#  @ycombinator Y Combinator Y Combinator has been sharing valuable insights and advice for startup founders through various videos and talks. Recently, there has been a focus on AI and its applications, with experts like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alexandr Wang discussing its potential and impact on the future. The organization has also been providing guidance on startup best practices, including fundraising, product development, and hiring. ### Engagements: [------] [#](/creator/youtube::UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/interactions)  - [--] Week [-------] +202% - [--] Month [---------] +51% - [--] Months [---------] -36% - [--] Year [----------] +142% ### Mentions: [---] [#](/creator/youtube::UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/posts_active)  - [--] Week [---] +21% - [--] Month [---] +6% - [--] Months [---] +13% - [--] Year [---] +90% ### Followers: [---------] [#](/creator/youtube::UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/followers)  - [--] Week [---------] +0.47% - [--] Month [---------] +0.94% - [--] Months [---------] +9.20% - [--] Year [---------] +27% ### CreatorRank: [-------] [#](/creator/youtube::UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/influencer_rank)  ### Social Influence **Social category influence** [vc firms](/list/vc-firms) #11 [finance](/list/finance) 26.7% [technology brands](/list/technology-brands) 24.43% [stocks](/list/stocks) 11.76% [celebrities](/list/celebrities) 8.14% [social networks](/list/social-networks) 6.79% [countries](/list/countries) 1.81% [exchanges](/list/exchanges) 1.36% [gaming](/list/gaming) 0.9% [automotive brands](/list/automotive-brands) 0.9% **Social topic influence** [y combinator](/topic/y-combinator) #4, [ai](/topic/ai) 32.58%, [how to](/topic/how-to) 31.22%, [ceo](/topic/ceo) #2585, [future](/topic/future) #3790, [the most](/topic/the-most) 8.6%, [the world](/topic/the-world) 6.79%, [if you](/topic/if-you) 6.79%, [products](/topic/products) 5.88%, [open ai](/topic/open-ai) #2073 **Top accounts mentioned or mentioned by** [@dreamgame](/creator/undefined) [@thehiddenpast987](/creator/undefined) [@andrejkarpathy](/creator/undefined) [@yahoo](/creator/undefined) [@jakewrightnet](/creator/undefined) [@cookedrio](/creator/undefined) [@tinahuang1](/creator/undefined) [@theprimetimeagen](/creator/undefined) [@davidondrej](/creator/undefined) [@nimoplanet](/creator/undefined) [@markuspodcast](/creator/undefined) [@venturekites](/creator/undefined) [@incryptotrust](/creator/undefined) [@trylaurence](/creator/undefined) [@plivoai](/creator/undefined) [@orbitonfinance](/creator/undefined) [@startuparchive_](/creator/undefined) [@somalisintech](/creator/undefined) [@technology_now](/creator/undefined) [@fintechloop](/creator/undefined) **Top assets mentioned** [Alphabet Inc Class A (GOOGL)](/topic/$googl) [DoorDash Inc. (DASH)](/topic/doordash) [Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN)](/topic/coinbase) [Thomson Reuters Corporation (TRI)](/topic/thomson-reuters) [Tesla, Inc. (TSLA)](/topic/tesla) ### Top Social Posts Top posts by engagements in the last [--] hours "Should You Start A Startup Startup School In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Harj Taggar shares his advice on the types of people best suited to be startup founders and how to prepare to start a company in the future. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:48 - How to decide whether to be a startup founder. 02:42 - Resilience is the most important quality 03:35 - Founder of Benchling (S12) 05:11 - Startup resilience - Initial motivation isn't" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BUE-icVYRFU) 2022-11-01T17:13Z 2.1M followers, 538.8K engagements "60 Startup Founders Share How They Met Their Co-Founder At the S23 batch retreat we interviewed [--] founders about how they met their co-founders. By compiling their answers together you get to see their commonalities and differencesand hopefully inspire you to find someone to start a company with. This is the first episode of a new series we're calling Founder FAQ where we'll ask YC founders about their stories and experience. If you're looking for a co-founder sign up for Y Combinator's Co-Founder Matching Platform: https://yc.link/FounderFAQ-cofounder Thank you to all the companies who" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=IyhLAbqDw0k) 2023-07-26T16:22Z 2.1M followers, 71.3K engagements "Why OpenClaw Broke The Internet What Sets OpenClaw Apart From Other Agents YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JhJPeF8DGL0) 2026-02-12T18:04Z 2.1M followers, 17.9K engagements "AI Is Eating Logistics Logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that quietly powers the entire global economy and it's shockingly manual. Ryan Petersen founder & CEO of Flexport joins the Lightcone to break down how AI is finally touching the physical world: making shipping cheaper speeding up global trade and automating work that used to live inside emails spreadsheets and phone calls. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:51 What is Flexport and what are they doing with AI 03:17 When did AI tools become serious at the company 06:27 The benefit of internal hackathons 12:03 What internal AI projects" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=KTmxaMdUbHA) 2025-11-14T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 59.6K engagements "Kirsty Nathoo - Managing Startup Finances YC Partner and CFO Kirsty Nathoo shares the most common mistakes startups make with their finances and how they can prevent them. You can find the lecture slides and transcript here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/70 Find more Startup School and YC content at https://www.startupschool.org/library. YC Y Combinator startup school YC Y Combinator startup school" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LBC16jhiwak) 2019-08-22T14:54Z 2.1M followers, 296.9K engagements "Eric Migicovsky - How to Talk to Users YC Partner Eric Migicovsky outlines a framework for asking questions and collecting feedback from your users. This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:27 Best founders maintain a direct connection to users 00:02:03 Write code and talk to users 00:02:43 The Mom Test book - Three common errors when conducting user interviews 00:03:22 [--]. Talk about their" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=MT4Ig2uqjTc) 2019-07-25T18:32Z 2.1M followers, 465.6K engagements "The Truth About Building AI Startups Today In the first episode of the Lightcone Podcast YC Group Partners dig into everything they have learned working with the top founders building AI startups today. They share the ideas that are working particularly well mistakes to avoid and take a look at the competitive landscape among the current AI giants. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Intro 00:41 The Lightcone Podcast 01:53 YC Recent Batch 03:34 College Students and AI Startups 04:44 AI Startup Success Factors 05:53 Opportunities in Mundane AI Tasks 07:30 Beware of" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TwDJhUJL-5o) 2024-02-08T21:04Z 2.1M followers, 547.1K engagements "Building Confidence In Yourself and Your Ideas One trait that many great founders share is conviction. In this episode of Dalton & Michael well talk about finding confidence in what you're building the dangers of inaccurate assumptions and a question founders need to ask themselves before they start trying to sell to anyone else. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Coming Up 00:16 - Intro: How Fast Is Too Fast 00:26 - Rigorous Thinking 02:10 - Superficial Validation 03:26 -" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=al-15mMAS18) 2024-02-29T22:58Z 2.1M followers, 193.5K engagements "The Truth About The AI Bubble [----] was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode the YC partners break down the surprises of the year from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the application layer and why the next wave of AI startups may be just getting started. 00:00 Intro 00:50 Anthropic models are most preferred in the latest YC batch 05:36 Why arent there more AI consumer apps 07:01 Swapping models in and out is becoming the norm 09:08 The big AI bubble question 14:37 Space as the solve for data centers" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=cqrJzG03ENE) 2025-12-22T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 100K engagements "The Startup Playbook for Hiring Your First Engineers and AEs Most founders think hiring is about interviewing. But it's actually about selling. For Startup School Juicebox co-founder & CEO David Paffenholz joins YC's Harj Taggar to share how early-stage founders can find pitch and close top engineering and sales talent from crafting better outreach to winning great hires from Big Tech even when you're an unknown startup. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 0:00 Why your first hires matter 1:17 What great" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=i_PjjXKNpA4) 2025-11-07T17:58Z 2.1M followers, 37K engagements "Kevin Hale - Startup Pricing [---] YC Partner Kevin Hale goes over the fundamentals of pricing and monetization how it affects your customer acquisition strategy and how to optimize it through a few rules of thumb. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6h-startup-pricing-101 This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 1:35 ROI of monetization 2:50 The pricing thermometer 5:00 Pricing mistakes 6:34 Stages of a" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=jwXlo9gy_k4) 2019-09-06T17:33Z 2.1M followers, 205.8K engagements "Why Your Startup Website Isn't Converting Jorn van Dijk is the CEO and co-founder of Framer one of the most influential website design platforms in the world. As a designer-turned-founder Jorn has helped shape how modern startups think about the power of design when telling their stories. In this episode of Design Review YCs Aaron Epstein sat down with Jorn to review user-submitted websites built using Framer. They'll share practical advice on how to clearly communicate what your product does when animation helps (and when it hurts) and how to use Framers powerful tools without ending up with" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=leQ89XSHILw) 2026-01-29T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 20.4K engagements "We're All Addicted To Claude Code Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings Maybe they're addicted to coding agents In this episode of Lightcone Calvin French-Owen a co-founder of Segment and former engineer on OpenAI's Codex team joins us to talk about why coding agents suddenly feel so powerful the differences between Codex Claude Code and Cursor and what the future of work will look like. 0:00 Intro 1:15 Garry cant stop using Claude Code 4:00 Contrast with IDEs context-splitting 6:23 Distribution models top down vs bottom up 9:11 Licensing and" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qwmmWzPnhog) 2026-02-06T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 83.9K engagements "Most Important Lifestyle Habits Of Successful Founders Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best approaches to developing a healthy lifestyle that ultimately helps you run and grow a successful startup. Take care of yourselves out there. