Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 564 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator56 min
How To Design In The Agent Era
Led by Stephen Haney, Paper is an AI-native design platform currently ranking as the third most-used tool behind Figma and Sketch, utilizing a native HTML and CSS rendering engine to facilitate precise agent collaboration. The application distinguishes itself by treating code as the single source of truth, offering features like direct React component handoff and an MCP server that allows autonomous agents to manipulate local repositories and design canvases. While the team prioritizes human curation to maintain design quality against common AI aesthetic pitfalls, the platform is rapidly evolving into a visual coordination layer for the broader agent ecosystem by integrating tools like Paper Shaders and multi-model image generation.
- Y Combinator42 min
Garry Tan: The Future of AGI Is Personal
The speaker advocates for "Personal AGI," a system of user-owned agents that process vast personal context on private infrastructure to drastically increase output and preserve cognitive independence. Drawing parallels to Baruch Spinoza's rejection of institutional compromise, the talk details how "skill files" and hybrid architectures enable individuals to replace traditional workforces with scalable, compounding digital labor. This shift promises to democratize high-level execution by allowing founders to achieve unprecedented economic leverage while retaining full ownership of their generated knowledge and intellectual tools.
- Y Combinator36 min
The Case For Data Centers In Space
Philip Johnston, Mark Mandelmann
Founded by Philip Johnston in 2024 and backed by a $170 million Series A from Benchmark, StarCloud has emerged as YC's fastest-growing unicorn by pioneering orbital data centers to bypass terrestrial energy constraints. The company successfully launched its first satellite in November 2025, deploying custom-modified GPU hardware and thermal management systems to run AI models like Gemini while utilizing automotive-grade components to mitigate radiation risks. With plans to scale to 88,000 satellites by 2028 and deploy high-bandwidth compute for government and hyperscale customers, StarCloud aims to eventually generate terawatts of processing capacity through partnerships with SpaceX and NVIDIA.
- Y Combinator49 min
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work
Waymo has advanced its fully autonomous fleet to operate 500 weekly trips across 15 U.S. cities, achieving a safety record 17 times better than human drivers through a multimodal sensor architecture and a foundation model utilizing both fast geometric reactions and slow semantic reasoning. The company addresses the unique challenges of physical AI by integrating real-world data into a generative simulation ecosystem that creates rare edge cases for training, while its "Safety and Readiness Framework" rigorously validates performance to ensure public trust and regulatory compliance. Looking ahead, this structural augmentation and flywheel of agent, simulator, and critic data positions Waymo to expand its technology beyond personal vehicles into trucking and broader physical applications.
- Y Combinator31 min
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?
Patrick Collison shares his journey from dropping out of college twice to launching Stripe, emphasizing the critical role of retaining "cognitive L1 cache" over reliance on AI tools for deep reasoning. He highlights that while new business formation on Stripe has doubled and AI is accelerating revenue milestones, entrepreneurs should remain wary of decentralization fears and instead focus on solving visceral customer problems like legacy payment friction. Collison concludes by advising founders to build fundamental knowledge of first principles and to assess whether their chosen venture is a cause they are willing to pursue for decades.
- Y Combinator1h 16m
Kernels and Chips: Cursor, NVIDIA, and Meta Researchers on GPU Performance | YC Paper Club
Stuart Sul, John, Francois Chaubard, Jon Saad-Falcon, Mark Saroufim, Misha Smelyanskiy, Brennan Shacklett
The event synthesizes critical industry shifts toward specialized ASICs and disaggregated architectures that separate training and inference workloads to maximize intelligence per watt. Technical deep dives highlight breakthroughs in multi-GPU kernel optimization and local inference, demonstrating that consumer accelerators can now deliver nearly 90% of frontier model utility while reducing energy costs by 70%. These innovations collectively address systemic bottlenecks in network communication and latency, establishing a roadmap for distributed, cost-efficient AI ecosystems that minimize reliance on centralized cloud resources.
- Y Combinator32 min
Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity”
Alexander Wang discusses his journey from founding Scale AI to leading Meta's Frontier Lab, where he is developing the Muse Spark model to deliver frontier-level AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost. He argues that the immediate future of the industry will be defined by agentic looping and the orchestration of autonomous agents rather than raw model size, predicting a massive expansion in global GDP driven by these technologies. Wang concludes by advising founders to build independent convictions based on first principles while emphasizing that systematic thinking and vision are becoming the scarce resources in an era of abundant computational intelligence.
