Latest Interviews

YC Paper Club

YC is launching the "Paper Club," a community initiative for researchers, engineers, and founders to navigate the rapid pace of AI development through small, biweekly gatherings at its Mountain View office. The program focuses on selecting under 100 participants, specifically targeting builders who implement papers and researchers studying production failures, to discuss new research presentations followed by private dinners. Applications are currently open for the inaugural cohort, with the first session scheduled for May 20th.

Electronics in Space

Philip Johnston

StarCloud co-founder Philip Johnston is addressing the surge in space launch capacity from companies like SpaceX and Astrospace by developing orbital data centers optimized for inference workloads. Y Combinator is currently recruiting chip designers with backgrounds at SpaceX and NVIDIA to create specialized processors that meet critical requirements for reduced mass, thermal efficiency, and radiation hardening. This initiative aims to capture the urgent market demand for computing resources that can operate effectively in the harsh space environment.

How Warsh Could Shape Fed Policy

Kevin Warsh, Rob Kaplan, Alison Nathan

Following the Justice Department's decision to drop its investigation of Jerome Powell, the Trump administration expects Kevin Warsh to be confirmed as the next Fed Chair by June. Warsh, a former "lieutenant" to Ben Bernanke who views quantitative easing strictly as an emergency tool, plans to collaborate with Treasury Secretary Bessent to manage the balance sheet while prioritizing a reduction in the Federal Reserve's communication burden through the potential elimination of the dot plot. This strategy aims to navigate sticky inflation and geopolitical uncertainties that have pushed market rate cut expectations into 2027, requiring Warsh to build consensus among diverse FOMC members to secure seven votes for any policy shift.

Company Brain

Enterprise AI automation is currently bottlenecked by the fragmentation of proprietary domain knowledge siloed within human memory and legacy systems, creating an urgent need for a "company brain" that extracts, structures, and converts this data into executable skills files. This dynamic infrastructure serves as a critical intermediate layer between raw enterprise data and reliable AI agents, moving beyond simple document chatbots to map specific operational workflows like refund handling and incident response. The speaker predicts universal global adoption of this technology for safe, efficient automation and invites startups to apply to Y Combinator to build this essential primitive.

AI-Personalized Medicine

Intelligent agents are deploying personalized health data and falling production costs for genetic medicines to generate precise clinical suggestions and bespoke treatments. This convergence of regulatory openness and declining diagnostic expenses is enabling the early detection of disease signals while allowing patient access to specialized trials. Industry leaders anticipate this shift will democratize access to severe illness care and spur a surge in startups building the necessary infrastructure for this new model.

AI-Native Service Companies

Driven by the rapid evolution of AI models from software tools to autonomous professional agents, the market is shifting toward "AI-native" companies that sell direct services rather than software licenses. This investment thesis targets high-spend sectors like insurance, accounting, and healthcare administration where global spending on services vastly exceeds software costs and outsourcing rates are already high. To capitalize on this shift, a specific call for submissions has been issued to founders building "place as a service" ventures that embed human professionals within their AI-driven delivery models.

Apollo's Jim Zelter on the Future of Private Credit

Jim Zelter, Alison Mast

Apollo Global Management, led by Jim Zelter, is strategically expanding its $970 billion asset base to finance a projected $5 trillion to $6 trillion capital expenditure surge driven by AI infrastructure and industrial reshoring. By leveraging its integrated insurance subsidiary Athene and $150 billion in recent investment-grade capital, the firm aims to dominate the $40 trillion private credit market with a focus on large-scale projects like the Intel semiconductor venture and Japanese corporate carve-outs. This approach seeks to capitalize on the shift from non-investment grade lending to massive investment-grade financing needs while maintaining disciplined risk management that prioritizes fundamental value over market noise.

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.

