Year One

Greypoint: Building Hardware in an AI Batch

Four founders, one CNC machine, and a pitch that stopped a room full of investors cold: Greypoint Industries is building drone technology to compete with defense primes t

9 Mothers: The $200M That Warped the Batch

Days before Demo Day, a $200 million valuation for an unnamed S26 startup lands in a YC founder group chat and won't stop spreading. On this episode of Year One, Miles an

Demo Day+72: How S26 Term Sheets Get Priced

The applause hasn't even faded and the phones are already lighting up. This episode of Year One picks up in the 72 hours after S26's Demo Day, when term sheets start arri

Nadia: The Verdict Arrives

Nadia has just opened the YC decision email she has been waiting on for weeks, and in this episode you hear the exact moment she finds out if her company’s next year is c

Nadia: The Ten Days Before August 28

Ten days before Y Combinator's August 28 decision date, founder Nadia is stuck in the kind of limbo that quietly reshapes how she runs her company. Her Fall 2026 seed rou

Nadia: What the Yes or No Actually Bought Her

Nadia read the email four times and still couldn't parse it. An ambiguous status update from Y Combinator landed Tuesday night, and what followed was ninety seconds of de

Nadia: The Verdict Lands August 28

Founder Nadia submitted her YC Fall 2026 application just before the July 27 deadline, and now she's twenty-four days into total silence, waiting for an interview invite

Nadia: Betting the Raise on August 28

Eight minutes before the YC Fall 2026 application deadline closed on July 27, Nadia deleted a paragraph about her co-founder — and on this episode of Year One, Miles and

Mato: Turning Personalized Demos Into Onboarding

Alexander Benz had a new product category, a cold lead pipeline, and only two minutes to convince confused prospects to try something they had never seen before. The stak

F26: The Application Nobody Finished Yet

Three weeks before her YC application deadline, a founder sat in her kitchen and stopped mid-sentence, realizing her polished traction slide left out the real reason she

Corgi: The Cease-and-Desist Heard on X

When Papermark founder Marc Seitz accused insurance startup Corgi of copying his open-source dataroom software word for word, the stakes escalated fast: Corgi's own CEO a

Corgi: The IP Scandal Every S26 Founder Is Ignoring

A YC-backed insurtech called Corgi shipped its Dataroom product on June 24th and was facing a public plagiarism accusation within twenty-four hours. The stakes were immed

S26 Day One: What the First Week Actually Decides

A founder inside YC's Summer 2026 batch describes day one of S26 — not the pitch, not the Demo Day narrative, the unedited version. The room was quieter than expected, an

Jorge: Turning BrainHi’s GTM Into an Engineered Machine

Jorge B. Macías had to figure out how to sell an AI product to medical offices from Puerto Rico, scale it to millions in ARR, and do it as the first founder from the isla

S26: The $2M Token Trap

Sam Altman walked into a YC event and offered every startup in the current batch $2 million in API tokens for an uncapped equity stake — and founders had to decide on the

The S26 Email: What Getting In (and Not) Actually Means

Two founders applied to YC S26. One got in. One didn't. In this episode of Year One, Miles and Grant sit with both of them inside the moment the decision email arrived —

Mato: Betting YC Will Turbocharge AI Podcasting

Alex Benz is applying to YC Summer 2026 while already sitting on $10k MRR, four enterprise customers, and a live AI podcast platform that actually works in production—and

Hex Security: $1M ARR in 8 Weeks

Fourteen companies in the YC W26 batch hit a million in ARR before Demo Day ended — three times more than the previous winter batch and the highest count in YC history. T

The S26 Call: Two Founders, One Decision Window

Two founders applied to YC S26 in the same window. One got the interview invite. One hit June 2 in silence. This Year One episode follows both through the moment the deci

The Quiet Breakdown: What Year One Actually Costs

A founder walks into an all-hands meeting running the best quarter of her company's life, and realizes mid-sentence she has nothing left. Not tired. Empty. In this episod