Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders

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 makes great founders.

The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew

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 electricity to get it off

Max Junestrand: You Need The Willingness To Learn Faster Than Anyone Else

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 2024.At Startup School

Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac

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 symbols that helped make t

Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics

Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, for long periods of ti

Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"

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 months later, OpenClaw

Max Hodak: How Startups Build Speed

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.Building a company like

How To Design In The Agent Era

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 Haney, founder of AI-native

Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence

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 we're entering the era

Building the First Data Centers in Space

Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space. In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit a

Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: "Move Fast And Ship Safely"

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 fully autonomous mile

Patrick Collison: "What If You Succeed?"

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 Stripe. The reasoning, a

Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI

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 search got fast. In 20

Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity”

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 against the noise. At Startup

Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban

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 building America’

Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a 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 founders dinner. Twenty yea

Boris Cherny: Building Claude Code

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, how Claude Code came t

Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

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 breakthroughs in modern comp

World Models, Explained

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 one of the great ope

How To Better Understand Your Users

Most founders obsess over dashboards and aggregate metrics, but some of the best product insights come from understanding how individual users actually use their product.