Latest Interviews
Showing 76–90 of 107 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator46 min
A.I. Policy and Public Perception - Miles Brundage and Tim Hwang
Miles Brundage, Tim Hwang, Craig Cannon
Researchers from the Future of Humanity Institute and Oxford University analyze the dual-use nature of artificial intelligence, categorizing risks ranging from near-term digital threats like deepfakes and adversarial attacks to long-term existential concerns. They advocate for a shift in policy from reactive measures to proactive frameworks that incorporate responsible disclosure norms, interpretability standards, and structured international cooperation to address geopolitical competition and regulatory divergence. By extrapolating technical trends rather than waiting for incidents, these experts aim to establish rigorous governance models that balance rapid deployment in fields like healthcare with the critical need for safety and value alignment.
- Y Combinator55 min
Cost vs Quality in Edtech – Keith Schacht, Avichal Garg, and Geoff Ralston
Keith Schacht, Avichal Garg, Geoff Ralston
Avicii and Keith Peltz examine the evolution of EdTech since 2011, analyzing how the industry's historical struggle with the "cost versus quality" trade-off and misaligned venture capital expectations for growth curves have shaped current market dynamics. They identify a pivotal structural shift where high-speed internet access and teacher-led adoption are dismantling the "free school" barrier, enabling companies like Mystery Science to prove that superior digital products can succeed in the mass market. The founders conclude that future innovation will likely bypass traditional public systems to focus on "learning companies" addressing individual outcomes, job training, and adult self-directed education rather than relying on institutional bureaucracy.
- Y Combinator54 min
Breaking Down HackerRank's Survey of 40,000 Developers with Vivek Ravisankar
Vivek Ravisankar, Hari, Paul Bouquet, PG, Sam, Jessica, Akshay, Shiv, Nicola, Ritika, Mark Mandelbaum Kosinskiy
HackerRank co-founder Vivek Desai recounts the company's evolution from a failed educational venture to a global platform that connects over 3.4 million developers with employers through verified coding assessments rather than traditional resumes. As the first Indian-based Y Combinator company, the team overcame logistical hurdles to establish a market shift toward skill-based hiring, effectively reducing bias and replacing abstract brain teasers with practical problem-solving challenges. Recent data from their community highlights key industry trends, including a surge in self-taught programmers, the rising demand for Python and Go skills, and a corporate move toward prioritizing work-life balance and remote talent acquisition.
- Y Combinator50 min
Funding Is an Outcome of Building a Good Business - Porter Braswell of Jopwell
Jopwell, a for-profit career advancement platform founded in 2014 by a former Goldman Sachs trader, connects Black, Latino, Hispanic, and Native American professionals with 44 million qualified underrepresented workers to resolve corporate recruitment pipeline challenges. Leveraging a $12 million funding raise including a Y Combinator investment, the company utilizes a "referral at scale" model that verifies diverse applicant funnels while rejecting non-profit status to operate as a scalable business. Founded on the premise that diversity is a demographic and financial imperative rather than a vague mandate, Jopwell has grown to 35 employees and serves as a data-driven bridge between underrepresented talent and companies explicitly seeking verified, diverse hiring solutions.
- Y Combinator53 min
Researching Psilocybin's Effects on Depression - Dr. Rosalind Watts
Dr. Rosalind Watts, Craig Cannon
Led by Professors Robin Carhart-Harris and David Nutt, a pioneering research initiative successfully demonstrated that high-dose psilocybin can deactivate brain regions linked to negative rumination and offer a "reset" for patients with severe, treatment-resistant depression. Although the study achieved a 100% preference rate for psilocybin over prior treatments among its 20 participants, long-term efficacy remains limited by the absence of formal integration therapy, prompting calls for structured follow-up sessions to sustain behavioral changes. Currently constrained by reliance on single-source funding, the researchers are prioritizing comparative trials against antidepressants while advocating for a holistic therapeutic model that combines preparation, ego-dissolving experiences, and sustained support to address the growing crisis of ineffective psychiatric medication.
- Y Combinator59 min
Dalton Caldwell - Startup Investor School Day 2
The Startup Investor School Day 2 addressed operational feedback from the previous day while delivering a comprehensive framework for investment philosophy, strategy, and process discipline. Expert speakers emphasized prioritizing conviction over consensus, establishing clear decision funnels, and mastering founder meeting best practices through direct communication and rigorous case studies like Nekton. The event concluded with a Q&A session that clarified complex challenges regarding commitment, negative feedback delivery, and milestone-based financing structures.
- Y Combinator48 min
The Number One Goal is Getting Started - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy
Avni Patel Thompson, Craig Cannon
Harvard MBA Avni leveraged her background in pharmaceuticals and international strategy to validate and launch Poppy, a child-care platform, by conducting a four-week manual trial that secured paying users before seeking capital. After three rejections from Y Combinator, she secured funding by demonstrating rapid growth and a scalable vision for global infrastructure, emphasizing that collecting revenue from strangers is essential for true product-market fit. Her journey illustrates a methodology where diverse life experiences, including a failed startup and expatriate living, serve as a "mosaic" of skills to de-risk entrepreneurship and address critical market gaps in modern family support systems.
