Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 585 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator30 min
New LLMs Are Unlocking Robot-Use Agents
Francois, Hanmei, Vincent, Jay
Frontier researchers and startups like Waddle Labs are advancing a paradigm shift toward general-purpose "robot use agents" that leverage coding-based policies and cross-modal data to perform complex physical tasks without specialized fine-tuning. By applying the "Bitter Lesson" principle to consolidate diverse datasets, these systems utilize in-context learning and memory consolidation architectures to rapidly adapt to new environments, with current demonstrations successfully executing multi-step manipulation challenges. Industry projections indicate that as latency decreases and internal world representations converge, economically viable, general-purpose robots capable of performing competent human-like tasks will emerge within two years.
- Y Combinator36 min
Startups Are Moving From Bits to Atoms
Recent YC batches have witnessed a hard tech resurgence, with the physical sector share tripling to 20% alongside a historic 1-in-6 PhD founder rate driven by AI acceleration and macroeconomic shifts in defense and space. Concurrently, the software landscape has pivoted toward revenue-generating agentic workflows and solo founders, as AI tools enable single individuals to execute complex full-stack operations and experienced founders to manage autonomous coding teams. These trends collectively signal a fundamental shift where advanced physical intelligence, specialized silicon, and autonomous agents are redefining startup viability and scaling strategies.
- Y Combinator13 min
How To Get Better At Outbound Sales
Founder-led sales strategies prioritize executing at least 100 manual outreach attempts to validate messaging and targeting before attempting automation, ensuring high conversion rates through rigorous prospect research and job title verification. This approach relies on constructing problem-centric, peer-to-peer communication while leveraging customer feedback to build credibility and optimize LinkedIn profiles for maximum trust. Successful execution requires strict operational discipline, including daily time-blocking for consistent volume and a systematic debugging framework that iterates through deliverability, content, and market fit until a viable reply rate of two to three per hundred is achieved.
- Y Combinator1h 0m
Self-Improving Harnesses, Local Personal AI And YC's Agent For Work | YC Paper Club
Seth Karten, Jon Saad-Falcon, Josh France, Regan Bell
YC Harness Club researchers demonstrate that "self-improving harnesses" capable of modifying their own code and memory have driven Arc AGI success rates from 30% to 100%, surpassing standard prompt engineering by leveraging recursive learning architectures. Presentations by Seth and John Sad Falcone detail specific implementations like Prime Agent's multi-tier context management and OpenJarvis's local on-device stack, which collectively achieve frontier-level performance while reducing costs by 800x and enabling autonomous long-horizon research. Furthermore, the QM project establishes a centralized cloud-hosted framework with dynamic sandboxing and fine-grained permissions, addressing critical challenges in system-wide coordination and data security for scalable multi-agent deployment.
- Y Combinator57 min
Open Models Are Collapsing The Cost Of AI
Driven by cost efficiency and customization needs, enterprises are increasingly adopting open AI models, with major corporations like AT&T shifting significant token consumption away from proprietary systems toward flexible, locally deployable solutions. Ollama has emerged as a critical orchestration layer for this ecosystem, supporting 85% of Fortune 500 companies and facilitating a hybrid deployment strategy that balances local hardware capabilities with cloud-based inference for complex tasks. This market shift positions open models to handle the majority of daily enterprise workflows, reducing reliance on expensive frontier closed models while navigating geopolitical security concerns through rigorous supply chain verification and secure hosting environments.
- Y Combinator21 min
Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders
Paul Graham delivered his 47th Y Combinator batch talk, highlighting a shift toward high-seriousness ventures in logistics and cancer research while defining founder ambition through the "formidable" archetype of those who consistently achieve their goals. Graham analyzed the current AI landscape, noting its uneven "jagged frontier" and the economic reality that token costs now eclipse salaries despite rapid price declines. He concluded that Y Combinator's ecosystem remains vital for peer collaboration and that the next trillion-dollar company will emerge not from a specific idea but from formidable founders capable of adapting to shifting market conditions.
- Y Combinator15 min
The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew
Gustaf Alströmer, Anders Forslund, Clara
Heart Aerospace successfully flight-tested the world's largest electric airplane, a 100-foot wingspan aircraft capable of carrying 36 passengers on short-haul routes with minimal operating costs. Led by CEO Anders Forslund and co-founder Clara, the Los Angeles-based team utilized a hybrid configuration to achieve a 500-mile range while significantly reducing maintenance and noise through the replacement of traditional jet engines with electric motors. This clean-sheet design, which marks the first new American airliner in 18 years, aims to replace inefficient regional jets by leveraging existing airport infrastructure and capitalizing on current advancements in battery technology.
