Y Combinator — transcripts.

1DoorDash's Application Video for YC S13hey i'm stanley i'm a stanford cs major i did find an engineer at facebook hey i'm andy i'm also a stanford cs major and i did platform engineering at facebook i'm evan i was on… 2Garry Tan: "Personal AGI Is How You Stay Under Your Own Power"So the internet calls me one of the most AI psychotic people online. So it's only right that I start my talk with a story about one of the most cancelled men in history. His name… 3How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas | Startup Schoolall right hello everyone I've got a lot of content to get through so I'm gonna move fast Buckle in if you are looking for a startup idea right now I'm going to try to help but… 4Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIAll right. Should we go Should we get started Jeff? >> Sure. Sounds great. >> All right. Jeff, welcome. And again, thank you so much for being here. Especially I just got a cold… 5Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt>> All right, Boris. We're so excited to have you here, the creator of Claude code. >> Thank you. >> >> It's great to be here. >> Fresh off the press. You guys just shipped Opus… 6Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"Sam, thanks for joining us. >> This is something >> this is like a lot bigger than the earlier startup schools. >> Yeah, I mean startups are a lot bigger now than they have ever… 7Why You Should Leave Your FAANG Jobwe all know these people that want to just like tell you their darkest secret which is they wake up every day and they like dream of quitting like they have fantasies of quitting… 8Solving the Blank Canvas Problem: Gusto's AI Co-FounderI'm here with Eddie Kim, Gusto's co-founder and head of technology. Gusto was in YC's winter 2012 batch and recently crossed a billion dollars in annual revenue and now serves… 9Why Two IIT Engineers Turned Down $550K Jobs To Build A StartupI was just panicked because I never prepared for anything. I mean I prepped so much for the interview that I chatted with a lot of XYZ interview founders etc. They all told me… 10How To Get Your First UsersHow do you get a new product off the ground? And when you're just starting out, where do those first real users actually come from? You see, most people aren't early adopters. Ask… 11Inside The Startup Building Reusable RocketsThe team at Stokepace is going after the holy grail of rocket science. Stoke is building fully and rapidly reusable rockets with aircraftlike reusability. Today, only this section… 12The ML Technique Every Founder Should KnowWelcome back to another episode of Decoded. Today I'm sitting down with YC visiting partner Francois Shaard to talk about one of the most important topics in AI today, diffusion.… 13Emergent: How Six Months of Tinkering Led To A $100M ARR CompanyIf you look at like last 30 years like most of the economic gain in the world has come from software companies. If you remove all the software companies from you know NASDAQ and… 14We just launched Paxel!Something strange is happening right now. Every one of us is writing software with AI, but we're doing it alone. No one really knows what it means to build well with coding agents… 15How Stripe Built Their New WebsiteToday, I am thrilled to welcome Stripe's head of design, Katie Dill, back to the show. Katie and her team recently launched a brand new Stripe homepage. She's going to take us… 16Thanks for a great time, India 🇮🇳>> This is incredible. I can't believe how many people came out for this. >> >> We were so shocked because we got over 25,000 applications. >> >> Future of the India AI… 17How to Make Claude Code Your AI Engineering TeamHi, I'm Gary, president and CEO of Y Combinator. I'm also an engineer who spent the first decade of my career building software full-time. I studied computer systems engineering… 18Inference, Diffusion, World Models, and More | YC Paper ClubAll right. Hello everyone. How you guys doing? Welcome to the first ever YC paper club. This is like a very exciting thing. Absolutely thrilled with the response. We had over a… 19The New Way To Build A StartupIf you haven't tried Claude Code in the last month, it's time to give it another shot. And if you have, you know what I'm talking about. It feels like AGI is here. One of… 20We're All Addicted To Claude CodeI feel like when I'm using quad code, it's like, oh, I feel like I'm flying through the code. >> When it's in your CLI, this thing can debug nested delayed jobs like five levels… 21How Intelligent Is AI, Really?I'm excited today to welcome Greg Camrad who is the president of the Ark