Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Cursor Head of Design Ryo Lu has spent his career at the intersection of design and engineering—from building fan sites as a kid to designing products at Stripe, Asana, and Notion. Now he's rethinking how software itself gets made.

On this episode of Design Review, Ryo joins YC's Aaron Epstein to break down how great product websites communicate what a company does. They walk through sites from early-stage startups, call...

Starcloud recently made history by launching a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 into orbit — the first time a GPU that powerful has ever operated in space. It's the first step toward building AI data centers in orbit, powered by continuous sunlight and cooled by radiating heat into deep space.Their approach could one day rival the world's biggest data centers while using less energy, zero fresh water, and far lower emissions.I...

For years, we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work, the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced, and more hopeful.From radiology to software engineering, the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster, demand for human creativity and judgment grows.YC's Garry Tan explores what history, economics, and real companies show us— that technology doesn't...

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the issue tracking tool used by thousands of high-growth companies. Before Linear, he was the first designer at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb.On Design Review with YC's Aaron Epstein, Karri shares how his design background shaped Linear’s product philosophy, why quality and craft matter from day one, what founders should look for when hiring, and how AI is chang...

Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something that’s never been done before.

They're building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains—capturing CO2 from moving vehicles before it enters the atmosphere, then turning those emissions into revenue by selling it to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products.

In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Gustaf Alströmer visits Re...

Jordan Fisher is the co-founder & CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answers—asking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away.He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right ...

Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model?YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with Nick Joseph, Anthropic's Head of Pre-training, to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claude—from managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws, data strategies, team composition, and why the hardest problems in AI are often in...

We are entering the era of Fintech 3.0. Regulatory clarity, growing consumer adoption, and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto — and at YC, Base, and Coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. In this episode of Main Function, YC's Harj Taggar and Base's Jesse Pollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they're most excited to see, why this is such an exciting ti...

For nearly two decades, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes work—guiding the company through the rise of mobile, the cloud, and now the age of AI.In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School, Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term, the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves, and why he believes A...

Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit, now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He's spent nearly a decade making programming accessible to all—and with the rise of AI, that vision is closer than ever.In this talk from AI Startup School on June 17, 2025, Amjad traces the arc of computing from mainframes to personal computers to a future where AI agents can create software on demand. He predicts that the valu...

Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir, and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model.

During his time at Palantir, he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today.

On ...

Michael Truell on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.At 25, Michael Truell has already built Cursor into one of the fastest-growing companies in AI coding, hitting $100M ARR in just a year. In this fireside chat with YC General Partner Diana Hu, he shares the lessons that came from years of failed projects with his co-founders, why he believes programming is still essential even as AI changes how we code, and how...

OpenAI recently released its first open-weights model since GPT-2, entering a field led by DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen.YC's Ankit Gupta breaks down everything you need to know about these top OSS models, including what sets them apart under the hood. He’ll compare their approaches to mixture-of-experts, long-context training, and post-training techniques that shape reasoning and alignment—and explore how different design ch...

In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC General Partner Gustaf Alströmer is joined by Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups in the world. In just 13 months, Max and his team scaled from 10 to 100 people, raised $80M, and cracked the challenge of selling to one of the most skeptical industries. Max shares insights on building a successful vertical AI company, selling to conservat...