- Y Combinator50 min
Blake Scholl: How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jet
Founded by Blake Scholl in 2014, Boom Supersonic successfully developed the XB-1, the first privately built jet to break the sound barrier, using a lean team and software-driven engineering to overcome decades of aviation stagnation. This historic flight directly catalyzed a shift in US federal policy, prompting an Executive Order that legalized supersonic flight over land and clearing the path for the upcoming Overture airliner. By vertically integrating manufacturing and creating revenue through ground-based engines, the company aims to double global travel speeds while eliminating the traditional sonic boom barrier.
- Y Combinator39 min
Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"
Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Garry Tan
Sam Altman and Y Combinator highlight an exponential shift in startup capabilities where coding agents reduce development time to mere seconds while hard tech representation in the portfolio surges to 25%. The organization positions itself as a decentralizing force to prevent single-entity control of AI power, explicitly rejecting the "live action role play" mindset in favor of heretical, high-conviction building. Altman warns of safety risks regarding surveillance and model concentration but maintains that widespread founder agency and distributed innovation will ultimately prevent economic collapse or catastrophic safety incidents.
- Y Combinator36 min
Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt
The Opus 5 model release demonstrates a 30% score on the ARC AGI benchmark and unprecedented autonomous endurance by eliminating over 80% of legacy system prompts through an empirical ablation methodology. This shift enabled dynamic workflows where thousands of agents autonomously rewrote complex software stacks like the Bunn runtime and Cloud Code desktop app in mere days. Strategic advice for developers emphasizes replacing rigid prompt engineering with context design and verification protocols to leverage these emergent agentic capabilities effectively.
- Y Combinator48 min
What Actually Makes A Startup Durable
Paul Graham and YC partners outline a strategic framework for navigating the AI era, emphasizing that while AI increases individual productivity by 1,000x, founders must target "hard" problems with durable moats to survive market saturation. The session advises building companies through co-founders who provide essential emotional support rather than just complementary skills, noting that human judgment remains critical for community building and navigating high-stakes pivots. Finally, students are offered over $25,000 in AI credits to neutralize geographical disadvantages, reinforcing the program's focus on rapid execution and deep market engagement over theoretical development.
- Y Combinator29 min
What Big Tech Missed And How Startups Can Still Win
Alexandre LeBrun, Zuckerberg, Jan, Alex
Ami Labs is raising approximately one billion euros in seed funding to develop foundational world models that train on sensory data rather than text, addressing the limitations of current large language models for robotics applications. Co-founded by Alex K. and Yann LeCun following their shared history at Meta and various startups, the Paris-based company aims to build general-purpose robots capable of operating safely in open environments by solving the compute bottlenecks and latency issues inherent in existing vision-language-action architectures. While the venture tackles the high capital demands of securing thousands of GPUs and top-tier talent, it operates under a strict strategic constraint where failure to deliver visible progress within two years could render the company unsustainable due to the intense external expectations created by the massive funding round.
- Y Combinator20 min
Why Physical AI Is the Next Platform Shift
Anchored, founded by former quantitative trader Eric Landau, constructs the data layer for physical AI by managing petabytes of multimodal data to power robotics and autonomous systems. After pivoting from healthcare vision to broader industrial applications, the company established a production-ready facility in the Bay Area and refined its sales culture through iterative hiring challenges. With the post-ChatGPT market accelerating demand for specialized physical AI infrastructure, Anchored now leads a crowded sector by offering scalable data collection that moves clients from proof-of-concept to enterprise production.
- Y Combinator30 min
What Top AI Labs Are Really Doing With Observability
Founded by IBM veterans Olivier Pomel and Alexi Laurent, Datadog disrupted the monitoring industry by merging Dev and Ops into a single platform, overcoming initial Y Combinator rejections and regional venture capital biases to achieve a 2019 IPO. Under a leadership philosophy that prioritizes direct customer engagement over written values, the company has expanded its product suite to serve top AI firms while executing a radical shift where engineers will primarily automate code generation within two quarters. This strategic pivot aims to drastically increase development velocity and reorganize the company around smaller, high-autonomy teams, even as it navigates post-lockup valuation volatility and the rapid evolution of AI-driven observability.
- Y Combinator44 min
He Built the World's #1 Open-Source Coding Agent
Jay V, Gary Tan, Mark Mandelmann, Seth Vargoevic, Frank, Dax, Dylan Patel, Soyal, PG, Jay Poldinger
OpenCode, a sixteen-year-old platform founded by Jay Poldinger and Frank, has grown to 13 million monthly active users and processes 7 trillion daily tokens by serving as a neutral model harness that bypasses vendor lock-in. The company's strategy of supporting over 70 open-source models, which became critical after Anthropic restricted open usage, generated $160,000 in monthly subscription revenue and an estimated $33 million in inference revenue as of June. With significant adoption in China, Brazil, and the United States, OpenCode validates its product-market fit through enterprise organizations that proactively seek security agreements to integrate its agent loops into internal workflows.