Latest Interviews

The World in 2021: five stories to watch out for

Maria, Tom Standage

The event outlines a convergence of critical global shifts, including a widespread deterioration of democratic institutions in 80 nations alongside accelerating electric vehicle production and China's emergence as the world's largest cinema market by 2021. Concurrently, major economies like the US, EU, and China are preparing for the COP26 summit to enforce stricter emissions targets, while NASA advances planetary defense capabilities with the DART asteroid-mission launch. These developments collectively highlight a pivotal year defined by geopolitical constraints, industrial electrification, and evolving scientific strategies for space and climate security.

What is history's deadliest pandemic?

A comprehensive analysis reveals malaria's profound historical role in shaping human migration, the transatlantic slave trade, and the geopolitical outcomes of World War II through its influence on genetics, economies, and military campaigns. While global infection rates have declined due to advanced treatments and targeted strategies like Senegal's genomic surveillance, the legacy of DDT usage remains linked to the origins of the modern environmental movement. Current eradication efforts face significant hurdles as researchers repurpose genomic tools for new pathogens while struggling to secure the estimated $2.7 billion in annual funding required to eliminate the disease by mid-century.

DoorDash's Application Video for YC S13

Stanley, Andy, Evan, Tony

Stanley, Andy, Evan, and Tony, a team of former Facebook and Square professionals, launched Palo Alto Delivery to address the supply-demand mismatch where local restaurants face high delivery demand but lack affordable logistics. By utilizing routing algorithms to optimize a labor pool of drivers with spare time, the founders validated their solution within a month, securing over 150 paying customers and generating more than $10,000 in revenue. The operation scaled from the co-founders acting as initial drivers to a managed system that automatically transmits orders to restaurants, effectively bridging the gap between consumer demand and underserved small business needs.

DoorDash at YC Summer 2013 Demo Day

Tony Xu

DoorDash differentiates itself in the food delivery market by integrating proprietary logistics with merchant partnerships, a model that addresses the delivery gap for over 70% of the U.S. population. The company's operational strategy, which utilizes in-restaurant iPads and proprietary software, successfully delivered an average of 44 minutes in challenging suburban pilots while generating over $1.5 million in annualized sales for partners. Building on this verified efficiency and a 30% weekly order growth, DoorDash is now expanding its network to solve last-mile logistics challenges beyond food into a broader on-demand package delivery sector.

How to restore trust in politics

Shirley Islam, Matthew Taylor, Emma Hogan

Matthew Taylor and participants like Shirley Islam advocate for citizens' assemblies as a deliberative alternative to adversarial representative democracy, aiming to restore public trust through random selection and expert-guided consensus building. Data from the OECD and case studies in Ireland and Scotland demonstrate that governments implementing these recommendations see high rates of policy adoption, often transforming contentious issues like abortion and drug reform into actionable legislation. Despite initial political reluctance to cede control over outcomes, proponents argue that these assemblies provide voters with continuous agency between elections and signal a global shift toward more inclusive governance models.

Designing Characters with Deep Learning: Spellbrush (W18) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020

Corey

SpellRush, a Y Combinator-backed studio, has developed an on-premises deep learning system using Generative Adversarial Networks to generate AAA-quality character art in seconds, effectively replacing hundreds of hours of manual labor. The company engineered its models to correct demographic biases found in training data, specifically increasing the representation of male characters and diverse skin tones, while reducing model training costs to approximately $4,000 per iteration through custom hardware. Now operating a team of five, SpellRush is applying these tools to produce the world's first AI-illustrated game and is actively recruiting additional animators and research interns to expand its capabilities.

MMOs in the Instagram Era: Highrise (S18) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020

Jimmy

Pocket Worlds, a fully remote developer, launched HiRISE, a social-first MMO that has surpassed five million downloads and generates over one million dollars in monthly revenue following recent Series A funding. The platform reverses traditional design hierarchies by prioritizing community infrastructure through a hybrid architecture that splits functionality between native Swift and Kotlin for UI and shared C++ for game logic and avatars. This modular framework enables the company to rapidly deploy diverse experiences like fashion contests and hero-collector games within a single persistent social ecosystem while actively recruiting talent for expansion.

Synthetic Media: Virtual Influencers & Live Animation: Figments (S19) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020

Jay Rosenkranz

YC-backed startup Figments, led by CEO Jay Rosenkranz, is building a virtual production platform that merges motion capture with live streaming to create fictional esports characters like Noralis competing in *Super Smash Brothers Ultimate*. The company successfully pivoted to a fully remote model during the pandemic, utilizing Unreal Engine and ARKit to drive viral growth and secure commercial partnerships with brands such as Reebok and Guayaquil Yerba Mate. As Figments expands its storytelling across Twitch and YouTube, it is actively recruiting talent to further develop its proprietary technology for digital product placement and character creation.

