Latest Interviews
Showing 1–10 of 10 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator38 min
Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI
Ankit Gupta, Francois Chaubard
Two 2025 research initiatives, Hierarchical Reasoning Models (HRM) and Tiny Recursive Models (TRM), challenge standard scaling laws by utilizing inference-time recursion to achieve state-of-the-art reasoning with drastically fewer parameters. HRM reaches 27 million parameters using a three-level weighted hierarchy, while the simplified TRM distills the architecture to just 7 million parameters yet achieves 87% accuracy on ARC-Prize benchmarks by treating recurrence as a dynamic latent memory tape. These systems overcome historical RNN limitations through Deep Equilibrium Models and latent recursion, offering a pathway to efficient, deep reasoning that diverges from traditional Chain-of-Thought constraints.
- Y Combinator39 min
Startup Advice: AI GTM, Pivoting & How To Hire
Founders entering legacy industries must select a go-to-market model—typically software-first, full-stack, or acquisition-based—while rigorously tracking automation trajectories to secure software valuations from investors. Strategic execution requires prioritizing mid-market segments for faster feedback loops and securing empowered early adopters, as AI sales tools and high-level marketing hires only succeed after founders have personally mastered their own product-market fit. Ultimately, successful scaling depends on treating hiring as a failure-prevention necessity, leveraging open-source components to build enterprise trust, and maintaining the conviction to pivot when customer conviction indicates a "great" idea is absent.
- Y Combinator29 min
The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup
Brad Flora, Pete Koomen, Nicolas Dessaigne, Gustaf Alströmer, Nicola, Gustav
This presentation outlines a strict capital discipline strategy for startups, emphasizing that pre-seed and seed founders must prioritize product-market fit by avoiding premature hiring and restricting spending to absolute essentials. As companies transition to Series A and beyond, the focus shifts to scaling a predictable revenue engine where growth is fueled only by accretive hiring and retention metrics like Net Dollar Retention. Throughout all stages, the guidance warns against mimicking large corporate structures or overspending on branding, urging founders to maintain transparency and use capital strictly as fuel for validated business models rather than a tool to mask fundamental weaknesses.
- Y Combinator38 min
2024: The Year the GPT Wrapper Myth Proved Wrong
Jared Harge, Diana, Harj, Lily Yang, Cheng Cheng, Suk Peng, Yiu, Francesc Campoy Flores, Priyanka Vergadia, Anan, Mark Mandelbaum, Melanie Warrick, Mark Mirchandani, Gary Miles, Leslie Kendrick Magnuson, Harjit
The 2024 startup landscape shifted toward capital-efficient growth, where companies like Opus Clip and Perplexity achieved tens of millions in revenue with under $5M in funding by leveraging open-source models and vertical-specific applications. Enterprise adoption accelerated as AI agents attained enterprise-scale reliability, driving a record-breaking aggregate weekly growth rate of 10% for YC batches while converting pilots to revenue at unprecedented speeds. This ecosystem revival was fueled by regulatory relief, a resurgence of in-person Silicon Valley activity, and a strategic pivot from model monopoly to multi-model orchestration that prioritized product execution over raw compute ownership.
- Y Combinator21 min
How To Find A Co-Founder | Startup School
The event outlines a comprehensive strategy for startup founders to secure co-founders who can double execution capacity, enhance quality control, and provide essential emotional resilience. It emphasizes selecting partners based on stress tolerance and aligned goals rather than specific technical skills, recommending equal equity splits and a trial period to mitigate the risks of role disputes or work ethic mismatches. By leveraging networks for organic connections and maintaining regular communication, founders can avoid common breakup causes and build a durable team capable of competing with established entities.
- Y Combinator29 min
How To Keep Your Users | Startup School
YC Group Partner David Leib leverages his experience scaling Bump and Google Photos to argue that high cohort retention is the definitive quantitative signal of product-market fit. He details precise methodologies for defining user actions, selecting appropriate measurement intervals, and interpreting retention curve shapes to distinguish sustainable growth from a churn-heavy treadmill. By avoiding common analytical pitfalls and applying strategies like user acquisition targeting and onboarding optimization, founders can transform cohort data into a actionable roadmap for building scalable, long-term businesses.
- Y Combinator26 min
Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale
Paul Graham's 2013 essay "Do Things That Don't Scale" challenges Silicon Valley orthodoxy by urging early-stage founders to manually solve immediate user problems before prioritizing technical infrastructure, a strategy exemplified by companies like Airbnb and DoorDash. This approach prioritizes rapid learning and product-market fit over theoretical scalability, allowing startups to validate demand through direct customer engagement while avoiding the pitfalls of building unwanted solutions. Although manual operations risk trapping founders in consultancy models, successfully transitioning to automation after securing initial traction provides a critical competitive advantage by ensuring software development addresses genuine market needs.
- Y Combinator22 min
Consumer Startup Metrics | Startup School
Founder guidelines for consumer startups define 15% month-over-month growth as the ideal benchmark while emphasizing that viral loops and network effects provide sustainable value compared to paid acquisition. Strategic analysis mandates rigorous tracking of customer acquisition costs against retained users to ensure positive unit economics, alongside defining retention "magic moments" and maintaining a Net Promoter Score above +50 to validate product-market fit. Companies achieving long-term scale typically prioritize an 80:20 split favoring organic channels to mitigate the risks of diminishing returns and platform dependency inherent in over-reliance on paid growth.
- Y Combinator32 min
How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas | Startup School
This analysis identifies common startup pitfalls like solving non-existent problems and outlines a rigorous evaluation framework prioritizing founder-market fit, market acuteness, and scalable business models. It further details effective ideation methodologies, including leveraging personal expertise and observing organic market shifts, while offering counter-intuitive insights that validate ideas through high entry barriers and existing competition. Ultimately, the guidance advocates for iterative execution and direct market validation through launching, emphasizing that successful ventures often emerge from boring, broken industries rather than explicit search for perfect concepts.
- Y Combinator28 min
Top Ways Startups Waste Money
Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel, Brad Flora
Early-stage founders frequently squander capital on premature hiring, marketing, and professional services before achieving product-market fit, a behavior driven by the "Sebastianism" fallacy of seeking external saviors rather than building internal foundations. The discussion outlines specific inefficiencies in seeking FAANG talent, over-relying on advertising and PR retainers, and granting unnecessary equity to advisors, all of which can be avoided by founders executing core tasks themselves. By prioritizing self-reliance and scrappy alternatives to validate hypotheses, companies can prevent costly mistakes and ensure that significant spending only occurs after proving the business model generates active customer demand.