Latest Interviews

How To Design In The Agent Era

Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein

Led by Stephen Haney, Paper is an AI-native design platform currently ranking as the third most-used tool behind Figma and Sketch, utilizing a native HTML and CSS rendering engine to facilitate precise agent collaboration. The application distinguishes itself by treating code as the single source of truth, offering features like direct React component handoff and an MCP server that allows autonomous agents to manipulate local repositories and design canvases. While the team prioritizes human curation to maintain design quality against common AI aesthetic pitfalls, the platform is rapidly evolving into a visual coordination layer for the broader agent ecosystem by integrating tools like Paper Shaders and multi-model image generation.

Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work

Dmitri Dolgov

Waymo has advanced its fully autonomous fleet to operate 500 weekly trips across 15 U.S. cities, achieving a safety record 17 times better than human drivers through a multimodal sensor architecture and a foundation model utilizing both fast geometric reactions and slow semantic reasoning. The company addresses the unique challenges of physical AI by integrating real-world data into a generative simulation ecosystem that creates rare edge cases for training, while its "Safety and Readiness Framework" rigorously validates performance to ensure public trust and regulatory compliance. Looking ahead, this structural augmentation and flywheel of agent, simulator, and critic data positions Waymo to expand its technology beyond personal vehicles into trucking and broader physical applications.

Kernels and Chips: Cursor, NVIDIA, and Meta Researchers on GPU Performance | YC Paper Club

Stuart Sul, John, Francois Chaubard, Jon Saad-Falcon, Mark Saroufim, Misha Smelyanskiy, Brennan Shacklett

The event synthesizes critical industry shifts toward specialized ASICs and disaggregated architectures that separate training and inference workloads to maximize intelligence per watt. Technical deep dives highlight breakthroughs in multi-GPU kernel optimization and local inference, demonstrating that consumer accelerators can now deliver nearly 90% of frontier model utility while reducing energy costs by 70%. These innovations collectively address systemic bottlenecks in network communication and latency, establishing a roadmap for distributed, cost-efficient AI ecosystems that minimize reliance on centralized cloud resources.

Blake Scholl: How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jet

Blake Scholl

Founded by Blake Scholl in 2014, Boom Supersonic successfully developed the XB-1, the first privately built jet to break the sound barrier, using a lean team and software-driven engineering to overcome decades of aviation stagnation. This historic flight directly catalyzed a shift in US federal policy, prompting an Executive Order that legalized supersonic flight over land and clearing the path for the upcoming Overture airliner. By vertically integrating manufacturing and creating revenue through ground-based engines, the company aims to double global travel speeds while eliminating the traditional sonic boom barrier.

How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)

Gustaf Alströmer, Max Junestrand, Mark Mandelmann, Martin Splitt

Founded in 2024 by Max Giunestrand, Legora is an AI-powered workspace for legal professionals that recently secured an $80 million Series B funding round led by Iconic and General Catalyst. The company differentiates itself through a "software + service" hybrid model and a data-centric architecture that ensures GDPR compliance by hosting all European client data within the EU. With a flat organizational structure that scaled from ten to 100 employees in less than a year, Legora is aggressively expanding its operations to hubs in New York, London, and Stockholm to support law firms in navigating the AI transition.

Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI, Transforming Work With Agents & Competing With China

Alexandr Wang, Jared

Meta has committed to investing over $14 billion in Scale AI, valuing the company at $29 billion while appointing Alexander Wang to lead its new AI superintelligence lab. Under Wang's direction, Scale is pivoting from its origins in data labeling to building agentic workflows for enterprise and government sectors, leveraging proprietary data and specialized fine-tuned models to differentiate in a fragmented market. The partnership aims to accelerate scientific breakthroughs and develop military applications like the Thunderforge system, positioning the company to manage a future economy where human operators oversee swarms of autonomous AI agents.

Inside The Hard Tech Startups Turning Sci-Fi Into Reality

Y Combinator advises hard tech founders to leverage a $500,000 investment and three-month timeline to validate specific technical kernels rather than building full-scale complex products. By isolating manageable milestones—such as securing massive Letters of Intent or demonstrating proof-of-concept prototypes—companies like Boom Supersonic and Relativity Space de-risk their ventures to achieve billion-dollar valuations or successful commercial launches. This strategy prioritizes "timeline compression" and tangible execution over traditional fundraising, allowing teams to mitigate technical risks while capitalizing on obvious market demand.

YC SUS: Eric Migicovsky & Dalton Caldwell discuss pivoting & pitching

Eric Migicovsky, Dalton Caldwell, Eric Majerjkowski, Rick Viscomi

This discussion outlines critical strategies for startup founders, emphasizing that pivots should be driven by a complete lack of traction and validated through concrete customer payments rather than theoretical debates. It further details how to effectively apply to Y Combinator by prioritizing clarity, avoid common pitfalls like over-relying on patents, and ensure sustainable unit economics by focusing on retention and revenue. Ultimately, the guidance stresses that success relies on building genuine product-market fit and maintaining financial flexibility to adapt quickly to external shocks.

