Latest Interviews
Showing 256–270 of 338 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator3h 42m
Startup Investor School Day 4 Live Stream
Andy Bromberg, Aaron Harris, Ron Conway, Jeff
The final day of Startup Investor School featured a comprehensive analysis of early-stage investment history by Andy Bromberg, behavioral standards for angel investors presented by Aaron Harris, and a founder-centric investment philosophy from Ron Conway. The session detailed the evolution from traditional venture capital to modern token offerings like ICOs while establishing a strict code of conduct emphasizing reputation, speed, and integrity in deal-making. Ultimately, the event equipped attendees with tools to model SAFE conversions and fostered a network committed to maintaining ecosystem transparency and supporting high-potential founders.
- Y Combinator4h 16m
Startup Investor School Day 3 Live Stream
Elad Gil, Pejman, Jeff Clavier, Andrea, Ali Partovi
Day 3 of the Startup Investor School convened five prominent investors, including Elad Gil, Pejman Nozad, Jeff Clavier, Andrea Zurlo, and Ali Partovi, to dissect critical strategies for market selection, team evaluation, and portfolio construction. The speakers emphasized that successful angel investing requires a 10-year horizon, strict risk discipline regarding net worth allocation, and a service-oriented mindset that prioritizes founder support over immediate financial gains. Key consensus points highlighted the necessity of investing in brilliant founders with big ideas regardless of initial market perceptions, maintaining long-term patience through early-stage losses, and building a personal brand rooted in integrity and operational availability.
- Y Combinator59 min
Dalton Caldwell - Startup Investor School Day 2
The Startup Investor School Day 2 addressed operational feedback from the previous day while delivering a comprehensive framework for investment philosophy, strategy, and process discipline. Expert speakers emphasized prioritizing conviction over consensus, establishing clear decision funnels, and mastering founder meeting best practices through direct communication and rigorous case studies like Nekton. The event concluded with a Q&A session that clarified complex challenges regarding commitment, negative feedback delivery, and milestone-based financing structures.
- Y Combinator48 min
The Number One Goal is Getting Started - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy
Avni Patel Thompson, Craig Cannon
Harvard MBA Avni leveraged her background in pharmaceuticals and international strategy to validate and launch Poppy, a child-care platform, by conducting a four-week manual trial that secured paying users before seeking capital. After three rejections from Y Combinator, she secured funding by demonstrating rapid growth and a scalable vision for global infrastructure, emphasizing that collecting revenue from strangers is essential for true product-market fit. Her journey illustrates a methodology where diverse life experiences, including a failed startup and expatriate living, serve as a "mosaic" of skills to de-risk entrepreneurship and address critical market gaps in modern family support systems.
- Y Combinator59 min
Uncut Interview with Sam Altman on Masters of Scale [Audio]
Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Craig Cannon
Y Combinator President Sam Altman reflects on his accidental transition from an 18-year-old student founder to a leader who expanded the accelerator into a global hard-tech hub supporting fields like AI and synthetic biology. Drawing on lessons from his early ventures and investment in Stripe, Altman outlines a philosophy prioritizing intense user engagement, aggressive early-stage scaling, and a frugal culture to mitigate risk and foster organic growth. He emphasizes that successful leadership requires balancing clear vision with formal structure, maintaining humility through historical perspective, and recruiting senior experts to guide first-time CEOs through rapid expansion.
- Y Combinator38 min
Startup Investor School Preview with Geoff Ralston
The inaugural Investor School offers a four-day hybrid course at Y Combinator's Mountain View headquarters and via live stream to train accredited individuals in the mechanics of angel investing. Led by experienced mentors, the curriculum covers deal structures, founder assessment, and portfolio management while leveraging historical case studies to teach risk mitigation and effective capital allocation. Participants gain practical insights into navigating modern funding landscapes, with applications now open to a targeted audience seeking to diversify the investor ranks and contribute capital to early-stage startups.
- Y Combinator1h 0m
It's Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done - Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo
Sam Chaudhary, Karen Lien, Craig Cannon, Liam, Paul Graham, Jenna Klein, Chris Streeter, Carol Dweck
ClassDojo founders Sam Kiernan and Liam secured an investment from Y Combinator's Paul Graham by persistently demonstrating their platform's ability to bridge the gap between home and school communication while promoting growth mindset skills through collaborative content. Since its inception, the company has grown to serve over 300,000 schools globally with a lean team structure, relying on teacher-led adoption and radical transparency to maintain its human-centric mission. Now pivoting toward a direct-to-parent monetization model, ClassDojo aims to sustain its profitability while prioritizing educational equity and avoiding the surveillance capitalism practices common in the EdTech sector.
- Y Combinator51 min
Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media
Gimlet Media acquires podcast talent by prioritizing visionary founders and magnetic hosts with at least 100,000 independent downloads, offering the human capital and marketing infrastructure needed to scale content quality. The company cultivates a non-partisan culture that values empathy and editorial execution, using practical hiring assessments to build teams capable of representing underrepresented voices. Driven by a strategy that leverages YouTube clips for discovery and adapts successful formats like true crime, Gimlet transforms independent audio concepts into sustainable, mainstream productions.
