Episodes featuring Y Combinator
Browse episodes where Y Combinator appears as host or guest. View all episodes →
Y Combinator's robotics panel discusses why autonomous robotics is still unsolved and why companies targeting specific business problems with teleoperation and fine-tuned models are the best near-term path.
Max Hodak, CEO of retinal prosthesis company Science, talks with Y Combinator about why deep tech startups fail from weak internal systems, not weak technology.
Stephen Haney, founder of Paper, joins Y Combinator to discuss how to design software in the AI agent era by using agents to iterate faster while keeping humans in charge of quality.
Garry Tan makes the case that founders and professionals can build their own AI agents today, achieving 8-100x productivity gains without waiting for centralized AGI.
Philip Johnston, CEO of StarCloud, joins Y Combinator to explain why his company is building data centers in space to meet AI computing demand while avoiding Earth's energy and regulatory limits.
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov joins Y Combinator to explain why a working autonomous vehicle demo is only 1% of the engineering work needed to reach safe, production-scale deployment.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison talks with Y Combinator at Startup School about learning in the AI era, dropping out, Stripe's slow launch, and why Stripe data suggests it's never been a better time to start a company.
Jeff Dean joins Y Combinator to share frameworks for building AI products, covering inference optimization, agent systems, and how small teams can compete by dominating specialized domains.
Y Combinator Paper Club gathers systems researchers to discuss AI hardware and software optimization, covering GPU kernel efficiency, heterogeneous inference, and where compute is headed next.
Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, talks with Y Combinator about spotting AI as an exponential trend early, building data infrastructure, and using AI agents to multiply organizational output.
Blake Scholl of Boom Aerospace joins Y Combinator to explain how a 50-person team broke the sound barrier by treating hardware development like software.
Sam Altman joins Y Combinator to explain why now is the best time to start a company, covering AI's impact on development, co-founders, and avoiding cynicism.
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, talks with Y Combinator about why removing constraints from AI models unlocks far more capability than adding instructions or rigid scaffolding.
Jensen Huang joins Y Combinator to discuss how NVIDIA was built on a flawed founding technology, and why mindset, learning, and confronting reality matter more than picking the right idea.
Y Combinator partners discuss what makes startups last in the AI era, arguing that pure software is no longer defensible and founders must find the genuinely hard problem competitors cannot copy.
Alexandre LeBrun, Wit.ai founder and now CEO of Ami Labs with Yann LeCun, tells Y Combinator why he is betting on world models over LLMs, and how startups can beat big tech by taking risks.
Eric Landau, co-founder of Encord, talks with Y Combinator about why physical AI is the next big platform shift and what he learned building a data infrastructure company from scratch.
Olivier Pomel, co-founder of Datadog, tells Y Combinator how two French engineers built a billion-dollar cloud monitoring company from New York despite early rejections and skeptical investors.
Photoroom's founders talk with Y Combinator about how they grew past $20M ARR by treating ambition as a learnable skill, not a personality trait.
Stanislas Polu, co-founder of Dust, makes the case for building a model-agnostic AI platform for the workplace rather than betting on any single lab or narrow vertical.