Latest Interviews
Showing 31–45 of 449 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator17 min
Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Walks Us Through His AI Coding Setup
Charlie, co-founder of Conductor, leads a team developing a macOS application that orchestrates multiple coding agents to generate software primarily in TypeScript and Rust. The platform enforces a strict non-terminal workflow where AI handles code generation while humans intervene only through specific review modes to maintain quality and prevent error cycles. With a strategic focus on high-efficiency model selection and a future roadmap emphasizing malleable, modifiable agents, Conductor positions itself as a tool that shifts software value from code itself to human-authored prompts and descriptions.
- Y Combinator24 min
Why Two IIT Engineers Turned Down $550K Jobs To Build A Startup
GigaML, a Y Combinator-backed startup founded by IIT Kharagpur alumnus Varun and his Stanford-educated co-founder, has pivoted from EdTech to developing AI agents that achieve 60% to 70% support deflection rates for major clients like DoDash and DoorDash. The company addresses the enterprise bottleneck of manual configuration by launching "AI forward deployed engineers" that automatically iterate policies to improve business metrics, a strategy enabled by their "0.1% talent" recruitment philosophy and heavy reliance on human-coded expertise rather than sales teams. By leveraging the YC trust network to secure early contracts with eight-person operations, GigaML aims to unlock broader enterprise AI adoption through a generic automation layer that eliminates the need for extensive human engineering resources.
- Y Combinator47 min
Inside YC's AI Playbook
Pete Koomen, Gary, Jared, Diana, Tom, Boris
Y Combinator has redefined its operational model by evolving into a super AI-native organization that treats artificial intelligence as a foundational infrastructure rather than a mere tool, enabling autonomous agents to access a unified PostgreSQL database for complex business logic. This architecture supports a dynamic ecosystem of over 350 specialized tools and a daily "dream cycle" process that refines workflows based on meeting transcripts, effectively compressing employee onboarding and eliminating traditional manual coding bottlenecks. By broadcasting internal agent interactions to public channels and investing heavily in token costs, YC advocates for a decentralized future of just-in-time software where human prompts drive the interface, positioning the firm to leapfrog competitors reliant on conventional co-pilot methodologies.
- Y Combinator50 min
How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot
Eric Ries exposes how the 1980s doctrine of shareholder primacy systematically undermines long-term company value, citing cases like Jeff Lawson's ouster at Twilio and Saul Price's departure from FedMart as evidence that founder control is often lost to short-term investor demands. To counter this instability, the event advocates for structural reforms such as the industrial foundation model, which legally prioritizes mission over profit, as demonstrated by the sustained success of entities like Novo Nordisk and the mission-preserving safeguards of Anthropic. The presentation concludes by urging founders to immediately adopt Public Benefit Corporation status and design "governance fortresses" to insulate their organizations from the inherent conflicts of standard corporate governance.
- Y Combinator29 min
Zepto: How Two 17-Year-Olds Built India's Largest Seller Of Fruits and Vegetables
Aadit Palicha, Jared Friedman, Keval
Founded in 2020 by college dropouts Adit Ayyal and Keval Karia, Zepto revolutionized India's grocery sector by pivoting from a WhatsApp-based service to a proprietary 10-minute dark store delivery model. Operating as a massive logistics and supply chain network, the company now manages over 200,000 jobs and delivers tens of millions of monthly orders while leveraging AI to optimize forecasting and advertising revenue. With current expansion plans targeting India's top 50 cities, Zepto aims to replicate the scale of major global retailers like Walmart and cultivate a domestic consumer goods ecosystem.
- Y Combinator32 min
Harshil Mathur: AI Is Compressing Every Moat
Founded by Harshil Mathur in 2015, Razorpay became the first Indian Y Combinator company to pivot from a failed educational focus to a payment infrastructure provider for startups after navigating a twelve-month regulatory gestation period. The firm secured a competitive moat by rejecting early global acquisition offers and becoming the first gateway to support UPI, subsequently processing over $180 billion in gross merchandise value while maintaining capital efficiency that inadvertently generated profits. Today, Mathur continues to lead the company through a strategic reinvention using AI, emphasizing that founder-led conviction in long-term problem-solving remains essential despite advancements in software development speed.