Prize. >> That's, right. >> Thanks, for, coming, here, at, Europe's, 2025 in beautiful San Diego. >>… 22Zynga Founder: Consumer Is Not Investible Right Now - Thats Why You Should Build ItEven though consumer is arguably not investable right now, the opportunity has never been greater to offer people a new, you know, internet treasure, reinvent some service that we… 23How Legora Went From YC to $100M ARR in 18 MonthsAll right. >> What do you want to talk about? >> Uh, well, I wanted to start talking about Jude Law. >> Um, how >> Jude how does one um how does one grab Jude Law to be um um your… 24The Most AI-Pilled CEO We Knowyou wake up whatever problem you have in your life why can't you solve it with AI and just like start there I think the CEO needs to be the chief AI officer like it's not a… 25Why Your Startup Website Isn't ConvertingToday we're joined by Yorn Van Djk, the CEO and co-founder of Framer, the leading website design platform. Yorn is going to use his expert design background to review a bunch of… 26BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest ProblemsOne in 11 babies born in America this year will be screened by a genetic test that didn't exist a decade ago. Can you articulate like the needle in the haystack problem that you… 27Replit's CEO On The Only Two Jobs Left In The Company Of The FutureToday I'm joined by Amjad Msad, the CEO and co-founder of Replet. Replet is the leading noode app builder uh for consumers and enterprise. They just recently raised their series… 28François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGII think we're probably looking at AGI 2030 around the time uh that we're going to be releasing like maybe AR 6 or AR 7. You're not going to stop uh AI progress. I think I think… 29OpenAI: $2M in tokens to every YC company in the spring and summer batches.We're excited to announce that OpenAI is offering to invest $2 million in every YC company in the spring and summer batches. >> What are the terms? >> OpenAI is investing $2… 30How to Build an AI-Native Services CompanySome of the biggest companies of the next decade won't be software businesses at all. They'll be services companies like insurance carriers and law firms rebuilt from scratch with… 31Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Walks Us Through His AI Coding SetupHello, I am Charlie, the co-founder of Conductor, which is an app that lets you orchestrate a bunch of coding agents on your Mac. And we were YC Summer 24. Uh, and I'd love to… 32The Truth About The AI BubbleI think perhaps the thing that most surprised me is the extent to which I feel like the AI economy stabilized. We have like the model layer companies and the application layer… 33How to Get Your First 10 CustomersHi, I'm Max, a visiting partner here at Y Combinator. Today I want to talk to you about something I constantly hear from YC founders, which is, "I think I know who my target… 34Zepto: How Two 17-Year-Olds Built India's Largest Seller Of Fruits and VegetablesIf you remove all constraints and you just remove all the laws of physics and you just think from first principles, what's the most extreme positive customer experience you can… 35How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AIThis is based a little bit off a talk Diana gave. There's a video up over the weekend which is super cool. Um Jack Dorsey was tweeting some stuff like two or three weeks ago that… 36Harshil Mathur: AI Is Compressing Every MoatB2B is a business of trust and the trust at the end of the day nothing replaces the human touch point of trust right you pick up the phone you call even today like just having… 37The Powerful Alternative To Fine-TuningThe world is changing so quickly. This is probably a little bit obvious, but you should just try things and and like every day do something with AI. Last summer, I took a weekend… 38Pick One Idea and Go DeepHi, I'm John and I'm a partner at YC. I often meet founders who have lots of ideas about what to work on and can't decide between them. Sometimes they're working on multiple… 39Paul Graham, Founder of Y Combinator, Live from StockholmI'm going to talk about two questions today that many of you have probably wondered about. The first one is about you. Should you go to Silicon Valley? The second one is about… 40The AI Agent Economy Is HereWelcome to another episode of The Light Cone. Things are a bit different around here. For one thing, Claude Code has totally taken over my life. And if Jared is any indication, I… 41Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris ChernyAt Enthropic, the way that we thought about it is we don't build for the model of today. We build for the model six months from now. That's actually like still my advice to to… 42Inside The Startup Reinventing The $6 Trillion Chemical Manufacturing IndustryThis reactor in Houston, Texas, represents a whole new approach to chemical manufacturing. We make chemicals in a completely new way. We started off by making hydrogen peroxide.