- Y Combinator1h 0m
Max Junestrand: You Need The Willingness To Learn Faster Than Anyone Else
Max Junestrand, Gustav Omstrammer
Legora has scaled from three Swedish engineers to over 750 employees, generating $100 million in annual recurring revenue while deploying an agentic AI operating system that now serves three percent of the world's lawyers. Following a strategic pivot after a $35 million funding round revealed revenue lagged behind interest costs, the company shifted focus from growth velocity to product-market fit by freezing sales and transitioning to proactive, autonomous agents. Founded by Max, August, and Sigge, the firm differentiates itself through a high-intensity culture designed to overcome Scandinavian humility, recently securing talent at a 23-year-old salesperson who generated over $10 million without prior industry experience.
- Y Combinator53 min
Going In Deep On Data | YC Paper Club
Francois Chaubard, Vincent Sunn Chen, Volo Kuleshov, Shayne Longpre
Industry experts from Snorkel, Inception Labs, and MIT articulate a paradigm shift where data has evolved from a passive resource into a $100 billion sector requiring complex product craftsmanship and continuous expert supervision. Presentations detailed breakthroughs such as Snorkel's Senior SWE-bench with validation agents, Inception's Mercury 2 diffusion model achieving 1,000+ tokens per second, and novel cross-lingual scaling laws that optimize low-resource language performance. These developments collectively redefine the production frontier by demonstrating that architectural advances alone are insufficient without scalable data programming and domain-specific synthetic environments to resolve real-world distribution gaps.
- Y Combinator40 min
Michael Kratsios: Inside the White House's AI Strategy
White House OSTP Director Michael Kratos advocates for an AI strategy that prioritizes open-weight models and rejects rigid regulatory thresholds, emphasizing a unified national standard to prevent incumbents from stifling startups. Through the report *A New Golden Age for Science*, the administration proposes shifting federal research funding toward private sector leadership while accelerating scientific breakthroughs via autonomous cloud labs and rapid-grant mechanisms. This approach complements President Trump's executive order on quantum computing and a broader "born free" philosophy that aims to remove barriers for digital technologies while carefully managing specific physical risks.
- Y Combinator52 min
Susan Kare: How I Designed the Original Apple Mac Icons
Iconographer Susan Kerr recounts her pivotal role in shaping early Macintosh interfaces, from designing the "Chicago" font to creating iconic symbols like the "Happy Mac" boot screen under strict pixel constraints. Drawing on her experiences at Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, she advocates for minimalist design principles that prioritize meaningful metaphors over product-specific imagery to ensure universality and longevity. Her career highlights how simple, salient details and strict limitations can foster creativity, ultimately defining the visual language of modern computing interfaces.
- Y Combinator58 min
Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics
Physical Intelligence has advanced its PI-07 foundation model to achieve general-purpose physical AI capable of zero-shot generalization across diverse appliances and robots without task-specific retraining. By integrating multi-timescale memory and optimized reinforcement learning strategies, the organization significantly improves task throughput and reliability for complex manipulation scenarios like kitchen workflows. Currently deployed by YC-backed companies for real-world applications, these models represent a shift toward "out-of-the-box" generalist agents that can operate autonomously in unstructured environments.
- Y Combinator15 min
Circleback CEO Ali Haghani: Why Your Company Should Be Recording More Meetings
Circleback, a YC Winter 24 batch company, functions as an AI-driven "company brain" that records, transcribes, and orchestrates team conversations to automatically generate notes and update CRM systems. Founder Ali employs the platform to manage recruitment pipelines and partner relationships while utilizing a specialized workflow that combines AI-generated code with strategic oversight to accelerate product development. The organization is simultaneously establishing rigorous governance protocols for autonomous agents and shifting its operational focus toward high-leverage decision-making as it transitions from manual coding to AI orchestration.
- Y Combinator42 min
Peter Steinberger: What Happens When 4.7 Million People Let It Cook
Launched in November 2024 by a solo developer to solve personal automation needs, the open-source agent project "OpenClaw" rapidly evolved into a viral community initiative that engaged over 18,000 contributors and achieved 4.7 million weekly downloads by mid-2025. Rather than accepting venture capital or acquisition offers, the founder established a 501(c)(3) non-profit status with Nvidia support to maintain independence while addressing security misconceptions and refining the architecture for multimodal voice interactions. The project's trajectory highlights a strategic shift from proprietary models to open-weight alternatives, ultimately serving as a case study on sustaining developer velocity through personal enjoyment and rigorous community governance.
- Y Combinator1h 24m
Why Robotics Still Isn't Solved - But Could Be Soon | YC Paper Club
Francois Chaubard, Marcel Torne, Milan Ganai, Tyler Ga Wei Lum, Niko West, Bill Jiao, Guanming Wang, Shyam Gollakota
Recent industry presentations address critical scaling barriers in robotics, including Sim-to-Real gaps, deformable object handling, and the lack of sensory feedback by introducing specialized architectures like Multi-Scale Embodied Memory and self-supervised Chain of Thought frameworks. Concurrently, a strategic shift toward "Robotics Application Companies" emphasizes proprietary data collection and teleoperation over generalist models, while new World Action Model optimizations reduce inference latency to enable real-time physical AI deployment. These technical and business advancements collectively aim to transition robotics from isolated demos to mass-market, long-horizon task execution.