Desining from Day One: Artists as Founders: Multiverse (S20) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020

Hisham, Sara, Sarah

Multiverse, a Y Combinator-backed platform founded by two MIT engineers and illustrator Sara, is developing a hybrid of Dungeons & Dragons and Roblox to digitize tabletop RPGs into a visual, streamable online experience. The company differentiates itself by prioritizing high-fidelity narrative art as a core business asset, recruiting top-tier indie creators from platforms like ArtStation and Twitch rather than traditional AAA studios to drive user engagement and market validation. By granting equity to its artistic co-founders and leveraging visual assets for fundraising, Multiverse aims to bridge the gap between scrappy entertainment storytelling and scalable platform economics.

Life after Trump: what’s the future of the Republican Party?

Trump, Joe Biden, Idris Kahloun, James Astle

Despite his 2020 election loss, Donald Trump maintains dominant control over the Republican Party, compelling former critics like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio to align with his populist platform to avoid electoral backlash. This entrenched loyalty, reinforced by base support for the 2020 election fraud narrative, has created a fragmented media ecosystem and left Trump with minimal internal opposition as he contemplates a 2024 run. Analysts warn that the party's future trajectory remains volatile, with the strength of Trump's personal appeal serving as the decisive factor in either cementing a populist era or allowing for a potential succession.

Uncle Bob - The Long Reach of Code, Automating Programming, and Developing Coding Talent

Uncle Bob, Robert Martin

Robert Martin argues that the future of programming depends on irreplaceable human intuition and leadership rather than AI automation, emphasizing that current machines lack the sentience required to handle complex specifications and legacy quirks. He proposes a significant shift in professional training and hiring, recommending that trade-style apprenticeships replace traditional university degrees while assessment focuses on long-term observation of problem-solving skills rather than standardized coding tests. Furthermore, Martin calls for the industry to establish a professional regulatory body to enforce ethical standards and advocates for merit-based hiring practices to ensure technical competence without political or diversity quotas.

Care after covid: the future of elderly health-care

Sasha Nauta

Amidst a rapidly aging global population where the 80-and-older demographic is set to double, rising dementia costs and severe care home mortality rates have exposed the fragility of current long-term care systems. While some nations explore controversial international outsourcing to manage labor expenses, the sector remains crippled by chronic understaffing driven by wages significantly lower than those in acute hospital settings. In response, pilot programs utilizing remote monitoring technology are proving that half of institutional care could shift to home settings, offering a potential pathway to mitigate resource strain and improve patient outcomes.

Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing, Complexity, and Creativity

Scott Aaronson

Computer scientist Scott Aaronson recounts his accelerated academic path to a PhD at age 22 and outlines his philosophy on narrowing research focus to master specific computational problems rather than broad fields. He analyzes the historical delays in quantum information science, attributing progress to the confluence of computational complexity theory and Bell's theorem, while discussing the mathematical limits of the Busy Beaver function under Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. Aaronson further critiques the stagnation of fundamental quantum algorithms since Shor's and Grover's discoveries, argues that economic equilibrium calculations are often computationally intractable, and advises aspiring researchers to leverage pre-print servers to tackle specialized open problems.

Covid-19: why vaccine mistrust is growing

Professor Jonathan Heaney, Professor Heidi Larson, Dr Jonathan Kennedy, Kristin Urquiza, Neil Johnson, Fadi Kouran, Slavia Chankova

With over 20 COVID-19 vaccine candidates in development, experts warn that failing to achieve 70% population uptake due to widespread hesitancy could necessitate indefinite social restrictions. This crisis of trust is driven by political polarization, the legacy of the retracted Andrew Wakefield study, and algorithmic amplification of misinformation on social media platforms that have disproportionately spread falsehoods from figures like President Trump. In response, health organizations and tech-savvy clinics are launching counter-misinformation campaigns to protect herd immunity goals against hostile narratives that link political populism with declining public confidence.

Scott Young - Ultralearning, The MIT Challenge

Scott Young

Scott Young identifies a cultural deficit in general ambition and argues that society should reward high-impact, original endeavors rather than minor achievements or social status. He examines the "miracle year" phenomenon of geniuses like Einstein as statistical outliers whose success resulted from specific cognitive styles aligning with solvable problems, while cautioning that the typical path to professional success requires following established institutional steps rather than waiting for a genius to be discovered. Finally, Young outlines how age-related cognitive changes necessitate modified learning strategies for older adults and advocates for early-careers to avoid premature optimization in favor of long-term, high-impact projects that build a foundation for future breakthroughs.