Episodes featuring Y Combinator
Browse episodes where Y Combinator appears as host or guest. View all episodes →
At a YC Paper Club night, Dan Fu of Together AI, Jeffrey Morgan of Ollama, Joe Fioti of Luminal and Liangsheng Yin of SGLang explain why serving models, not training them, is where the cost and hard engineering lie.
Y Combinator's Aaron Epstein talks with Hey Clicky founder Farza Majeed about launch videos. Farza argues that frequent, scripted but casual demos shot on a phone beat expensive produced videos at getting real users.
YC's Aaron talks with Alex Danilowicz, CEO of the AI design tool Magic Patterns, about building it as a non-designer. They demo the product and review startup landing pages to spot what makes them look vibe coded.
Stanford AI safety researchers Clark Barrett and Mykel Kochenderfer join Y Combinator to discuss practical, engineering-based approaches to real AI risks, drawing on methods from aerospace.
Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer, joins Y Combinator to explain how he's running a 60,000-person company with startup speed while betting heavily on AI infrastructure and security.
Y Combinator and guests discuss what comes after GPUs, covering optical computing, neuromorphic chips, and living brain cell cultures as ways to escape AI's energy crisis.
Y Combinator hosts founders from Waddle Labs and RoboCurve to discuss how general-purpose LLMs like Claude and GPT-4o may beat specialized models at controlling robots.
YC partners Garry Tan, Jared Friedman, and Diana Hu break down how hard tech and agentic AI are reshaping startups in 2026, with median batch revenue more than doubling.
Y Combinator's Christina Gilbert, who has closed millions in founder-led sales, shares eight tactics to improve outbound reply rates and fix common targeting mistakes.
At a YC Paper Club night, researchers from Prime Intellect, Stanford and YC argue the harness around a model, not the model itself, drives big gains, covering self-improving harnesses, local AI and YC's QM agent.
Jeffrey Morgan, CEO of Ollama, talks with Y Combinator about how open-source AI models are cutting enterprise costs and giving companies more control than closed alternatives.
Paul Graham shares what makes great founders and successful startups, drawing on lessons from 47 Y Combinator batches that hold true even as AI changes the landscape.
Y Combinator talks with Hart Aerospace CEO Anders Forslin about how his company built and flew the world's largest electric aircraft and the strategies behind scaling a hardware startup.
Max Junestrand of Legora joins Y Combinator to discuss how his AI legal startup grew from zero to $100M ARR in 18 months through rapid learning and execution.
Y Combinator's Data Club panel of founders and researchers makes the case that data quality, not compute or architecture, is now the main bottleneck in AI development.
Michael Kratsios, White House Director of Science and Technology Policy, joins Y Combinator to explain how U.S. AI policy gets made and what it means for startup founders.
Susan Kare, who designed the original Macintosh icons, talks through the design principles that made early Mac graphics clear and lasting.
Chelsea Finn of Physical Intelligence talks with Y Combinator about how robots are moving from single-task machines to general-purpose AI systems ready for real-world deployment.
Ali Haghani, CEO of Circleback, joins Y Combinator to discuss why recording all company meetings helps AI agents work better and lets founders focus on strategy.
Peter Steinberger tells Y Combinator how his open-source coding agent grew to 4.7 million weekly downloads and what he learned navigating viral growth, security crises, and AI vendor dependency.