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Hosted by Y Combinator · 🇺🇸 US · EN-US · 309 episodes
Established thought leaders with verified media credentials.
We help founders make something people want. The Y Combinator Podcast is where builders talk about building. From the earliest days of an idea to scaling a company that changes the world, YC partners and founders share real stories, lessons, and tactics from the frontlines.
Y Combinator hosts Y Combinator Startup Podcast, a technology show with 309 episodes published.
Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, for long periods of time, without a human babysitting them. At Startup S
Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few months later, OpenClaw had exploded into one of the biggest open source
Science is building a retinal implant that restores vision to people who have gone blind. One patient has already used it to read a 300-page novel.Building a company like that requires a lot more than getting the technol
AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing how they build, ship, and stand out. In this episode of Design Review, Stephen Haney, founder of AI-native design tool Paper, joins YC General Partner Aaron E
The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before. At Startup School 2026, YC President & CEO Garry Tan explains why we're entering the era of personal AGI: AI agents that run on your own in
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space. In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space.
Waymo’s first autonomous demo took eighteen months. The product took fifteen years. Today, the Waymo Driver runs 500,000 trips a week — four million fully autonomous miles across fifteen cities, with 17 times fewer serio
In 2009, Patrick and John Collison went to Startup School in Berkeley, got sushi in Potrero Hill afterward, and decided on the walk home to start Stripe. The reasoning, as Patrick remembers it, was that “we might as well
In 2001, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat did the math and realized Google’s entire search index would fit in RAM — then shipped it in a few days, and search got fast. In 2013, another napkin calculation showed that three m
Alexandr Wang's advice to his 18-year-old self: develop your own internal compass for how the future will unfold, and hold conviction in it against the noise. At Startup School 2026, the Scale AI (YC S16) founder — now l
In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither. Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic (YC W16), the startup building America’s first supersonic airliner, to change that. At Sta
In 2005, Sam Altman was a Stanford sophomore in YC’s first batch, building a startup in a little Cambridge office while Paul Graham cooked the founders dinner. Twenty years later, as co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, he closed
Fresh off the launch of Opus 5, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny joins Diana Hu at Startup School 2026 to talk about what the newest models can do, how Claude Code came to be, and what it means to build products when the
NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthroughs in modern computing.At Startup School 2026 at Chase Center, Garr
Why do even our best AI models need tens of thousands of examples to learn skills that a human picks up in a handful of tries?Solving this problem is one of the great open challenges in modern AI. World models, which giv
Most founders obsess over dashboards and aggregate metrics, but some of the best product insights come from understanding how individual users actually use their product. In this episode of Startup School, YC's David Lie
Bryant Chou co-founded Webflow, which today powers around 1% of all websites on the internet. Now he's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI-powered website and marketing platform that doesn't just build your sit
Many founders get stuck trying to find the perfect startup idea before they commit. But the perfect idea doesn't exist in the abstract. The only way to find what works is to pick one, go deep, and get feedback from real
Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn't just another tool, it's a new foundation for building products, teams, and c
Some of the biggest companies of the next decade won't be software businesses, they'll be services companies like insurance carriers, law firms, and tax practices rebuilt from scratch with AI doing most of the work. In t
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Y Combinator Startup Podcast is hosted by Y Combinator. The show is categorised under technology and has published 309 episodes.
Y Combinator Startup Podcast has published 309 episodes.
Y Combinator Startup Podcast regularly covers technology. It sits in the technology category.
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Episodes of Y Combinator Startup Podcast average 42 minutes. a focused format where a clear narrative arc and tight preparation matter most.
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