… 43Groww: If Your Customers Don't Love It or Hate It, You've Already LostMost of the time like you would not build what customer is directly asking but you read between the lines okay you know what so customer did not say okay show me all the products… 44How We Redesigned Our WebsiteWelcome to a very special episode of Design Review. Today I am joined by Evard who is the designer here at YC and we're going to be talking about the brand new YC website that we… 45India Can Create The Largest AI CompaniesThis wave is more about are you living at the edge of the technology and not as much about do you understand the right go-to-market right business model etc. This is about do you… 46Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthroughcontinual learning, long-term reasoning, uh some aspects of memory, these are still unsolved. I think all of these are going to be required for AGI. Depending on what your AGI… 47This Startup Catches Fraud at ScaleSo, I'm particularly excited to do this Founder Fireside because we have a first for the Founder Fireside series. We are doing a big announcement on this podcast. We are… 48How To Build A Company With AI From The Ground UpHi, I'm Diana and I'm a partner at YC. Over the past few months, it's become clear to me that AI is not just going to change how quickly software gets built or what workflows get… 49Common Mistakes With Vibe Coded WebsitesIt's easier than ever to design with AI tools, but that doesn't mean you should always accept all changes. So today, I'll be joined by Raphael Shod to look at the good, the bad… 50Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AIWelcome back to another episode of Decoded. Today, I'm back with YC visiting partner Francois Shaard to talk about one of the most interesting recent trends in AI research… 51Inside YC's AI PlaybookHow do you build super intelligence inside a company? >> Part of the key thing is not to just use AI as a copilot. This is the the thing where you use it as the building layer for… 52AI Is Unlocking Millions Of New BuildersSo I think now we are just truly seeing this unlock where people who who were like really close to problem domain expert and but have been blocked by you know technology barrier… 53The Age Of The 40-Year-Old Solo Founder Is HereYou need to have a certain amount of expertise to know what to do with this boundless intelligence that's imbued in the model. And I think this is where folks with experience… 54How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And RotThe best way to make money is to create more value than you capture, right? To build something that people want. And yet, we're all supposed to pretend these days that we think… 55The Future Of Brain-Computer InterfacesI think it is very possible that the first people to live to a thousand are alive right now. It still takes some suspension of disbelief because I think biotech has just been so… 56From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion UnicornI'm here today with James Hawkins, CEO and founder of Post Hog from the YC Winter20 batch. James is here hot off the news of raising a 75 million series Z round of funding at a $… 57Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 EngineersI think that's like the defining question like will you have control over your own tools or will your tools have control over you? Using OpenClaw these days is like driving a… 58OpenClaw Creator: Why 80% Of Apps Will DisappearToday I'm sitting down with Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, the open- source personal AI agent that has completely taken over the internet. The GitHub repo exploded to… 59The GPT Moment for Robotics Is HereThe equation I think for starting a robotic business has changed and will continue to change at an accelerating pace because the upfront cost is not that high anymore. >>… 60How Meesho Became India’s Biggest Shopping AppIt's hard. It's hard to kill your existing business and start a new one. We did it and I I remember it was mid of 2021. So July 5th 5th July 2021 we launched our app. >> Yeah. >>… 61Self-Play for LLMs, AI for Biology, Formal Verification, and More | YC Paper ClubThank you guys so much for coming. This one will have much a much more applied bent based on the feedback. We have a bunch of really cool people that I'll introduce in a second…