- Y Combinator58 min
Leah Culver of Breaker and Tom Sparks of YC Answer Your Questions About Security and Podcasting
Leah Culver, Tom Sparks, Craig Cannon
This event examines the intersection of government surveillance, device security, and startup culture, highlighting Apple's resistance to backdoors while detailing best practices for developers to protect sensitive data through iOS Keychains and robust multi-factor authentication. Speakers contrast the convenience of biometrics with their permanent compromise risks, advising users to combine passcodes with strong passcode habits to mitigate law enforcement access. The discussion concludes by outlining Breaker's vision to transform podcasting into a serialized content platform and identifying emerging opportunities in IoT security and passive bio-sensing technologies.
- Y Combinator55 min
Tim Urban of Wait But Why
Tim Urban, Andrew Finn, Craig Cannon
Author and researcher Tim Urban leverages his *Wait But Why* blog to catalyze a cultural shift that encourages high-intelligence individuals to pursue careers in artificial intelligence and technology as a strategic response to humanity's imminent existential challenges. By framing the "Page 500" moment—a critical transition where human survival depends on mastering AI safety and overcoming the Fermi paradox's great filter—Urban argues that redirecting top talent toward these fields offers the most effective multiplier for global well-being. This perspective is grounded in a rigorous, multi-source research methodology designed to synthesize complex topics like CRISPR, VR, and space exploration into actionable insights for both creators and future tech workers.
- Y Combinator1h 10m
Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem - Des Traynor of Intercom
Des Traynor and Owen McCabe transitioned from a rejected academic study on code proficiency to founding the chat and messaging platform Intercom after discovering that in-app notifications drove superior customer engagement compared to legacy error-tracking tools. The company accelerated its growth by prioritizing timeless content marketing, manual onboarding, and a unified brand philosophy that aligned product features with the core mission of making internet business personal. Today, Intercom continues to evolve by shifting its messaging toward explicit ROI for enterprise clients while expanding into new sectors like soccer technology and financial simplification based on Traynor's insights into solving large, frequent problems.
- Y Combinator1h 2m
There's an Art to Getting Brilliant People to Surprise Themselves - Kevin Slavin of The Shed
Kevin Kelly's peripatetic career bridges disparate fields, from bootstrapping the mobile game company Area Code to shaping the operational philosophies of MIT's Media Lab and New York's The Shed. His work redefines cultural institutions as "synchronizing signals" that counteract social fragmentation through adaptive architecture, such as The Shed's 120-foot moving shell, and digital strategies like total smartphone ticketing. Looking forward, Kelly advocates for a future where innovation emerges from cross-disciplinary agility rather than traditional domain expertise, a perspective he applies to his analysis of the nascent virtual reality industry.
- Y Combinator18 min
Preston Silverman on Building out a Marketplace in Education - at YC Edtech Night
Founded by a former strategy consultant and teacher, Raise Me awards nearly $1.5 billion in scholarships during high school to bridge the critical gap between eligibility and college enrollment. The platform secured its initial growth through a $100,000 Gates Foundation grant and strategic partnerships with higher education institutions, bypassing traditional EdTech skepticism to address the $100 billion annual scholarship market. Now a 52-person organization aiming for national ubiquity within five years, the company shifts focus from early-stage survival tactics to scaling its model that prioritizes student guidance and skill development over content-heavy curricula.
- Y Combinator57 min
Microbes, Robots, and Ambition - Robin Sloan on His Novel Sourdough
Robin Sloan, Kat Manalac, Craig Cannon
During a discussion on the intersection of artificial intelligence and literary craft, the author details the unprecedented creation of the *Sourdough* audiobook, which features machine-generated alien music synthesized from Croatian Klapa folk recordings. The conversation further examines the technical reality of the "Egg Problem" in robotics, the author's philosophy of viewing technological convergence as a cumulative "glorious crash" rather than an adversarial force, and the fragility of digital preservation in contrast to physical media. Looking toward the future, the author outlines plans to integrate text generation as a core stylistic tool in a new novel while reflecting on how current cultural narratives have shifted from Silicon Valley's early optimism to a more critical examination of power and labor.
- Y Combinator28 min
Keith Schacht and Doug Peltz on What Traction Feels Like - at YC Edtech Night
Keith Schacht, Doug Peltz, Geoff Ralston, Tim, Blake
Founded by former teacher Doug Peltz and entrepreneur Keith Schacht, Mystery Science delivers an interactive, pre-recorded science curriculum that acts as a virtual co-teacher for K-5 educators lacking subject expertise. The company secured a $2 million Series A round and entered Y Combinator in 2017 after validating a viral, teacher-led adoption model that currently operates in over 10% of U.S. schools. By replacing traditional textbooks with evidence-based storytelling, Mystery Science has bypassed the need for heavy sales infrastructure to become a dominant supplemental resource in a market where 95% of elementary schools lack dedicated science staff.