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:35 - Plan for the punches 01:50 - Adulting harder 03:07 - Audit how you live 04:05 - Good & Bad Habits 07:23 - Information diet 09:22 - Salary bump 12:51 - Hard conversations" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0IShllkCHtY) 2022-07-22T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 472K engagements "AI Native Hedge Funds AI Native Hedge Funds YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=3-Zj8i8XNP8) 2026-02-11T15:58Z 2.1M followers, 22.3K engagements "Great founders actually build" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4jVyyL_AX7c) 2024-05-22T16:18Z 2.1M followers, 150.4K engagements "OpenClaw Creator: Why 80% Of Apps Will Disappear Youve probably already heard all about OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot). The viral sensation is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own device connects with messaging apps you already use and goes beyond chat to actually execute tasks like managing your email calendars files workflows and more. Now meet the man behind it. YCs Raphael Schaad sat down with Peter Steinberger the creator of OpenClaw to discuss the aha moment behind the viral personal AI agent why local-first agents could replace many of todays apps and how personal" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4uzGDAoNOZc) 2026-02-07T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 465.1K engagements "Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School [----] Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook at Y Combinator Startup School on October [--] [----]. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Presented in Stanford Memorial Auditorium by Y Combinator and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Y Combinator Facebook Mark Zuckerberg Startup School [----] YC Y Combinator Facebook Mark Zuckerberg Startup School [----] YC" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=5bJi7k-y1Lo) 2013-10-25T10:40Z 2.1M followers, 643.2K engagements "Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI Transforming Work With Agents & Competing With China Alexandr Wang started Scale AI to help machine learning teams label data faster. It started as a simple API for human labor but behind the scenes he was tackling a much bigger problem: how to turn messy real-world data into something AI could learn from. Today that early idea powers a multi-hundred-million-dollar engine behind America's AI infrastructurefueling everything from Fortune [---] workflows to real-time military planning. Just last week Meta agreed to invest over $14 billion in Scale valuing the" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=5noIKN8t69U) 2025-06-18T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 342.6K engagements "How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails Startup School Whether it's for sales recruiting or making new connections cold outreach is a necessary tool for helping build your startup. But as you probably know most cold emails either are ignored or end up in the trash. So what can you do to make sure your emails break through the noise In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein shares expert advice on how to write cold emails that have all the right ingredients to get noticed and convert new customers. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=7Kh_fpxP1yY) 2024-09-12T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 108.4K engagements "How to Apply and Succeed at Y Combinator by Dalton Caldwell YC Partner Dalton Caldwell gives insight into how YC admissions works and what makes for a successful YC experience. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6t-how-to-apply-and-succeed-at-y-combinator This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 00:35 Why apply to YC 2:53 Creating luck 4:38 Reasons not to apply 10:56 Properties of a good application" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=8yiOcCPvyNE) 2018-09-28T01:19Z 2.1M followers, 226.7K engagements "Vertical AI Agents Could Be 10X Bigger Than SaaS As AI models continue to rapidly improve and compete with one another a new business model is coming into view - vertical AI agents. In this episode of the Lightcone the hosts consider what effect vertical AI agents will have on incumbent SaaS companies what use cases make the most sense and how there could be [---] billion dollar companies in this category alone. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Coming Up 1:01 Jared is fired up about vertical AI agents 7:25 The parallels between early SaaS and LLMs 9:09 Why didnt the big" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ASABxNenD_U) 2024-11-22T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 968.4K engagements "How to Apply And Succeed at Y Combinator Startup School YC Group Partner Dalton Caldwell shares his strategies for how to think about applying to YC. This talk goes beyond the information on YC's website and reflects Dalton's latest advice on the topic. (Fun Fact: An earlier version of this talk is frequently mentioned by YC founders as instrumental in their decision to apply to YC and to getting in) Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Why It's Worth Applying to" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=B5tU2447OK8) 2023-05-12T17:45Z 2.1M followers, 348.6K engagements "How David Lieb Turned a Failing Startup Into Google Photos Backstory YC General Partner David Liebs story is all about perseverance. In [----] he co-founded Bump an app used by 150M people to share photos and contact info by bumping their phones together. Though he couldnt find a way to turn it into a sustainable business he didnt quit. Instead Lieb and his team pivoted several times got acquired and eventually went on to build Google Photos. In this episode of Backstory Lieb shares his advice for finding the right idea what mistakes to avoid and how to maintain a positive mindset no matter" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=CcnwFJqEnxU) 2024-12-18T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 366.5K engagements "The Sales Playbook For Founders Startup School Navigating B2B sales for the first time can feel slow and overwhelming. Drawing from his experience founding Monzo and GoCardless YC's Tom Blomfield shares his playbook for running a tight sales process that lands real recurring revenue. He walks through each stepfree and paid pilots opt-out contracts long-term dealsand shows how to prove value and close customers. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:21 - The Typical B2B Sales Progression 01:00 - Common Pitfalls" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DH7REvnQ1y4) 2025-08-15T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 101.2K engagements "State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents At first prompting seemed to be a temporary workaround for getting the most out of large language models. But over time it's become critical to the way we interact with AI. On the Lightcone Garry Harj Diana and Jared break down what they've learned from working with hundreds of founders building with LLMs: why prompting still matters where it breaks down and how teams are making it more reliable in production. They share real examples of prompts that failed how companies are testing for quality and what the best teams are doing to make LLM outputs" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DL82mGde6wo) 2025-05-30T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 320K engagements "Good News For Startups: Enterprise Is Bad At AI MIT's new State of AI in Business report went viral for claiming that 95% of enterprise AI projects fail. But the real story isn't that AI doesn't work it's just big companies can't build it. In this episode of the Lightcone Garry Harj Diana and Jared break down what the study really says why in-house enterprise AI efforts keep stalling and how startups are filling the gap with products that learn integrate and actually deliver value. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 2:08 The enterprise AI adoption gap and why the failure rate is high 3:32 Even Apple can be" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DULfEcPR0Gc) 2025-10-30T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 118.7K engagements "Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Reviews Startup Websites Stripes Head of Design Katie Dill is one of the most influential designers in Silicon Valley. Before joining Stripe she led the design team at Lyft and was Head of Experience Design at Airbnb. Throughout her career shes leveraged the power of great design to help build a few of the most successful companies in the world. So whats the secret to her success For Katie its all about focusing on the details and making sure that every pixel counts. In this episode YCs Aaron Epstein and Katie Dill review startup landing pages with a focus on" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DY5Z-uZ6ZMc) 2024-10-01T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 92.8K engagements "Startup Experts Reveal Their Favorite Pivot Stories You might think that pivoting is something done only by the startups that dont make it. In reality a huge number of the best startups pivoted. In this first episode of our new series Office Hours Y Combinator Group Partners share their favorite stories of entrepreneurs who pivoted and went on to build game-changing companies. The group of startup experts also share their own pivot stories and help answer the questions: How do you know if its time for your startup to pivotand how will you know if that next idea is the one Apply to Y" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DmehFuCMtvc) 2023-07-21T17:34Z 2.1M followers, 151.8K engagements "How To Find A Co-Founder Startup School Building a startup and trying to break into an established market is very difficult especially if youre trying to do it alone Thats why its critical to find the right co-founder for the journey. In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Harj Taggar explains why you need a co-founder when to bring them on where you can find one and how to maintain the relationship. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 02:55 - Should you" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Fk9BCr5pLTU) 2024-09-27T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 111.2K engagements "How Do Billion Dollar Startups Start The biggest companies in the world all had to start somewhere. In this episode of Office Hours the Group Partners explore the humble origins of several top YC companies to try and identify common traits of the most successful founders. Theyll explore what it takes to keep your company alive in the early days where to focus your energy and how to find product market fit that leads you to mega success. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc)" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=HB3l1BPi7zo) 2024-10-11T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 122.6K engagements "The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup Many startups fail because they run out of money. So how should you think about how to spend the money you raise In this episode of Office Hours YC General Partners Brad Flora Pete Koomen Nicolas Dessaigne and Gustaf Alstrmer discuss how to spend responsibly at each stage of a startup including advice on when to hire whether to invest in marketing and what spending mistakes to avoid. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:40 - How to think about money" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=IRROi-Q1V44) 2025-02-12T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 73.4K engagements "Secrets You Can Learn From Your Customers YC partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how spending real time with your users can unlock insights and growth. Hear the stories of how Airbnb and Brex built billion-dollar companies by forging genuine connections with customers. Learn why having too much money and too many people can actually slow down learning. And discover how to accelerate insight into your product by making your users feel special. Successful startups dont just build technology they solve human problems. The key is listening to the people who really matter: your" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=IdwYMfM2QMs) 2023-04-28T22:02Z 2.1M followers, 87.5K engagements "Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale A little over ten years ago Paul Graham published the essay "Do Things That Don't Scale." At the time it was highly controversial advice that spoke to the drastically different needs of an early startup versus the needs of a much larger more established company. YC Partners discuss PG's essay its influence on Silicon Valley and some prime examples of YC founders that embraced the mantra "Do Things That Don't Scale." Read Paul Graham's essay here: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-apply Work at" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=IjPDIjge81o) 2024-05-30T17:43Z 2.1M followers, 216.5K engagements "Transformers Explained: The Discovery That Changed AI Forever Nearly every modern AI model from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok is built on the same foundation: the Transformer. In this video YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough [----] paper Attention Is All You Need the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JZLZQVmfGn8) 2025-10-23T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 88.8K engagements "Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again) Andrej Karpathy's keynote on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/viewusp=sharing Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:25 - Software evolution: From [---] to [---] 04:40 - Programming in English: Rise of Software [---] 06:10 - LLMs as utilities fabs and operating systems 11:04 - The new LLM OS and historical computing analogies 14:39 - Psychology of LLMs: People spirits and cognitive quirks 18:22 - Designing LLM apps with partial autonomy 23:40 - The" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ) 2025-06-19T01:05Z 2.1M followers, 2.4M engagements "50 Founders Share How They Got Their First Customers At the start of the S23 batch we interviewed [--] founders about how they managed to get their very first customers. It's a snapshot in time that highlights the different tactics YC founders employ in the early stages to get their companies up and running. Hopefully their experience will offer some insights for anyone wondering about how exactly to go after that first customer. Thank you to all the companies who volunteered to be interviewed for this episode: Artie CandorIQ Accend Mantlebio Fleet Works Sweetspot Shasta Health Kapa Ohmic" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=NZp5j5hvn9I) 2023-08-09T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 156.3K engagements "The Student's Guide To Becoming A Successful Startup Founder If you're a high school or college student with big dreams of starting your own company this video is for you. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel two startup founders who started in the early 20s and are now top investors sit down to share the hard-won advice they wish they had known back in high school. Whether you're already running your own startup or just have an idea you can't stop thinking about Caldwell and Seibel will discuss the skills you need to learn now and how to set yourself up for success after graduating school." [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=O5KCB2p6SB8) 2023-04-14T19:46Z 2.1M followers, 123.1K engagements "Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI Andrew Ng on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Andrew Ng has helped shape some of the most influential movements in modern AIfrom online education to deep learning to AI entrepreneurship. In this talk he shares what hes learning now: why execution speed matters more than ever how agentic workflows are changing what startups can build and why concreteness beats vagueness when turning ideas into products. He reflects on the rise of AI coding assistants the shifting bottlenecks in product development and why despite faster software its still" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=RNJCfif1dPY) 2025-07-10T14:02Z 2.1M followers, 423.9K engagements "How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era AI has upended the once "safe" CS career path. New grads are facing unemployment rates twice those of art history majors and a CS degree is no longer a surefire ticket to wealth. At the same time small focused teams are scaling from zero to eight-figure revenue in months. In a special Lightcone Live at AI Startup School Garry Harj Diana and Jared discuss why it's now more important than ever to focus on building real skills domain expertise and agency rather than just chasing credentials. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ShYKkPPhOoc) 2025-07-08T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 350K engagements "Gustaf Alstromer - How to Get Users and Grow YC Partner Gustaf Alstrmer who was most recently a growth expert at Airbnb describes strategies for scaling your user base. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Introduction 2:56 Growth - Startup School [----] 4:02 Why is growth important 4:49 Startups = Growth 12:47 You can impact your growth rate. 15:38 Now measure your retention 19:18 Raise your hand if you are measuring your" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=T9ikpoF2GH0) 2018-09-12T14:57Z 2.1M followers, 402.7K engagements "How To Get AI Startup Ideas Apply to AI Startup School in SF: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus Theres never been a better time to launch an AI startup but many prospective founders find themselves stuck when it comes to thinking of a good idea. In this episode the Lightcone hosts look at different ways breakthroughs can be discovered. Apply to Y Combinator applications for X25 are due Feb 11: https://ycombinator.com/apply Learn more about the startups mentioned in this episode: Salient: https://www.trysalient.com Diode: https://diode.computer Spur: https://www.spurtest.com Datacurve:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TANaRNMbYgk) 2025-02-07T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 273.3K engagements "How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas Startup School YC Group Partner Jared Friedman shares a framework for how to get and evaluate startup ideas. He shares many examples of YC companies and the inside stories of how they came up with the ideas that turned into billion dollar companies. Even if you have an existing idea this talk helps founders confirm that their idea is good and/or provide framework for a future pivot. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Finding a promising" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg) 2022-11-17T16:17Z 2.1M followers, 1.4M engagements "B2B Startup Metrics Startup School In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield discusses one of the most important elements of running any startup: metrics Tom shares what key metrics to track and how to use them to make the best decisions for your company. