Y Combinator Startup Podcast

How To Build The Future: Paul Graham & Amjad Masad

Replit was building toward the AI coding era years before it had a name. In 2024, the company shipped an agent that could take a request in plain English, work through er

How To Go From Researcher to Founder

Google, Anthropic, and Databricks were all started by founders with PhDs. But they’re exceptions to the rule. Many of the instincts that help researchers succeed in acade

What Happens When Everyone Can Build Software

Supabase has become one of the default backends for the AI coding era. The open source Postgres platform now has 13 million users, spins up more than a million databases

The New Full-Stack Designer

Marvin Schwaibold leads the product design studio at Shopify, where his team is rethinking some of the company’s most important products for the AI era. Before Shopify, h

This Is How You Should Actually Make Launch Videos

There’s a misconception that a successful launch video needs to cost tens of thousands of dollars and feel like a high-production commercial. But Farza Majeed has a diffe

How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs

Magic Patterns (YC W23) is one of the fastest-growing design tools in AI, helping product teams turn ideas into interactive, code-backed prototypes in minutes. Alex Danil

Robot-Use Agents: Why General-Purpose Models May Win in Robotics

One 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 professor Philip Isola argue

The State of Startups in 2026

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 are moving from bits

8 Ways To Improve Your Outbound Sales

The best outbound starts before you automate anything. Founders need to learn who actually has the problem, what gets their attention, and what makes them reply. YC Visit

Open Models Change The Economics of AI

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 models people are actuall

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