Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 51 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator14 min
How to Get Your First 10 Customers
This guide outlines a tactical framework for founders to secure their first ten customers by prioritizing manual, high-trust interactions over scalable automation. Early acquisition focuses exclusively on personal networks and in-person efforts, utilizing specific channels like micro-events, targeted Reddit DMs, and value-driven advice requests before ever deploying prospecting tools. Once these foundational deals are won through unscalable work, the strategy shifts to utilizing software like Apollo and Clay to replicate the validated pitch for subsequent growth.
- Y Combinator22 min
How to Make Claude Code Your AI Engineering Team
Gary Tan, President and CEO of Y Combinator, has launched GStack, an open-source framework that restructures AI coding assistants into specialized engineering teams to overcome current limitations in model scaffolding. The system utilizes skills like Adversarial Review and the Office Hours query to automatically identify design flaws, generate multiple UI variants, and process hundreds of daily pull requests without traditional to-do lists. With over 70,000 GitHub stars, GStack shifts developer focus from manual coding to strategic oversight, enabling the management of parallel AI sessions to accelerate software factory operations from ideation to production.
- Y Combinator13 min
OpenAI vs. Deepseek vs. Qwen: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures
OpenAI, Alibaba Cloud, and DeepSeek have each launched significant open-weight language models featuring distinct Mixture of Experts architectures and advanced long-context capabilities. While OpenAI's GPT-OSS prioritizes inference efficiency on consumer hardware, Alibaba's Qwen 3 introduces flexible dense and sparse variants with dual reasoning modes, and DeepSeek's V3.1 achieves superior memory efficiency through Multi-Head Latent Attention. Despite differing engineering strategies for scaling and alignment, all three families demonstrate comparable performance benchmarks derived from trillions of tokens and complex post-training pipelines.
- Y Combinator19 min
The Sales Playbook For Founders | Startup School
Early-stage B2B founders often stall in non-revenue design partnerships, so this guide outlines a four-stage framework to accelerate sales from initial discovery to signed Annual Recurring Revenue contracts. The strategy replaces vague, months-long pilots with narrow, paid trials that enforce financial commitment and specific ROI metrics, culminating in recurring contracts featuring automatic renewal clauses. By integrating operational tactics like immediate security certification and high-touch onboarding, founders can bypass traditional procurement bottlenecks and establish scalable revenue streams.
- Y Combinator17 min
How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School
The session establishes "vibe coding" as a disciplined engineering practice, recommending specific tool strategies such as using Replit for novices and dual-workflow setups with Cursor and Windsurf for experienced developers. It outlines a rigorous methodology involving architectural planning, modular Git-based implementation, and strict error handling protocols to manage AI-generated code effectively. The discussion further analyzes current model capabilities, highlighting Claude Sonnet 3.7 for implementation and Gemini for planning, while noting expected performance shifts due to training data biases in frameworks like Ruby on Rails.
- Y Combinator10 min
How Scaling Laws Will Determine AI's Future | YC Decoded
This event analyzes the evolution of AI scaling laws, tracing the transition from the 2020 Chinchilla optimization that prioritized data volume over model size to the current era where OpenAI's O3 model demonstrates that intelligence scales linearly with test-time reasoning compute. The discussion highlights industry concerns regarding pre-training data plateaus while arguing that the scaling revolution is shifting toward reasoning depth and unexplored modalities like robotics and chemical modeling. These insights collectively outline a new trajectory for Artificial General Intelligence that moves beyond simple architectural expansion to leverage extended inference and cross-domain applications.
- Y Combinator14 min
How To Use AI In Your Startup
The Y Combinator Spring Batch application deadline of February 11th offers selected startups a $500,000 investment and critical network access, with a strong emphasis on relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area to stay synchronized with rapidly evolving market conditions. Founders are advised to integrate large language models into their core product or operations rather than merely pivoting for trendiness, leveraging their physical proximity to industry leaders to identify automation opportunities in sectors like healthcare and legacy software replacement. Case studies such as WAPI illustrate how embedding within the SF community enabled an early pivot to voice AI, contrasting with remote companies that failed to adapt due to an informational lag in understanding current technological capabilities.