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:21 - Importance of Metrics 01:16 - Pre-launch Metrics 02:23 - Metric Overload Caution 03:17 - Key Metrics Selection 04:54 - Consistency in Metrics 07:13 -" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_mKeVGSqQac) 2023-12-15T18:15Z 2.1M followers, 120.1K engagements "Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything Chelsea Finn on June 17th [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley where she pioneered metalearning methods and Google Brain Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and cofounder of Physical Intelligence shes using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy real-world environments rather than confined lab setups. In this talk Chelsea traces the evolution of her teams workfrom early experiments on robotic grasping" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=a8-QsBHoH94) 2025-07-22T14:02Z 2.1M followers, 89.3K engagements "Large Spatial Models Large Spatial Models YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bLFl8OffFLE) 2026-02-09T16:31Z 2.1M followers, 22.4K engagements "The best way to price any product Startups Pricing entrepreneurship Startups Pricing entrepreneurship" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=czQxHhp7jec) 2023-02-02T22:37Z 2.1M followers, 210.3K engagements "Co-Founder Mistakes That Kill Companies & How To Avoid Them In the first episode of Rookie Mistakes Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss co-founder mistakes. To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back https://twitter.com/daltonc https://twitter.com/mwseibel Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Rookie Mistakes 00:15 - Note from YC founder 00:32 - Write it down 00:49 - Biggest error - Founders looking for someone with a skill match 01:57 -" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=dlfjs_eEEzs) 2021-11-22T18:00Z 2.1M followers, 171.8K engagements "You should probably still learn how to code" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=esvgwME4NyI) 2024-06-28T17:37Z 2.1M followers, 477.6K engagements "How to Get Your First Customers Startup School YC Partner & Former Head of Growth at Airbnb Gustaf Alstrmer gives tactical advice to answer the question: how do I get my first customers Gustaf will cover this topic for all kinds of companies - whether you're B2B or B2C. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:20 - Outline 00:44 - Do things that don't scale 03:40 - Founders should learn how to do sales 08:45 - The sales funnel 13:50 - Charging your first customer" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=hyYCn_kAngI) 2022-12-29T17:19Z 2.1M followers, 589K engagements "From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups Jake Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th [----] he shared how his team did itfrom picking the right idea to building AI products that actually workand how founders can turn a cool demo into a reliable tool used by real customers. Chapters: 00:00 How We Built a $650M AI Company 01:00 Picking the Right Idea in the AI Era 04:45 Three Types of AI Startups: Assist Replace or Do the Unthinkable 09:25" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=l0h3nAW13ao) 2025-10-28T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 197.6K engagements "The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street Brothers Chaz and Arnie Englander started Model ML after building and selling two YC companies. What began as a tool to help them analyze deals has grown into a full AI-powered workspace purpose-built for financial services empowering firms to create automations and workflows that reflect exactly how their teams operate. And it's already being used by 10% of the world's top investment banks and private equity firms to automate everything from client-ready PowerPoint decks to deep-dive research and due diligence. In this conversation with" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lqokpIme47A) 2025-07-31T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 58.2K engagements "Vertical AI Agents At a recent event a founder asked Sam Altman "If you were [--] and starting a startup today what would you build" His answer: A vertical AI agent. Apply to YC Winter [----] at https://ycombinator.com/apply" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lvmmk85ArWg) 2025-02-03T14:39Z 2.1M followers, 128.7K engagements "Startup Experts Reveal Their Top Productivity Advice There's only so many hours in a day and running a startup will require most of them. So how do you use that time wisely and be more productive In this episode of Office Hours the Group Partners at Y Combinator share their favorite strategies to be more effective and reduce distractions at work. They'll discuss the benefits of maker/manager schedules in addition to the fake work and productivity fads that can do more harm than good. If you're going to build a big business you'll learn it requires working smarter AND harder to win. Apply to Y" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=nF_YWdz6S0Y) 2023-10-06T16:44Z 2.1M followers, 167.5K engagements "Startup Advice: AI GTM Pivoting & How To Hire Every founder faces moments where theyre not sure what to do next such as how to go to market with AI products when to pivot and who to hire. In this episode of Office Hours YC partners Pete Brad Nico and Gustaf answer real questions from founders and share stories about how great teams build conviction learn faster and make better decisions as they grow. Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Building an AI company in a legacy industry 7:00 - Time to grow vs long term defensibility 14:31 - Spending for temporary edge vs waiting for model leap 16:10 - When" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=nGLmpKi-jRU) 2025-10-21T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 42.7K engagements "Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code Superintelligent AI Agents And Why Taste Still Matters Michael Truell co-founder and CEO of Anysphere the company behind Cursor joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all timeand why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=oOylEw3tPQ8) 2025-06-11T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 244.2K engagements "The Secrets To Setting Smarter Goals If you're looking to maximize your startup's potential start by setting the right goals. Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell provide tips and strategies for setting goals that will help keep you and your new business focused on successplus provide examples of bad goals to avoid as a startup. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Setting Goals: The Stupid Games 01:18 - What's a Too Aggressive Goal 03:35 - What are the Fake" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=rE2XaBGHN2I) 2023-01-11T19:13Z 2.1M followers, 167.3K engagements "The secret to better product demos Your stale product demos may be hurting rather than helping. Pete Koomen shares how storytelling can help your customers connect with your product. YC Y Combinator yt:cc=on YC Y Combinator yt:cc=on" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=rNPJKpmp3TM) 2023-05-07T22:18Z 2.1M followers, 58.3K engagements "Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder Two-time founder Rujul Zaparde knows a thing or two about resilience and learning from failure. After dropping out of college to build FlightCar the AirBnB of car-sharing he pivoted to become a product manager at Airbnb and later a visiting partner at YC. In [----] he co-founded Zip a procurement software company that has since raised $370 million and reached a $2.2 billion valuation. In this conversation with managing partner Dalton Caldwell Rujul demystifies the world of enterprise sales shares his hard-earned lessons about" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=rjyJsbUunQ4) 2025-01-08T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 94.6K engagements "Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era For nearly two decades Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes workguiding the company through the rise of mobile the cloud and now the age of AI. In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves and why he believes AI represents the most transformative shift yet. Chapters: 00:00 AI hype vs. reality inside companies 01:00 Early days:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=uqc_vt95GJg) 2025-09-16T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 88.9K engagements "How to Get and Test Startup Ideas - Michael Seibel Michael Seibel on getting and testing startup ideas. Michael is CEO and a Partner at YC. He was the co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv and Socialcam. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:52 Start with a Problem 00:01:26 Personal connection is helpful 00:02:07 Brainstorm with Friends 00:02:38 Once You've Found an Interesting Problem 00:02:45 Why Are You Uniquely Qualified to Work on This Problem 00:03:43 Your MVP" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=vDXkpJw16os) 2019-04-04T22:45Z 2.1M followers, 356.6K engagements "Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design Dylan Field on June 17th [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Dylan Field co-founded Figma to bring the design process online and make it multiplayer. From a meme maker built on WebGL to a design platform powering millions Figmas journey hit a major milestone with its IPO last week. In this conversation Dylan shares the early challenges of building in the browser the early risks and pivotal choices that shaped Figmas growth the principles that guided its product and community and how he thinks about building tools that empower" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=-7Qz7tSTfUU) 2025-08-08T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 36.7K engagements "How To Get Your First Users When you're starting out it isnt enough to just build a minimum viable product. You also need a minimum evolvable product - one that can adapt to the needs of those critical early customers. In this episode of Main Function YC General Partner Ankit Gupta offers an update to the classic MVP playbook. Hell outline strategies for getting your first customers the power of adaptability and how feedback from early users will ultimately shape the future of your product and your company. