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.
333 episodes transcribedOne of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software. In a recent essay, MIT professo...
YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups...
The best outbound starts before you automate anything. Founders need to learn who actually has the problem, what gets their attention, and what makes...
Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI model...
YC Visiting Partner Vivian Shen sits down with Paul Graham at the original YC office in Mountain View to talk about startups, AI, ambition, and what m...
Heart Aerospace (YC W19) just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown — a 100-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and $5 of electr...
Today, more than 3% of the world’s lawyers use Legora, and the company has grown from $1 million to $100 million in ARR since launching in October 202...
Susan Kare joined Apple as an art history PhD who barely knew anything about computers. She went on to design many of the icons, typefaces, and symbol...
Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, fo...
Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few mo...
Science is building a retinal implant that restores vision to people who have gone blind. One patient has already used it to read a 300-page novel.Bui...
AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing how they build, ship, and stand out. In this episode of Design Review, Stephen H...
The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before.At Startup School 2026, YC President & CEO Garry Tan explains why...
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space. In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H10...
Waymo’s first autonomous demo took eighteen months. The product took fifteen years. Today, the Waymo Driver runs 500,000 trips a week — four million f...
In 2009, Patrick and John Collison went to Startup School in Berkeley, got sushi in Potrero Hill afterward, and decided on the walk home to start Stri...
In 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...