- Y Combinator2 min
How do OpenAI’s o1 and o3 models perform complex reasoning?
OpenAI's O1 model utilizes a "chain of thought" reasoning mechanism to solve complex problems by decomposing them into sequential steps, a strategy originally formalized by Google Brain researchers in 2022. This approach enables the system to dynamically identify errors and adjust its logic rather than relying on simple next-token prediction, significantly improving accuracy in tasks requiring multi-step calculation. By explicitly walking through intermediate stages, such as determining total slices and calculating consumption before finding the remainder, the model mirrors human problem-solving to ensure precise outcomes.
- Y Combinator1 min
YC Partner and Algolia co-founder Nicolas Dessaigne’s advice for founders starting out.
Founders are urged to immediately launch imperfect products rather than waiting for a perfect idea, prioritizing rapid iteration and direct user engagement to validate market assumptions. This approach rejects over-engineering in favor of a "crappy, quick, and dirty" methodology that secures essential feedback through high-touch interactions with early adopters. By accepting short-term technical debt and imperfections, entrepreneurs can quickly pivot to build the correct product and capitalize on the market's forgiving memory.
- Y Combinator18 min
Starting A Company? The Key Terms You Should Know | Startup School
This session defines critical startup financial mechanics, including burn rate, profitability thresholds, and the structural differences between angel, seed, and Series A funding rounds. It distinguishes between equity instruments like convertible notes and SAFEs while explaining how metrics such as ARR and Total Addressable Market inform valuation and growth strategy. The discussion concludes by outlining the transition from finding product-market fit to scaling operations, ultimately leading toward an IPO or sustained bootstrapping.
- Y Combinator1 min
The best consumer companies incorporate both virality and network effect to grow organically.
Metcalfe's Law posits that a network's value scales with the square of its user base, transforming a single-user platform like WhatsApp from worthless to globally vital. This dynamic illustrates how the mathematical relationship between nodes and utility drives exponential growth for individual participants. Consequently, consumer companies achieve organic expansion by strategically combining distinct mechanisms of virality and network effects.
- Y Combinator21 min
Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Reviews Startup Websites
This session establishes core web design principles prioritizing immediate value clarity and mobile responsiveness while critiquing six specific healthcare and B2B technology sites. Reviewers identified critical usability failures across these platforms, including excessive scrolling on Mito Health, visual clutter on Cygnaz, and confusing brand identity on Taiv, which collectively risk user abandonment. The discussion concludes with actionable recommendations to align visual hierarchy, consistent typography, and clear calls-to-action with user scanning behaviors to boost trust and conversion rates.
- Y Combinator33 min
How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails | Startup School
This event details a data-driven outreach framework where founders must personally execute high-volume email campaigns using warm introductions or targeted cold strategies to secure B2B customers. The speaker outlines a specific funnel architecture that requires sending dozens of daily messages while applying seven principles of effective copy, such as humanized tone, deep personalization, and clear calls to action, to maximize response rates. By analyzing case studies of both failed and successful campaigns, the presentation emphasizes that manual, founder-led execution is essential for building initial traction before any automation is introduced.
- Y Combinator29 min
How To Keep Your Users | Startup School
YC Group Partner David Leib leverages his experience scaling Bump and Google Photos to argue that high cohort retention is the definitive quantitative signal of product-market fit. He details precise methodologies for defining user actions, selecting appropriate measurement intervals, and interpreting retention curve shapes to distinguish sustainable growth from a churn-heavy treadmill. By avoiding common analytical pitfalls and applying strategies like user acquisition targeting and onboarding optimization, founders can transform cohort data into a actionable roadmap for building scalable, long-term businesses.
- Y Combinator18 min
How To Price For B2B | Startup School
Founders are advised to anchor pricing in a collaborative value equation that quantifies customer ROI, setting rates between 25% and 50% of that value to ensure healthy margins while retaining two-thirds of the benefit for the client. The strategy explicitly discourages cost-plus or predatory price wars, instead urging a shift toward recurring revenue models and short, metric-driven pilots to mitigate revenue volatility. By treating cloud credits as real costs and avoiding public price transparency for enterprise deals, this framework enables startups to secure sustainable growth without triggering a race to the bottom.