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0kARDVL2nZg) 2026-01-14T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 85.6K engagements "Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems Multi-agent systems are powerful but hard to build. Think agentic MapReduce with thousands of subagents running in parallel. We're looking for folks who've felt the pain of scaling these systems and want to make operating fleets of agents as easy as deploying a web service. Apply to YC Fall [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0qGjxsMzuxc) 2025-08-01T22:29Z 2.1M followers, 24.5K engagements "Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search Aravind Srinivas on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Aravind Srinivas started Perplexity with one goal: to rethink how we search browse and interact with information online. In this conversation he shares the journey from hacking together a natural-language-to-SQL search tool to building a product used by millions around the world. He talks about the big bet on the AI-powered browser why agentsnot just chatbotsare the next step and how speed accuracy and focus help a startup compete against giants. Along the way he" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=2jOnoTEk-xA) 2025-07-11T14:37Z 2.1M followers, 129.6K engagements "How Much Equity to Give Your Cofounder - Michael Seibel Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on splitting equity between cofounders. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 How much equity to give your cofounders 00:00:23 Equity splits should maximize motivation 00:01:32 Safety mechanism for equity - Vesting and Cliff 00:02:21 More generous with" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=9NhEBVPlJs4) 2019-06-06T16:09Z 2.1M followers, 352.1K engagements "When is the Right Time to Apply to Y Combinator - Jared Friedman Y Combinator partner and Scribd cofounder Jared Friedman answers the question when is the right time to apply to Y Combinator https://twitter.com/snowmaker Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ YC Y Combinator Jared Friedman When is the Right Time to Apply to Y Combinator when should you apply to y combinator when should you apply to yc when to apply to y combinator when to" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=EEy2MYHxAe8) 2019-05-16T17:09Z 2.1M followers, 31.8K engagements "Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents Pivoting In [--] Hours And The Future of Coding Varun Mohan didn't set out to build one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools. He just knew his company had to change or die. After initially betting on GPU virtualization he saw the writing on the wall: if there was a future for his company it would be at the AI application layer not infra. Over a single weekend he and his team pivoted to building Windsurf a tool to help everyone both technical and non-technical write code faster and smarter. In this conversation Varun shares the inside story of how they" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LKgAx7FWva4) 2025-05-02T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 253.1K engagements "From Startup to Scaleup Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman Sam Altman sits down with Reid Hoffman to talk about the key changes founders should think about as they transition from a startup to a scaleup. This conversation took place at The Scaleup Offsite a private CEO gathering hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners in April [----]. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=PB64IQrkID8) 2017-05-31T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 112.5K engagements "How Surbhi Sarna Built A $275M Biotech Company From Nothing In our new documentary series Backstory were profiling the extraordinary Group Partners at the heart of YC. And were kicking it off with Surbhi Sarna YCs first healthcare and biotech focused Group Partner. In [----] Surbhi Sarna sold her company nVision for $275 million to one of the worlds leading healthcare companies. But to understand how Surbhi got where she is today you have to go back to her sophomore year in high school when a cancer scare upended her life and set her on an entirely new path. In this episode Surbhi opens up" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=R2fAYn8R318) 2023-09-29T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 56K engagements "Dont Be Afraid to Talk About Price If you can solve a real problem ask customers what its worthand disqualify the ones who arent ready or willing to buy. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=S07IIpgjFZ4) 2025-09-19T01:51Z 2.1M followers, 26.6K engagements "Things That Don't Scale The Software Edition Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on software hacks that don't scale. Companies discussed include Google Facebook Twitch and imeem. Watch the first video on doing things that don't scale here: https://youtu.be/4RMjQal_c4U Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Do things that don't scale 00:56 - 90/10 solution - Paul Buchheit 01:35 - Gmail 05:40 - Facebook 10:05 - Twitch part [--] 12:07 - Friendster vs MySpace 15:03 - Imeem 16:59 - Twitch part [--] 20:17 - Google 23:39 - Startup advice" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TCPjk8Tpb5c) 2022-02-16T15:30Z 2.1M followers, 193.8K engagements "Fusion Energy Will Power the AI Boom Fusion may still sound like science fictionbut it might not be for much longer. With AI pushing demand for clean power to new highs a breakthrough may finally be close. In this episode of YC Decoded General Partner Gustaf Alstrmer explains the history of fusion the physics behind it and the engineering challenges that stalled it for nearly a century. He also looks at how Helion Energy is approaching the problem differently as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by [----]. Apply to Y Combinator:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=XdigD0LOXx0) 2025-06-06T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 57K engagements "Team and Execution with Sam Altman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 2) How to Start a Startup is a series of video lectures initially given at Stanford in Fall [----]. Lecture Transcript: http://www.tech.genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-2-ideas-products-teams-and-execution-part-ii-annotated Sam Altman finishes up "Ideas Products Teams and Execution" by covering Team and Execution in Lecture [--] of How to Start a Startup. See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec02 Discuss this lecture:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=crMVJAf5TjA) 2017-03-17T16:58Z 2.1M followers, 67.1K engagements "Peter Reinhardt on Finding Product Market Fit at Segment Peter Reinhardt - https://twitter.com/reinpk - is cofounder and CEO of Segment - https://segment.com/ Segment helps companies capture data from every customer touchpoint and send it to the tools where it can be used most effectively. They were part of the YC Summer [----] batch. The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon *** Topics 00:00 - What is Segment 1:30 - Segments first customers 3:05 - Their YC application 4:00 - Going through YC 5:30 - Realizing their first product didnt work 10:30 - Launching" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=l-vfn97QTr0) 2018-09-06T13:08Z 2.1M followers, 75.7K engagements "How to Be a Great Founder with Reid Hoffman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 13) Lecture Transcript: http://www.genius.com/Reid-hoffman-lecture-13-how-to-be-a-great-founder-annotated So you've learned how to get started how to raise money how to build products and how to grow. Reid Hoffman founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock Ventures addresses many of the questions and confusions that might be cropping up - How to be a Great Founder. See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec13 Discuss this lecture:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=pkAum45ubWc) 2017-04-17T20:05Z 2.1M followers, 130.2K engagements "Satya Nadella on Leadership Successful leaders bring clarity create energy and solve over-constrained problemsat every stage" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=suxGr7IO2bA) 2025-08-11T20:23Z 2.1M followers, 31K engagements "Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen For this episode of Design Review YCs Aaron Epstein is joined by Karri Saarinen co-founder & CEO of Linear one of the top designer-founders working today. Together they'll review several sites from the YC community with an eye for how to build and maintain a high-quality brand. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Thank you to these companies for volunteering to have their sites reviewed*: Sprites AI (https://www.sprites.ai/) GigaML (https://gigaml.com/) UnReal Milk (https://www.unrealmilk.com/) Confident AI" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=uEeFsW9343g) 2025-07-25T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 35.8K engagements "Sam Altman on Choosing Projects Creating Value and Finding Purpose Sam Altman - https://twitter.com/sama - expands on ideas that have come up in several of his essays. Specifically: choosing projects creating value and finding purpose. Sams the president of YC Group - https://ycombinator.com/ - and co-chairman of OpenAI - https://openai.com/ The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon *** Topics :55 From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that dont really matter. Its hard to overstate how" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=uEl2KUZ3JWA) 2018-11-08T15:27Z 2.1M followers, 485.2K engagements "Critiquing AI Startup Websites with YC President Garry Tan When it comes to your startup's website you probably have a lot to say but not a lot of time to say it. For this episode of Design Review Group Partner Aaron Epstein invited YC President and CEO Garry Tan to break down whats working (and whats not) on the websites of five different AI startups. Watch along as they provide concrete advice that will help you improve your own site designs regardless of what type of company youre building. And if you'd like to have your startup's website reviewed please submit your info here:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=uIYujpFmvo8) 2023-06-15T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 149.2K engagements "How Nothing Founder Carl Pei Built A Multi-Million Dollar Smartphone Brand In Just [--] Years After co-founding the successful Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus Carl Pei felt the tech industry was missing the fun and wonder he remembered as a dedicated gadget fan growing up in Sweden. Pei decided to launch a new smartphone brand this time with an increased focus on thoughtful user interface and stylish yet practical designs. In only two years the brand known as "Nothing" has gained a cult following and gone to $600 million in annualized revenue. On this episode of The Main