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.

Garry Tan: The Future of AGI Is Personal

Garry Tan

The speaker advocates for "Personal AGI," a system of user-owned agents that process vast personal context on private infrastructure to drastically increase output and preserve cognitive independence. Drawing parallels to Baruch Spinoza's rejection of institutional compromise, the talk details how "skill files" and hybrid architectures enable individuals to replace traditional workforces with scalable, compounding digital labor. This shift promises to democratize high-level execution by allowing founders to achieve unprecedented economic leverage while retaining full ownership of their generated knowledge and intellectual tools.

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.

Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?

Patrick Collison, Harj Taggar

Patrick Collison shares his journey from dropping out of college twice to launching Stripe, emphasizing the critical role of retaining "cognitive L1 cache" over reliance on AI tools for deep reasoning. He highlights that while new business formation on Stripe has doubled and AI is accelerating revenue milestones, entrepreneurs should remain wary of decentralization fears and instead focus on solving visceral customer problems like legacy payment friction. Collison concludes by advising founders to build fundamental knowledge of first principles and to assess whether their chosen venture is a cause they are willing to pursue for decades.

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.

Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity”

Alexandr Wang, Garry Tan

Alexander Wang discusses his journey from founding Scale AI to leading Meta's Frontier Lab, where he is developing the Muse Spark model to deliver frontier-level AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost. He argues that the immediate future of the industry will be defined by agentic looping and the orchestration of autonomous agents rather than raw model size, predicting a massive expansion in global GDP driven by these technologies. Wang concludes by advising founders to build independent convictions based on first principles while emphasizing that systematic thinking and vision are becoming the scarce resources in an era of abundant computational intelligence.

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.

Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Garry Tan

Sam Altman and Y Combinator highlight an exponential shift in startup capabilities where coding agents reduce development time to mere seconds while hard tech representation in the portfolio surges to 25%. The organization positions itself as a decentralizing force to prevent single-entity control of AI power, explicitly rejecting the "live action role play" mindset in favor of heretical, high-conviction building. Altman warns of safety risks regarding surveillance and model concentration but maintains that widespread founder agency and distributed innovation will ultimately prevent economic collapse or catastrophic safety incidents.

Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt

Boris Cherny, Diana Hu

The Opus 5 model release demonstrates a 30% score on the ARC AGI benchmark and unprecedented autonomous endurance by eliminating over 80% of legacy system prompts through an empirical ablation methodology. This shift enabled dynamic workflows where thousands of agents autonomously rewrote complex software stacks like the Bunn runtime and Cloud Code desktop app in mere days. Strategic advice for developers emphasizes replacing rigid prompt engineering with context design and verification protocols to leverage these emergent agentic capabilities effectively.

New Operating Systems for the Physical World

A new software operating system addresses the stagnation in physical-world management by unifying AI agents, robots, and human workers into a single platform. This architecture shifts the industry value proposition from simple visibility to the direct coordination of heterogeneous labor, targeting the massive economic leverage inherent in industries where labor costs vastly exceed software spending. By capturing continuous, real-time data from mixed-field operations, the system establishes a unique data moat designed to train superior AI models and optimize safety and reliability in ways incumbent solutions cannot match.

How Photoroom Trained Themselves To Dream Bigger

Gary Tan, Elliot

PhotoRoom, the largest Y Combinator company headquartered in Europe, leveraged a strategic pivot to e-commerce photography to achieve 300 million downloads and serve major clients like Amazon and Uber. Its founders attribute this exponential growth to a cultural shift fostered by YC, which replaced European risk aversion with a "failure-safe" mindset that treats a billion-dollar valuation as an attainable target. By enforcing English-only offices, prioritizing deep vertical focus, and utilizing aggressive resource constraints, the company instilled a mandatory ambition across its team to drive rapid scaling and execution speed.

Scientists Are Built for Startups

Arvind Veluvali, Ayman Saleh, Dima Yanovsky

The speaker leverages their experience engineering fungus-based materials and simulating the NASA Perseverance rover to argue that scientists, particularly those from structured space agencies, possess the ideal mindset for startup entrepreneurship. Contrasting NASA's rigid, decade-long project lifecycles with the high-pressure, iterative environment of seed-stage ventures, the speaker demonstrates that technical feasibility and the willingness to conduct long-term experiments are more critical than formal business training. Ultimately, the presentation posits that researchers accustomed to managing massive-scale contractor coordination and undefined success metrics are uniquely prepared to lead new ventures despite the inherent risks.

AI-Powered Consumer Products for 1 Billion People

Positioning artificial intelligence as the most significant platform shift since the web era, the analysis highlights a critical window where AI agents have achieved sufficient human-like capability to support viable consumer products. While unit economics currently require approximately $1,000 per user monthly, rapid cost reductions of 10x annually are projected to trigger a widespread "consumer moment" where early entrants can secure permanent market dominance across sectors like automation, health, and finance. The initiative explicitly seeks builders to develop applications targeting a one-billion-user market before the competitive landscape solidifies.

The Primer

Neal Stephenson

Inspired by Neal Stephenson's *The Diamond Age*, a new venture seeks to deploy AI-driven adaptive tools that deliver one-on-one tutoring quality in reading, writing, and arithmetic to every child at consumer scale. Rather than replacing educators, the system is designed to augment classroom instruction, addressing historical inequalities in access to personalized learning. Founders are actively recruiting builders to develop this technology, aiming to achieve a fraction of the Primer's societal impact as the foundation for a broader educational revolution.

India Can Create The Largest AI Companies

Puneet, Arnav, John, Ankit, Jared

The event redefined the global startup paradigm by highlighting how India's deep technical talent enables founders to bypass traditional barriers and build meritocratic AI companies for the international market immediately. Speakers emphasized that success now hinges on founder agency, rapid learning, and the ability to leverage coding agents for extreme execution speed rather than on warm connections or established business models. To catalyze this shift, the program provided attendees with AI computing credits and facilitated co-founder networking to launch high-agency ventures within days.