Latest Interviews

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.

" It is very possible that the first people to live to a thousand are alive right now."

Max Hodak

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.

Differences Between The Leading AI Models

Madhav Jha

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.

This Is The Holy Grail Of AI

Ian Fischer

Poetic is advancing a recursively self-improving AI system that autonomously enhances its own intelligence at a fraction of the cost and time required by major competitors like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Unlike industry standards that demand hundreds of millions of dollars and months of effort to train new Large Language Models from scratch, Poetic's proprietary method accelerates these cycles significantly. This speed and efficiency advantage allows Poetic to potentially outpace rivals who remain constrained by the prohibitive expenses and long timelines of traditional retraining approaches.

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.

Startup School 2026

Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Alexandr Wang, Jeff Dean

On July 25th and 26th, 2026, Y Combinator will host a two-day Startup School in San Francisco for hand-selected undergraduate and graduate technical builders. The event features confirmed keynote addresses from industry leaders Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Alexander Wang, and Jeff Dean alongside exclusive access to YC partners and alumni. Given that over 100 attendees from the previous cohort founded YC-backed companies, this limited-capacity gathering serves as a critical accelerator for the next generation of industry-defining enterprises.

What Boris Cherny Learned From Building Claude Code

Boris Cherny

Quad Code's founder executed a grueling three-month sprint to launch a terminal-based product, accepting current code-generation limitations as an inevitable starting point rather than a final state. This strategy mirrors Anthropic's philosophy of building software for capabilities expected six months into the future, encouraging founders to target where models currently fail rather than optimizing for today's constraints. By prioritizing this forward-looking approach, both entities anticipate that natural model progression will resolve existing gaps without requiring premature adaptation to immature technology.

Why OpenClaw Broke The Internet

OpenClaw distinguishes itself as a local AI agent that executes autonomously on user hardware with full permissions to interface directly with IoT devices and control physical environments. By leveraging comprehensive access to a user's entire local dataset, the system successfully reconstructed detailed historical narratives from forgotten files to deliver deep, unexpected insights. Unlike cloud-based competitors, this platform grants users granular control over their digital footprint while enabling direct interaction with tangible assets such as vehicles, appliances, and smart beds.

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.

Stablecoin Financial Services

The proposed Genius and Clarity Acts position compliant crypto-native stablecoins in a unique regulatory niche that blends the efficiency of DeFi with the compliance standards of traditional finance. This framework aims to resolve the current market binary by enabling yield-bearing accounts, tokenized real-world asset access, and cost-effective cross-border payments within established legal boundaries. As regulators open this window for infrastructure development, the event highlights specific opportunities for builders to scale these hybrid financial solutions through accelerators like Y Combinator.

AI for Government

Despite the private sector's rapid adoption of AI for form processing, government agencies still rely on manual systems, creating a critical need for automated solutions to manage surging application volumes. This event addresses the unique challenges and high-value rewards of penetrating the public sector, where successful vendors gain sticky long-term contracts that can expand significantly after initial acquisition. The speaker specifically invites skilled developers to join the effort of building specialized AI tools that bridge this digital divide and replicate global efficiency benchmarks within government operations.

Infrastructure for Government Fraud Hunters

A new venture proposes replacing obsolete, rule-based government fraud detection systems with an AI platform capable of automatically parsing unstructured medical records to generate lawyer-ready case files for the False Claims Act. Targeting whistleblower law firms and inspector generals, the company seeks to replace manual, years-long investigations with a solution that accelerates fraud recovery tenfold. Founded by experts in healthcare compliance or legal counsel, this initiative aims to recover billions in taxpayer losses while capitalizing on current bipartisan political momentum for fiscal accountability.

AI Guidance for Physical Work

A new technological framework deploys real-time AI guidance via wearable cameras to accelerate physical labor proficiency, effectively replacing traditional months-long training with immediate visual and auditory coaching. Market viability is driven by the convergence of advanced multimodal models, ubiquitous smart hardware, and urgent skilled labor shortages, enabling three distinct business models: enterprise B2B sales, vertical integration in specific sectors, or a platform for rapid workforce upskilling. The initiative seeks collaborators to build systems that provide AI superpowers to field service, manufacturing, and healthcare workers, aiming to augment rather than replace human capability in physical roles.