Latest Interviews

Stablecoins 2.0

Stablecoin payment volumes have surpassed PayPal and now account for 20% of MasterCard's volume, with Stripe's $1 billion acquisition of Bridge signaling strong investor confidence. Following a potential shift toward a crypto-friendly US administration, market stakeholders anticipate imminent legislation to replace the current regulatory uncertainty. This convergence of explosive market adoption and favorable policy creates a prime environment for new ventures, particularly those focusing on corporate holding services and developer tools.

Public Safety Technology

Y Combinator is actively recruiting startups to advance public safety, building on Flock Safety's current achievement of solving 10% of US crimes with its license plate camera technology. The accelerator seeks new ventures focusing on computer vision for emergency response, community-police collaboration tools, and operational efficiency technologies to help meet the industry goal of solving 25% of all crimes within the year. This initiative positions YC as a key resource provider designed to facilitate the growth of companies driving this expanding public safety movement.

Government Software

Palantir's decade-long success selling software to the U.S. government, now valued at $125 billion, highlights a strategic opportunity for new ventures to leverage artificial intelligence amidst rising federal deficits. With billions spent annually on repetitive administrative functions, startups are encouraged to develop AI solutions that simultaneously reduce government spending and boost operational efficiency. This dual-purpose approach aims to capitalize on the current economic climate to transform how the public sector manages its resources.

The Winter 2025 application deadline is in less than a week! Apply at ycombinator.com/apply.

Y Combinator is accepting applications for its Winter 2025 batch by November 12th as it transitions to a four-batch annual schedule to capitalize on a unique twenty-year cycle of technological advancement. The program specifically targets early-stage technical teams with co-founders, emphasizing that hesitation is unnecessary given the organization's history of radically altering founders' trajectories even when applications began on a whim. By encouraging ambitious applicants to submit proposals immediately, YC asserts that the selection process offers a risk-free opportunity to fundamentally reshape the future course of their ventures.

Jeff Wang: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta|E1212

Jeff Wang, Harry Stebbings, Doug Leone, Mike Moritz, Roelof Botha

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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.

Once you identify the problem and fix it, you can always launch again.

Founders encountering zero user adoption are advised to replace emotional reactions with a diagnostic, analytical mindset that treats the stagnation as a solvable problem. By systematically iterating on single variables each week, such as refining email copy or pivoting from large enterprise targets to smaller organizations, leaders can isolate specific drop-off points like low reply rates. This structured approach enables the identification of root causes and facilitates targeted adjustments to drive eventual growth.

Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston on the beginnings of YC.

Jessica Livingston, Gary

Established in 2005 Boston, this venture capitalized on a capital-starved market to create a dedicated early-stage vehicle addressing the scarcity of small seed funds. The entity launched a distinct strategy of issuing modest checks specifically to provide founders with the liquidity needed to quit their jobs and validate ideas before pursuing larger funding rounds. This approach successfully filled a critical gap in the angel investment landscape by bridging the gap between untested concepts and traditional venture capital requirements.

New Defense Technology

Amidst concerns that bloated defense contractors are hindering U.S. technological leadership, Y Combinator is actively recruiting startups to emulate agile innovators like Palantir and SpaceX. This strategic initiative leverages Silicon Valley's historical roots as a military R&D hub, a legacy physically embodied by the Y Combinator headquarters which formerly operated as a World War II naval shipbuilding facility. With the next decade framed as a critical window for reinvigorating defense capabilities, the program seeks to catalyze a new wave of defense-oriented companies in San Francisco.

Over-complicated pricing could kill a sales process.

This analysis recommends prioritizing simple, committed recurring revenue models like Monthly or Annual Recurring Revenue over complex or usage-based structures. Advocates argue that committed contracts protect revenue during economic downturns and align better with investor expectations by preventing immediate income collapse. Consequently, the strategic goal is to target MRR or ARR to ensure stability and facilitate value-based renewal negotiations.

We’re still in the early innings with AI.

YC-backed ventures like DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber exemplify smartphone-driven success stories that launched roughly four years after the iPhone's release. These examples demonstrate that determining which ideas will succeed and where value will accumulate requires a significant period of maturation before market dominance can be achieved.

Gmail creator Paul Buchheit on the very first version of Google’s “Did you mean?” feature

Paul Buchheit

A former Google engineer designed the original "Did you mean" spell correction feature after analyzing query logs that revealed roughly one-third of searches contained errors. Although the initial implementation used a standard spell correction library, it frequently produced incorrect suggestions, such as recommending the fish "Turbot" for "TurboTax." These early accuracy failures highlighted the complexity of auto-correction and drove subsequent refinements to the system's reliability.

Sales pre-PMF should be done by the founders.

Early-stage B2B startup founders must personally drive sales efforts prior to achieving product-market fit to validate their business models effectively. Because this pre-PMF selling requires entrepreneurial vision and a tight feedback loop with product development, external sales hires often fail to replicate these critical dynamics. Relying on external sales teams before validation is identified as a suboptimal strategy that risks the venture's ability to succeed later.

When you’re pre-product market fit, sales is a job for the founders.

The event asserts that early-stage B2B founders possess the unique capability to sell their products before achieving product-market fit, rendering external sales hires premature and ineffective. Success in this phase requires founders to leverage their vision for high-volume experimentation and establish tight feedback loops between sales efforts and product development. This distinction highlights pre-PMF sales as an exclusively entrepreneurial role, fundamentally different from the specialized functions assumed after a company validates its market.

The artistry is actually in that interface between the human and the technology itself.

The speaker argues that while artificial intelligence will significantly assist with backend development and API writing, it cannot fully automate the creative interface between humans and technology where true software artistry resides. By leveraging strongly typed systems and natural language to translate requirements into specifications, AI serves as a powerful tool that augments human productivity rather than replacing it. Ultimately, the event emphasizes that defining the fundamental scope of products remains a critical human responsibility that transcends mere code generation.