- Y Combinator59 min
Uncut Interview with Sam Altman on Masters of Scale [Audio]
Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Craig Cannon
Y Combinator President Sam Altman reflects on his accidental transition from an 18-year-old student founder to a leader who expanded the accelerator into a global hard-tech hub supporting fields like AI and synthetic biology. Drawing on lessons from his early ventures and investment in Stripe, Altman outlines a philosophy prioritizing intense user engagement, aggressive early-stage scaling, and a frugal culture to mitigate risk and foster organic growth. He emphasizes that successful leadership requires balancing clear vision with formal structure, maintaining humility through historical perspective, and recruiting senior experts to guide first-time CEOs through rapid expansion.
- Y Combinator1h 0m
It's Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done - Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo
Sam Chaudhary, Karen Lien, Craig Cannon, Liam, Paul Graham, Jenna Klein, Chris Streeter, Carol Dweck
ClassDojo founders Sam Kiernan and Liam secured an investment from Y Combinator's Paul Graham by persistently demonstrating their platform's ability to bridge the gap between home and school communication while promoting growth mindset skills through collaborative content. Since its inception, the company has grown to serve over 300,000 schools globally with a lean team structure, relying on teacher-led adoption and radical transparency to maintain its human-centric mission. Now pivoting toward a direct-to-parent monetization model, ClassDojo aims to sustain its profitability while prioritizing educational equity and avoiding the surveillance capitalism practices common in the EdTech sector.
- Y Combinator51 min
Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media
Gimlet Media acquires podcast talent by prioritizing visionary founders and magnetic hosts with at least 100,000 independent downloads, offering the human capital and marketing infrastructure needed to scale content quality. The company cultivates a non-partisan culture that values empathy and editorial execution, using practical hiring assessments to build teams capable of representing underrepresented voices. Driven by a strategy that leverages YouTube clips for discovery and adapts successful formats like true crime, Gimlet transforms independent audio concepts into sustainable, mainstream productions.
- Y Combinator58 min
Leah Culver of Breaker and Tom Sparks of YC Answer Your Questions About Security and Podcasting
Leah Culver, Tom Sparks, Craig Cannon
This event examines the intersection of government surveillance, device security, and startup culture, highlighting Apple's resistance to backdoors while detailing best practices for developers to protect sensitive data through iOS Keychains and robust multi-factor authentication. Speakers contrast the convenience of biometrics with their permanent compromise risks, advising users to combine passcodes with strong passcode habits to mitigate law enforcement access. The discussion concludes by outlining Breaker's vision to transform podcasting into a serialized content platform and identifying emerging opportunities in IoT security and passive bio-sensing technologies.
- Y Combinator55 min
Tim Urban of Wait But Why
Tim Urban, Andrew Finn, Craig Cannon
Author and researcher Tim Urban leverages his *Wait But Why* blog to catalyze a cultural shift that encourages high-intelligence individuals to pursue careers in artificial intelligence and technology as a strategic response to humanity's imminent existential challenges. By framing the "Page 500" moment—a critical transition where human survival depends on mastering AI safety and overcoming the Fermi paradox's great filter—Urban argues that redirecting top talent toward these fields offers the most effective multiplier for global well-being. This perspective is grounded in a rigorous, multi-source research methodology designed to synthesize complex topics like CRISPR, VR, and space exploration into actionable insights for both creators and future tech workers.
- Y Combinator1h 10m
Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem - Des Traynor of Intercom
Des Traynor and Owen McCabe transitioned from a rejected academic study on code proficiency to founding the chat and messaging platform Intercom after discovering that in-app notifications drove superior customer engagement compared to legacy error-tracking tools. The company accelerated its growth by prioritizing timeless content marketing, manual onboarding, and a unified brand philosophy that aligned product features with the core mission of making internet business personal. Today, Intercom continues to evolve by shifting its messaging toward explicit ROI for enterprise clients while expanding into new sectors like soccer technology and financial simplification based on Traynor's insights into solving large, frequent problems.
- Y Combinator1h 2m
There's an Art to Getting Brilliant People to Surprise Themselves - Kevin Slavin of The Shed
Kevin Kelly's peripatetic career bridges disparate fields, from bootstrapping the mobile game company Area Code to shaping the operational philosophies of MIT's Media Lab and New York's The Shed. His work redefines cultural institutions as "synchronizing signals" that counteract social fragmentation through adaptive architecture, such as The Shed's 120-foot moving shell, and digital strategies like total smartphone ticketing. Looking forward, Kelly advocates for a future where innovation emerges from cross-disciplinary agility rather than traditional domain expertise, a perspective he applies to his analysis of the nascent virtual reality industry.
- Y Combinator57 min
Microbes, Robots, and Ambition - Robin Sloan on His Novel Sourdough
Robin Sloan, Kat Manalac, Craig Cannon
During a discussion on the intersection of artificial intelligence and literary craft, the author details the unprecedented creation of the *Sourdough* audiobook, which features machine-generated alien music synthesized from Croatian Klapa folk recordings. The conversation further examines the technical reality of the "Egg Problem" in robotics, the author's philosophy of viewing technological convergence as a cumulative "glorious crash" rather than an adversarial force, and the fragility of digital preservation in contrast to physical media. Looking toward the future, the author outlines plans to integrate text generation as a core stylistic tool in a new novel while reflecting on how current cultural narratives have shifted from Silicon Valley's early optimism to a more critical examination of power and labor.