Latest Interviews
Showing 406–420 of 564 transcripts.
Clear all filters- 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.
- Y Combinator26 min
Sarah Chou on Finding Product-Market Fit in the Education Industry - at YC Edtech Night
Sarah Chou, Karen Lien, Chen, Preston, Jeff, Tim, Chad
Informed K-12, a B2B SaaS platform founded by CEO Sarah and CTO Chen, facilitates the digitization of administrative workflows for school districts by managing over 600 distinct forms ranging from mileage reimbursements to travel authorizations. After pivoting from an unsuccessful teacher-focused Q&A model, the company established a repeatable sales process targeting Chief Business Officials and Assistant Superintendents to validate demand for a system-level paperwork solution. With 22 employees now operating in 22 distinct markets, the firm leverages direct relationship-building strategies and rigorous data privacy standards to modernize back-office operations for districts navigating budget constraints and staffing challenges.
- Y Combinator1h 0m
Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman
Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, Sam Altman, Craig Cannon
Future projections suggest that hardware scaling and brain-like specialized architectures will unlock qualitatively different model behaviors, while recent evidence indicates that optimizing basic algorithms and batch sizes offers more immediate impact than developing new model structures. Concurrently, the OpenAI Dota 2 project demonstrated that robust engineering infrastructure and reinforcement learning self-play enabled bots to master the game and defeat top professionals within weeks, revealing emergent tactics such as psychological baiting. These developments highlight a field where strong distributed systems engineering and bug-free code are becoming as critical as advanced theoretical knowledge, effectively bridging the gap between complex virtual simulations and real-world AI applications.
- Y Combinator24 min
The Most Important Decision is Getting Started – Laura Behrens Wu
Laura Behrens Wu, Carolyn Levy
Shippo, co-founded by Laura Behrens-Wu and Simon, built an API platform that processes millions of monthly shipments for 16,000 e-commerce merchants after pivoting to solve critical shipping transparency issues. The company successfully raised $9 million in two rounds despite facing significant hurdles, including 115 investor rejections, team turnover, and a lawsuit, by maintaining transparent communication and executing a compressed four-week Series A process. Behrens-Wu now leverages this experience to advocate for inclusive hiring practices and warns founders to vet investors on their crisis management behaviors while navigating systemic gender biases in the B2B technology sector.
- Y Combinator1h 2m
Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett on Live Video's Struggle for Interestingness
Casey Neistat, Matt Hackett, Craig Cannon
The organization pivoted from failed raw live-streaming concepts to "Panels," a constrained product designed to foster articulate debate on daily news while employing strict moderation to mitigate online toxicity. This evolution reflects a broader hybrid strategy that merges media content creation with engineering rigor, overcoming cultural friction between newsroom and tech teams to build a sustainable "media plus product" model. Supported by CNN's long-term capital, the founders have transitioned from a survival mindset to a decade-long vision, prioritizing team stability and deep content development over immediate viral metrics.