YC SUS: Gustaf Alströmer and Eric Migicovsky discuss growth tactics

Gustaf Alströmer, Eric Migicovsky, Gustav

This comprehensive analysis outlines critical strategies for early-stage startups, emphasizing that charging users immediately is essential for validating product-market fit and sustaining growth. Founders are advised to prioritize direct customer engagement and curated supply acquisition while leveraging predictive retention metrics and substantial referral incentives to drive scalable adoption. The guidance further details how to navigate market education through targeted SEO and social proof, ensuring that monetization models align with user value rather than relying on unsustainable advertising revenue.

YC SUS: Kat Mañalac and Eric Migicovsky discuss Week 2 SUS Lectures

Kat Mañalac, Eric Migicovsky

Founders are advised to prioritize rapid MVP validation and recurring launches over perfectionism to maximize market discovery and gather authentic user feedback. Strategic distribution requires targeting accessible micro-communities and non-scalable manual hacks before scaling, while pricing and feature decisions must rely on real customer interactions rather than hypothetical surveys. Ultimately, sustainable growth depends on securing early revenue from niche customers to fund development, treating failed hypotheses as necessary pivots, and aligning product iteration with specific geographic or sector constraints.

After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin

Mathilde Collin

Mathilde Cullen co-founded Front with Laurent Dufaux in Y Combinator's Summer 2014 batch to build an email collaboration platform that achieved zero voluntary attrition through a culture of radical transparency and a rigorous "10x hire" recruitment strategy. The company secured early product-market fit by prioritizing direct customer feedback, which led to a strategic pivot adding SMS integration and a pricing evolution from a freemium model to higher-tier subscriptions. By adhering to disciplined weekly metrics, maintaining a bottom-up sales motion, and fostering deep co-founder alignment, Front successfully scaled while navigating leadership challenges including the CTO's cancer diagnosis.

The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit, Geoff

Google co-founder Paul Buchheit outlines the critical success factors for building billion-dollar companies, emphasizing the necessity of focusing on an exponential market shift and achieving deep product-market fit with a small, obsessive user base before scaling. Drawing from his experiences launching Gmail and selling FriendFeed to Facebook, Buchheit argues that startups must prioritize frugality, customer obsession, and the ability to handle network effects rather than chasing broad appeal or reacting to competitors. His framework stresses that true growth emerges from solving urgent customer problems with irrational conviction, a discipline he believes is often lost in large organizations that lack the cultural DNA for product-led innovation.

Helping African Businesses Get Paid, Shola Akinlade of Paystack

Shola Akinlade, Craig Cannon, Creative Joe, Paul Israel, Nelson, Nestor Ezeagu, Car Joyy, Achyut Shrestha, Jordan Jackson

Founded in 2016 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, Paystack transformed into Africa's leading payments infrastructure provider by simplifying complex banking processes for merchants across Nigeria and expanding into Ghana. The company accelerated from processing $200 to over $20 million in monthly transaction volume within three years, supported by a Series A investment from Stripe and Visa that facilitated its strategic growth. Through a rigorous internal engineering bootcamp and a focus on localized product adaptation, Paystack continues to build the foundational layer for the continent's next generation of digital businesses.

A Conversation with Elizabeth Iorns - Advice for Biotech Founders

Elizabeth Iorns, Adora Cheung

Former University of Miami assistant professor Elizabeth Irins founded Science Exchange in 2011 to solve scientific market inefficiencies by creating a vetted B2B marketplace that manages over $100 billion in annual outsourced research spend. The platform mitigates information asymmetry and quality issues through rigorous provider vetting and a Reproducibility Initiative that validates experimental results for major pharmaceutical partners like Amgen. Currently serving as a Y Combinator partner, Irins leverages the company's transparent data infrastructure to reshape academic-commercial collaboration while advising a portfolio of hundreds of biotech startups.

Building an Engineering Team by Ammon Bartram and Harj Taggar

Ammon Bartram, Harj Taggar

This presentation outlines a data-driven framework for early-stage startups to overcome engineering hiring bottlenecks by prioritizing personal networks over traditional job boards and implementing structured, bias-free technical screening. Founders are advised to defer recruiter engagement until their own sourcing consumes significant time, while adopting specific tactics like credential blindness and speed-of-hire advantages to compete effectively against established tech giants. The discussion emphasizes that reducing interview noise through defined critical skills and calibrated offers can significantly improve the ratio of true top performers, turning the hiring process into a strategic moat rather than a costly operational drain.