Peptides are not a miracle drug | The Economist

Natasha Loder, Tim Cross, Jason Palmer

Driven by high-profile endorsements and internet culture, the unregulated global market for peptides bypasses clinical trials to offer performance-enhancing substances riddled with purity risks and unknown long-term health effects. Regulatory bodies in the United States and United Kingdom are attempting to address this crisis through compounding pharmacy oversight and vendor crackdowns, yet enforcement struggles against the speed of online sales and social media promotion. Experts warn that without rigorous scientific validation, the current environment prioritizes profit and self-experimentation over the biological safety required to distinguish beneficial compounds from dangerous contaminants.

The Cost of Concurrency Coordination with Jon Gjengset

Jon Gjengset, John, Gabriel Kreiman

The presentation challenges the conventional view that mutexes are inherently slow, demonstrating instead that performance degradation in high-concurrency environments stems from CPU cache coherence overheads and MESI protocol costs rather than the lock mechanism itself. To address false sharing and serialization issues found in reader-writer locks, the speaker details the Left-Right data structure, a lock-free architecture that achieves linear scaling for read-heavy workloads by decoupling reader access from writer synchronization. Finally, the discussion emphasizes that optimal synchronization strategy depends on the specific read-to-write ratio and consistency requirements, urging developers to profile cache behavior and avoid blind optimization of lock primitives.

The New Media Playbook with Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz

Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg

The firm fundamentally redefines media strategy by replacing the defensive posture of traditional journalism with an offense-oriented approach that prioritizes speed, founder-led personal branding, and content saturation to control narratives within a 24-hour cycle. By treating viral posts as the primary medium and leveraging an OODA loop of rapid observation and action, the organization enables portfolio companies to generate immediate engagement through direct CEO communication rather than abstract corporate messaging. This ecosystem now functions as a comprehensive launch service and talent development pipeline, positioning the firm as the definitive standard for "New Media" roles while advising leaders to embrace controversy as a necessary signal of power in a landscape where old media acts only as a lagging indicator.

Startup School is coming to India! 🇮🇳

Harshil Mathur, Vidit Aatrey, Lalit Keshre, Mukund Jha

Y Combinator is hosting its inaugural one-day Startup School in Bangalore on April 18th to connect the next generation of Indian founders with industry leaders. The event convenes prominent founders from YC-backed companies such as Razorpay, Meesho, Grow, and Emergent to discuss the latest developments in technology and startups. This gathering aims to foster a community among top Indian builders and hackers by facilitating direct engagement with successful entrepreneurs.

New Worries

Josh Schiffrin, Chris Hussey, Josh Shiprin

Goldman Sachs Chief Strategy Officer Josh Shiprin highlighted that geopolitical instability and surging oil prices have overshadowed recent payrolls data, creating a complex stagflationary environment that complicates the Federal Reserve's outlook. While maintaining confidence in an impending rate cut, Shiprin warned that the duration of the conflict could alter the timing of reductions and urged investors to adopt a long-term strategy focused on a steepening U.S. 2s10s yield curve amidst heightened market uncertainty.

The New AI Trades

Ryan Hammond, Allison Nathan

In early 2026, software stocks suffered a 25% valuation collapse as forward earnings multiples compressed, while investors grappled with AI-driven disruption risks across sectors like legal and media. Simultaneously, five U.S. hyperscalers are projected to spend $660 billion on capital expenditures this year, a surge consuming 90% of their operating cash flows that has forced reduced buybacks and increased debt reliance. Amidst these headwinds, Goldman Sachs forecasts an S&P 500 recovery driven primarily by 12% fourth-quarter earnings growth and a market rotation toward cyclical sectors rather than AI-centric leaders.

AI Native Hedge Funds

A former quantitative researcher identifies the current inflection point where AI-native strategies are displacing legacy quantitative trading models, noting that established hedge funds are already lagging due to slow adoption. The initiative targets the development of autonomous "swarms of cloud agents" capable of synthesizing financial data and executing trades without human intervention to secure a decisive competitive advantage. This speaker is currently recruiting through Y Combinator to build the first fully automated financial firm that mirrors the paradigm shifts seen in the 1980s.