster and more accurately.
- Haney says never ship raw model output and delete AI tells like extra font sizes and pills.
Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence
6 Aug · 42 min
- Garry Tan says personal AGI runs on owned context, not a $20-a-month rented chatbot.
- In YC's Winter 2025 batch, a quarter of companies had codebases 95% AI-generated, and the batch is on track to be among YC's fastest-growing and most profitable.
Building the First Data Centers in Space
5 Aug · 36 min
- Starcloud became the fastest-growing unicorn in YC history 17 months after Demo Day, raising $170m led by Benchmark.
- Starcloud 1 launched in November 2025 with an Nvidia H100 and ran the first version of Gemini in orbit.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: "Move Fast And Ship Safely"
4 Aug · 49 min
- Waymo serves 500,000 trips a week and 4m autonomous miles weekly across 15 US cities.
- Waymo's 220m autonomous miles show its Driver is 17 times better than humans at serious-injury crashes, preventing one every eight days.
The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street
31 Jul 2025 · 46 min
- Model ML says it signed as many contracts in the last seven days as in all of Q4, which Chaz Englander cites as proof AI products deliver tangible value.
- Model ML's agentic workspace connects analysts' files, email, CRM and data vendors, and turns earnings summaries into slides that are 90 to 95 percent finished.