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.
317 episodes transcribedIn 2001, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat did the math and realized Google’s entire search index would fit in RAM — then shipped it in a few days, and se...
Alexandr Wang's advice to his 18-year-old self: develop your own internal compass for how the future will unfold, and hold conviction in it agains...
In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither.Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic (YC W16), the startup...
In 2005, Sam Altman was a Stanford sophomore in YC’s first batch, building a startup in a little Cambridge office while Paul Graham cooked the founder...
Fresh off the launch of Opus 5, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny joins Diana Hu at Startup School 2026 to talk about what the newest models can do, ho...
NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthr...
Why do even our best AI models need tens of thousands of examples to learn skills that a human picks up in a handful of tries?Solving this problem is...
Most founders obsess over dashboards and aggregate metrics, but some of the best product insights come from understanding how individual users actuall...
Bryant Chou co-founded Webflow, which today powers around 1% of all websites on the internet. Now he's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an...
Many founders get stuck trying to find the perfect startup idea before they commit. But the perfect idea doesn't exist in the abstract. The only w...
Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn't ju...
Some of the biggest companies of the next decade won't be software businesses, they'll be services companies like insurance carriers, law firm...
Building superintelligence inside a company isn't about adding AI as a feature. It's about making it the operating system the whole organizati...
In this episode of the Main Function Garry sits down with Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup", about his new book, "Incorruptible:...
Paul Graham is a co-founder of Y Combinator. He's funded and mentored companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, DoorDash, and thousands of others through YC, an...
We're entering a new era of software where a single person, working with AI agents, can build products that previously required entire teams.In this e...
A 7-million parameter model outperforming models a thousand times its size on tasks like ARC Prize. That's what recursive reasoning unlocks.In thi...
Demis Hassabis has had one of the most extraordinary careers in tech. He started as a chess prodigy and video game designer at 17 before getting a PhD...
Replit is the leading no-code app builder for consumers and enterprise, letting anyone with an idea build real, deployed software using natural langua...
AI isn't just making teams more productive. It's changing how companies should be built.In this episode of Startup School, YC Partner Diana Hu...