- 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 Combinator41 min
Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis projects Artificial General Intelligence will emerge around 2030, contingent on inventing specific architectural breakthroughs in continual learning and structured memory rather than merely scaling current methods. While deep tech startups are warned to anticipate AGI disrupting their decade-long cycles, the organization is simultaneously deploying efficient, modular "Flash" and open-source nano models to power edge devices and accelerate scientific discovery in fields like drug design and materials science. Ultimately, DeepMind advocates for interdisciplinary collaboration between AI and physical sciences to overcome current reasoning limitations and drive the next generation of autonomous agents.
- Y Combinator39 min
Replit's CEO On The Only Two Jobs Left In The Company Of The Future
Replit recently secured $400 million in Series D funding to achieve a $9 billion valuation while executing a strategic pivot toward "AI-native developers" who build software through natural language interactions with their Agent 4 system. By abstracting traditional coding behind multimodal AI agents, the platform enables non-engineers to rapidly deploy applications and reduce development costs by up to 70%, effectively shifting the company's focus from technical setup to high-level business orchestration. This product-led growth model empowers a diverse range of users, from solo entrepreneurs to enterprise teams, to accelerate idea velocity and build internal tools without requiring deep programming expertise or large engineering budgets.
- Y Combinator10 min
How To Build A Company With AI From The Ground Up
This presentation argues that AI must function as a company's central operating system rather than a peripheral tool, driving a shift toward closed-loop systems that render the entire organization queryable for automated decision-making. In this model, traditional middle-management hierarchies are eliminated and replaced by AI agents that execute engineering tasks and manage workflows, allowing human leaders to focus on strategy as founders, builders, or directly responsible individuals. By leveraging these "AI software factories," startups gain a decisive advantage over incumbents to achieve tenfold velocity increases and operate with human headcount replaced by optimized token usage.
- Y Combinator44 min
How Stripe Built Their New Website
Over a year in the making, Stripe's comprehensive homepage redesign repositioned the company as a global financial infrastructure leader by replacing visual fatigue with a dynamic bento-grid layout and a manifesto-style narrative. The project leveraged AI tools to accelerate asset creation while maintaining rigorous human oversight to ensure the "billionth" transaction scale and live economic metrics conveyed trust to diverse user segments. By prioritizing progressive disclosure and intentional motion over traditional scrolling, the team successfully clarified value propositions ranging from micro-entrepreneurs to the 78% of Forbes AI 50 companies that now rely on the platform.
- Y Combinator21 min
BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems
Jared Friedman, David Tsao, Oguzhan Atay
Billion to One, founded by PhD students Oguzhan and David, leverages proprietary synthetic DNA methods to detect rare cell-free DNA variations for prenatal screening and cancer liquid biopsies. Since its public listing with a valuation over $4 billion, the company has scaled its automated facility to process 600,000 tests annually and launched North Star Select for late-stage cancer treatment guidance. The firm now executes a strategic roadmap to address early-stage cancers through a capital-efficient progression from commercial adoption to population-wide screening, aiming to significantly reduce cancer mortality rates.
- Y Combinator31 min
This Startup Catches Fraud at Scale
Jared Friedman, Karine Mellata
Variance has officially exited stealth mode following a $21 million Series A round to commercialize AI agents that automate trust and safety infrastructure for Fortune 500 clients like GoFundMe and IAC. Founded by ex-Apple engineers Karine and Michael, the 12-person team leverages a unique "agentic" architecture to solve complex unstructured data problems in fraud detection and compliance without manual rule updates. Despite a 2024 leadership injury that threatened operations, the company is scaling its full-stack decisioning platform to replace traditional human review workflows with adaptive, self-healing systems designed to trace sophisticated abuse graphs.
- Y Combinator1 min
" It is very possible that the first people to live to a thousand are alive right now."
Technological accelerations in artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces are driving a paradigm shift where the first individuals capable of living to 1,000 years may already exist. By 2035, widespread AI accessibility and new lateral treatments will reframe the human condition despite market undervaluation and low public awareness. These advancements will fundamentally reconfigure human interaction by creating functional equivalents to direct brain-to-brain communication.
- Y Combinator1 min
Differences Between The Leading AI Models
Current AI models operate as specialized tools where Opus functions as a general workhorse, Codex excels in back-end debugging, and Gemini leads in front-end applications. Within three to six months, the market is expected to shift toward commoditization driven by converging model behaviors and narrowing gaps between open-source and proprietary options. Strategic success will therefore depend on building a user-centric layer that leverages these unique capabilities to optimize the customer journey rather than relying on raw model differentiation.