Function Pei reflects" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=uZVyBc1CKN0) 2024-08-13T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 127.6K engagements "What Would Elon Musk Work On If He Were [--] Sam Altman asked Elon Musk what he would work in if he were [--] today. This is a clip from a longer interview which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=tnBQmEqBCY0 Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:06 If [--] problems you will work on 00:00:55 AI 00:01:41 Genetics 00:02:06 High bandwidth interface to the brain YC Y Combinator Elon Musk Sam Altman How To Build The Future Advice YC Y Combinator Elon Musk Sam Altman How To Build The Future Advice" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=vVnDE8wSrVo) 2017-01-10T00:32Z 2.1M followers, 5.3M engagements "Stablecoins [---] Crypto is here to stay and stablecoins are the killer use case. They're now a real threat to the legacy payment networks and growth will only accelerate with a better regulatory environment coming. We'd love to fund builders working on stablecoin ideas. Apply to YC Winter [----] at https://ycombinator.com/apply" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=woAM_PbnCak) 2024-11-11T22:15Z 2.1M followers, 12.8K engagements "Early Decision for Students Introducing Early Decision. For students who want to do a startup but also want to finish school first. Apply now get funded the moment you're accepted and do YC after you graduate. ycombinator.com/early-decision" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=xKRCd0ovMqs) 2025-09-24T17:34Z 2.1M followers, 29.8K engagements "Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston on the beginnings of YC" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ywdFD0cAq2E) 2024-09-16T22:03Z 2.1M followers, [----] engagements "David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit David Rusenko details the story of how Weebly developed one of the most popular website creation and hosting sites on the web today. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ YC Y Combinator David Rusenko Startup School Weebly Product Market Fit YC Y Combinator David Rusenko Startup School Weebly Product Market Fit" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0LNQxT9LvM0) 2018-09-05T15:59Z 2.1M followers, 861.5K engagements "Enterprise Sales Startup School Y Combinator Group Partner Pete Koomen led his startup Optimizely to $100M ARR. In this video Pete breaks down the enterprise sales funnel and shares his top tips on how a technical founder can start closing real deals for their startup. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 03:29 - Prospecting 05:15 - Outreach 10:09 - Qualification 15:00 - Pricing 18:13 - Closing 18:58 - Avoid surprises in procurement process 20:02 - Implement 22:01 - Outro" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0fKYVl12VTA) 2024-07-08T18:40Z 2.1M followers, 175.4K engagements "Sam Altman - How to Succeed with a Startup Sam Altman President of Y Combinator shares his thoughts on how you can succeed with a startup. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:11 A product so good people tell friends 00:00:53 Easy to understand 00:01:13 Exponential growth in market 00:02:00 Real trends vs Fake trends 00:03:30 Evangelical founder 00:04:04 Ambitious vision 00:04:22 Hard startup vs Easy" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0lJKucu6HJc) 2018-08-29T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 2.2M engagements "Kevin Hale - How to Pitch Your Startup In this lecture YC Partner Kevin Hale goes over how to package up your idea and communicate it to an investor. He shares his tips on how to craft your pitch in a clear and concise way that effectively grabs your audience's attention. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6q-how-to-pitch-your-startup This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=17XZGUX_9iM) 2019-09-13T13:01Z 2.1M followers, 413.7K engagements "Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP YC CEO and Partner Michael Seibel shares his approach to building an MVP and getting your first users as a pre-launch startup. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvp This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Introduction 0:41 First talk to users 1:40 Goal: launch" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=1hHMwLxN6EM) 2019-08-01T13:21Z 2.1M followers, 830K engagements "Infrastructure for Government Fraud Hunters Infrastructure for Government Fraud Hunters YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=1mUTuQlEnCc) 2026-02-06T17:02Z 2.1M followers, 11.2K engagements "From dorm rooms to million-dollar companies You can just do things. And YC can help. Apply to W26 by November 10: http://ycombinator.com/apply YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=2alXOBCsvJ8) 2025-11-03T18:04Z 2.1M followers, 31.4K engagements "Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets Stoke Space is racing to build the world's first fully reusable rockets that can launch survive reentry and fly again and again. In this episode of Hard Tech YCs Aaron Epstein sits down with Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman to find out why they chose to take on one of the hardest problems in rocket science how an obsession with efficiency gives them an edge and what full reusability could unlock for the future of spaceflight. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=2hgjgycOU_0) 2026-01-08T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 32.5K engagements "Competition is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup 2014: 5) Lecture Transcript: http://www.tech.genius.com/Peter-thiel-lecture-5-business-strategy-and-monopoly-theory-annotated Peter Thiel founder of Paypal and Palantir discusses business strategy and monopoly theory in "Competition is For Losers". See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec05 Discuss this lecture: http://www.startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64034 Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:50 - Outline 00:00:57 -" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k) 2017-03-22T19:32Z 2.1M followers, 2.3M engagements "DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market In this episode of How To Build The Future Garry sits down with Tony Xu Co-founder and CEO of DoorDash to discuss their origin story how the company survived several near death experiences and what it takes to transform an entire industry. Apply for a YC Summer Fellows Grant: https://events.ycombinator.com/summer-fellows Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 02:45 - How they landed on the idea of DoorDash 05:16 - Doing things that" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=3N3TnaViyjk) 2025-03-26T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 192.6K engagements "Do Technical Founders Need Business Co-Founders Whether or not you need a co-founder is always a hotly debated topic but going one level deeper founders often wonder what kind of co-founder they need. Its also common for technical founders to be told by investors and advisors that they would benefit from a co-founder with non-technical expertise in things like business or marketing. Are they correct Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel dive into exactly that question. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=43RhhwpiSk0) 2024-01-11T19:47Z 2.1M followers, 167.6K engagements "The Engineering Unlocks Behind DeepSeek YC Decoded Chinese AI company DeepSeek recently made waves when it announced R1 an open-source reasoning model that it claimed achieved comparable performance to OpenAIs o1 at a fraction of the cost. But for those following AI developments closely DeepSeek and R1 didnt come out of nowhere. In this episode of YC Decoded General Partner Diana Hu breaks down the key engineering optimizations behind DeepSeek's remarkable new models and contextualizes them within the broader history of recent AI breakthroughs. Apply to Y Combinator:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4Tmn-XP93m4) 2025-02-05T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 216.8K engagements "How To Price For B2B Startup School If you're a startup founder how much should you charge for your product or service It's a simple question that can make many lock up. What number should you pick In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield guides you on how to come up with a price and then justify that number to customers. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:19 - The Value Equation 04:28 - Cost 06:26 - Competition 10:08 - Pricing 13:42 - Free" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hjiRmgmHiU) 2024-07-25T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 134K engagements "Franois Chollet: How We Get To AGI Franois Chollet on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Franois Chollet is a leading voice in AI. He's the creator of the Keras library author of Deep Learning with Python and the founder of the ARC Prize a global competition aimed at measuring true general intelligence. He's spent years thinking deeply about what intelligence actually is and why scaling up todays AI models isnt enough to reach it. In this talk he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized skills and lays out a path toward true general intelligence AI that can adapt" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=5QcCeSsNRks) 2025-07-03T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 138.8K engagements "From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn In just a few years James Hawkins took PostHog from an idea hacked together right before YC's W20 deadline to a unicorn powering product analytics for thousands of teams. In this episode of Founder Firesides he sits down with YC's Brad Flora to talk about surviving six months of "pivot hell" why open-source analytics was the breakthrough and how PostHog grew from fighting for its first users to launching full product lines. James also shares what he's learned about momentum staying close to customers and using transparency and humor to build a company" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=5WN8bfG06Hk) 2025-12-10T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 28.7K engagements "The Hard Part About Being Contrarian Some of the biggest breakthroughs like OpenAI and SpaceX started as ideas most people thought were impossible. But the best founders stay contrarian long enough to be right learning from criticism but staying true to their convictions and users who believe in the same vision. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=5uf_ofgv0UE) 2025-10-24T18:59Z 2.1M followers, 25.8K engagements "Elon Musk's Video Game Recommendations Sam Altman asked Elon Musk for video game recommendations. This is a clip from a longer interview which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=tnBQmEqBCY0 Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:00 New video game recommendation 00:00:28 Elon to Sam - Do you play games YC Sam Altman Y Combinator How To Build The Future Advice Elon Musk hearthstone overwatch blizzard video games gaming the last of us uncharted YC Sam Altman Y Combinator How To Build The Future Advice Elon Musk hearthstone overwatch blizzard video games gaming" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=8JoTw_JuE78) 2017-01-10T00:32Z 2.1M followers, 7.4M engagements "Dalton Caldwell - All About Pivoting YC Partner and Head of Admissions Dalton Caldwell talks about pivoting for startups and shares his advice on when and how founders should consider it for their companies. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6p-all-about-pivoting This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Introduction 0:29 What is a "pivot" 1:54 Why pivot 3:09 Good and bad" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=8pNxKX1SUGE) 2019-08-29T15:13Z 2.1M followers, 135.3K engagements "How To Cold Email Investors - Michael Seibel Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on how to cold email investors. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ *** Topics 00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Make it short i.e. [--] seconds or less to read 00:58 - Interested in: the problem you're trying to solve what your solution is have you launched do you have growth how big you think the market could be do you have" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=A3MmYbH1hbs) 2019-09-24T14:25Z 2.1M followers, 125.5K engagements "How To Deal With Setbacks Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best approaches to managing the many setbacks startup founders can face over the lifetime of starting and running a business. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:26 - Punches that land 01:04 - The setback cycle 02:05 - Fundraising 04:27 - YC - No for now 05:42 - Survivorship bias 06:28 - Co-founders 08:02 - The magical deal 09:15 - After the deal credits don't roll 11:21 - A bad launch" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=AWa4qZvtMuY) 2022-05-25T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 100.6K engagements "Tim Brady - How Much Equity Should I Give My First Employees Tim Brady explains how much equity you should offer your early employees. Tim is a partner at YC and was a Co-founder and Partner at Imagine K12. Formerly CEO at QuestBridge and Chief Product Officer at @yahoo. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=B2QdN0-fAbw) 2021-01-25T15:39Z 2.1M followers, 87.8K engagements "How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding Startup School AI can't yet one-shot an entire productbut with the rise of vibe coding it's getting close. YC's Tom Blomfield has spent the last month building side projects with tools like Claude Code Windsurf and Aqua seeing just how far you can push modern LLMs. From writing full-stack apps to debugging with a single paste of an error message AI is becoming a legit collaborator in the dev process. This video is a playbook for anyone who wants to get the most out of vibe coding and build faster. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BJjsfNO5JTo) 2025-04-25T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 344.7K engagements "Top Ways Startups Waste Money Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss what startups waste money onfrom marketing and sales to legal and hiring. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 02:19 - Hiring lies 04:50 - Contractors 06:51 - Marketing spend 09:53 - Brand advertising 11:02 - Approach events like a startup founder 12:20 - PR 16:01 - Lawyers 20:22 - Advisors 24:39 - Devil's advocate Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BtzUo6vL3Iw) 2022-07-07T19:11Z 2.1M followers, 375.9K engagements "Jared Friedman - Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders YC Partner Jared Friedman covers hard-tech companies and why founders should consider starting one. He also covers a couple of the most common problems hard-tech companies face and how to solve them with examples from seven YC companies. You can find the lecture slides and transcript here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/78 Find more Startup School and YC content at https://www.startupschool.org/library. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:36 - Outline 00:56 - What is a Hard Tech Company" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=C1DlZWfI6rk) 2019-09-20T10:46Z 2.1M followers, 91.2K engagements "Michael Seibel - Building Product YC CEO Michael Seibel outlines how successful startups think about building something people want. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:53 What allowed us to survive 00:03:50 What problem are you solving 00:10:11 Who is your customer 00:18:39 Does your MVP actually solve the problem 00:21:10 Which customers should you go after first (the easy ones) 00:25:46 Should you" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=C27RVio2rOs) 2018-09-05T15:59Z 2.1M followers, 1.1M engagements "Why Design Matters: Lessons from Stripe Lyft and Airbnb Stripe Airbnb and Lyft are a few of the most successful companies of the past decade. And there are at least two things they all have in common - great design and Katie Dill. Katie was Head of Experience Design at Airbnb led the design team at Lyft and is now Head of Design at Stripe. We spoke with Katie about her design philosophy what sets companies like Stripe apart and how important it is to instill a culture of design in your startup from day one. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DesignReview-apply Work at a startup:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=CKfERe55CeA) 2024-10-16T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 60.8K engagements "Don't Make These Hiring Mistakes Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the many different mistakes founders make when they approach hiring for their startup and how to grow your team the correct way. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:41 - Challenges in startup hiring 02:15 - Lies about hiring and how it doesn't solve all problems 10:14 - Devil advocate - Big" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=CUZ6PKJZvXE) 2022-05-19T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 128.9K engagements "The Biggest Mistakes First-Time Founders Make - Michael Seibel Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on the biggest mistakes first-time founders make. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ *** Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:10 - Solving a problem you don't care about 01:01 - Helping users you don't care about 01:47 - Choosing co-founders you don't know well" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=D56QeyyQMLI) 2019-08-16T17:04Z 2.1M followers, 337.5K engagements "Should Your Startup Bootstrap or Raise Venture Capital Within the world of startups you'll find lots of discourse online about the experiences of founders bootstrapping their startup versus the founders who have raised venture capital to fund their company. Is one better than the other Truth is it may not be so black and white. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the virtues and struggles of both paths. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Coming Up 00:31 - Lopsided" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=D81y-kh11oI) 2024-02-05T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 210.5K engagements "AI Interfaces Of The Future Design Review AI is dramatically changing the way we interact with software. So for this episode of Design Review YC General Partner Aaron Epstein sat down with Raphael Schaad the founder and designer of Cron (now Notion Calendar) to critique some groundbreaking AI user interfaces. Together theyll review a wide variety of examples from agents and adaptive UI to video prompts and realistic voice APIs all in an effort to get a glimpse of how AI is changing the future of software. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Thank you to these companies for" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DBhSfROq3wU) 2025-02-27T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 171.4K engagements "Ask These Questions Before Starting An AI Startup Jordan Fisher is the co-founder & CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th [----] he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answersasking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away. He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right now What happens when software becomes commoditized How do you build trust as teams shrink and AI takes on more" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DJjZzzPANBY) 2025-10-07T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 46.9K engagements "Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas YC Partner Kevin Hale walks us through the process of evaluating ideas and how founders should think about their startups. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6e-how-to-evaluate-startup-ideas This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ *** Topics" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DOtCl5PU8F0) 2019-07-25T18:32Z 2.1M followers, 746.5K engagements "Understanding SAFEs and Priced Equity Rounds by Kirsty Nathoo YC Partner Kirsty Nathoo gives the lowdown on several different ways to capitalize your company and how those impact founder equity and cap tables overall. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6m-understanding-safes-and-priced-equity-rounds This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Introduction 3:53 SAFEs 10:15" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dk6JNTDec9I) 2018-10-17T14:22Z 2.1M followers, 358.5K engagements "Inference AI Infra in the World of Test-Time Compute Theres room to rebuild the AI infrastructure stack: better software at inference-layer tooling cheaper ways to handle GPU workloads and optimizations that let AI apps scale without bleeding money. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DwgUlVWs5fk) 2025-01-31T21:53Z 2.1M followers, 38.2K engagements "This Startup Is Trying To Delete 29% Of All CO2 Emissions Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something thats never been done before. Theyre building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains. It's a system that captures CO2 from moving vehicles before those emissions ever enter the atmosphere. Then they turn those captured emissions into revenue by selling to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products. In this episode of Hard Tech YCs Gustaf Alstrmer visited Remora's headquarters outside of Detroit to find out how a recent college graduate" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ENG_DQF5E60) 2025-10-09T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 50.5K engagements "Reindustrialize With Modern Metal Mills Reindustrialize With Modern Metal Mills YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=F-KQMMJ73s4) 2026-02-08T04:17Z 2.1M followers, [----] engagements "Simple Products That Became Big Companies Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about OpenSea Gusto and the importance of building simple products that solve a real problem. To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Rookie Mistakes 00:42 - Note from YC founder 01:02 - Boiling the ocean 02:00 - Googlitis 02:32 - OpenSea 04:33 - Gusto 05:34 - Having lots of features is" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=G7TMqY7gkGY) 2022-01-26T15:07Z 2.1M followers, 190.8K engagements "Tarpit Ideas: The Sequel The long awaited follow-up to their original tarpit ideas video Dalton and Michael dispel some misconceptions about what a tarpit idea actually is and how it applies to current technology trends like artificial intelligence. Don't get stuck Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:29 - Tarpit [---] 02:47 - Key Factors 04:18 - Technology & Historical Factor 05:18 - X for Y 06:16 - Current Technology 06:54 - Artificial Intelligence 08:48 - Changing Behavior 10:09 - Arbitrage 12:40 - Takeaway 13:40 - Outro YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=GU9iT7MW0rs) 2024-07-19T18:10Z 2.1M followers, 92.7K engagements "Billion-Dollar Unpopular Startup Ideas Nine out of ten people might tell you you're crazy. The tenth might see what you see. Garry Harj Jared and Diana talk about contrarian bets the ideas that look impossible until they work. From Uber and Coinbase to DoorDash and Flock Safety they share how founders find opportunity where others see dead ends. Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 2:00 - AI verticals are becoming more crowded 6:22 - Non-obvious successes 9:50 - End users can get regulations changed 18:05 - Finding contrarian ideas what founders should look for 25:10 - Flock Safety and selling to local" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o) 2025-10-17T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 120.7K engagements "Vibe Coding Is The Future Andrej Karpathy recently coined the term vibe coding to describe how LLMs are getting so good that devs can simply give in to the vibes embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists. We dive into this new way of programming and what it means for builders in the age of AI. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Intro 0:42 What is vibe coding 1:00 What founders in the current YC batch are saying 4:35 Debugging and building systems 6:59 The models people are using now 10:01 What" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8) 2025-03-05T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 286.8K engagements "Founder Stories: Cathy Di Five minutes before the deadline Cathy Di applied to YC with an idea: Dedalus Labs. Months later she's now running a company that's just raised $11M. The deadline to apply for the winter batch is tonight at 8pm PT - there's still time to get your app in ycombinator.com/apply" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Iks_mTAYE6U) 2025-11-11T01:25Z 2.1M followers, 30.5K engagements "What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs For years we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced and more hopeful. From radiology to software engineering the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster demand for human creativity and judgment grows. YC's Garry Tan explores what history economics and real companies show us that technology doesn't replace people it redefines what we can do. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=IqwSb2hO1jE) 2025-10-14T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 314.3K engagements "Finding Opportunity in Outdated Rules Many big shifts happen when outdated rules no longer match how the world works. The opportunity is in noticing where technology has outpaced the law and building something that clearly benefits users while finding the right path forward. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JLW83-yNuBo) 2025-12-05T17:12Z 2.1M followers, 25.1K engagements "The Next Breakthrough In AI Agents Is Here In recent months AI agents have gone from experimental to increasingly useful with platforms like DeepSeek and OpenAI's Deep Research redefining whats possible. Now a new contender has entered the fieldManus a general purpose AI agent thats managed to capture global attention. In this episode of YC Decoded President and CEO Garry Tan dives into how Manus' unique architecture sets it apart what its launch says about the broader debate around GPT "wrappers" and why they might actually be more valuable than they first appear. Apply to attend our" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JOYSDqJdiro) 2025-04-08T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 278.8K engagements "Where Do Great Startup Ideas Come From Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about where the ideas for Airbnb Coinbase and Stripe came from. Then they discuss what you can learn from these founders. To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Rookie Mistakes 00:30 - [--] common themes 00:35 - [--]. Timing 00:48 - [--]. Idea 00:59 - [--]. Market 01:10 - AirbnB 01:24 - Competition 02:47 -" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jcuqq48CNj8) 2022-01-19T18:22Z 2.1M followers, 214.5K engagements "Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design Tom Brown co-founded Anthropic after helping build GPT-3 at OpenAI. A self-taught engineer he went from getting a B-minus in linear algebra to becoming one of the key people behind AI's scaling breakthroughs. And his work is paying off. Today Anthropic's Claude is the go-to choice for developers and his team is overseeing what he calls "humanity's largest infrastructure buildout ever." On this episode of The Lightcone he discusses his unconventional path from YC founder to AI researcher the discovery of scaling" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JdT78t1Offo) 2025-08-19T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 131.6K engagements "Startup Ideas You Can Now Build With AI There's never been a better time to start an AI company. Not just because there are new ideas but because the tech finally makes old ones actually work. On the Lightcone Garry Harj Diana and Jared talk through the kinds of startups that are suddenly viable thanks to LLMsfrom full-stack law firms to personalized tutors to recruiting platforms that can finally scale. They share the patterns they're seeing the ideas they're excited about and what it means to live at the edge of the future where breakthroughs often look like second chances. If you've been" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=K4s6Cgicw_A) 2025-05-16T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 286.2K engagements "How We Redesigned Our Website In this special episode of Design Review YC General Partner Aaron Epstein and YC Product Designer Eve Bouffard break down how they went about redesigning the YC homepage from the ground up. Theyll discuss the motivations for the redesign the unconventional process they took and lessons for founders building their own sites. Chapters: 00:00 Designing A New Website 01:00 The Old Homepage 02:30 Centering the Story on Founders 04:00 The New Vision: Inspire Dont Sell 05:30 Visualizing Founder Transformation 07:00 Letting Founders Speak for Themselves 08:45 Bringing" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=K5JoLAauzq4) 2026-01-30T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 19.7K engagements "How To Earn Customers For Life In this first in-person episode Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell reveal how startups can gain a competitive advantage by doing something deceptively simple. They share compelling stories of companies that built loyal relationships and achieved success by making personal connections with users. In contrast they discuss the traps early-stage founders make by trying to emulate big tech. If you want to build a business that customers love and that thrives in the long run this advice on why caring deeply about your customers is key. Apply to Y Combinator:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LJay5YW4fLA) 2023-03-03T00:16Z 2.1M followers, 108.3K engagements "Mark Zuckerberg : How to Build the Future Mark is a cofounder of Facebook. Facebook is one of the most influential companies in the history of the world. Over [---] billion people use it every day. Access podcast and transcript versions of this interview here: http://www.ycombinator.com/future/mark/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:12 The early days of Facebook 00:02:17 Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started 00:03:16 Something that made Facebook different from other projects that you built 00:04:26 Advice that you give to other" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lb4IcGF5iTQ) 2016-08-16T17:46Z 2.1M followers, 2M engagements "Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School [----] Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School [----]. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:49 - What was the first thing you wrote 08:19 - Why did Facebook win 12:55 - Network for college students 14:12 - When did you realize you were going to do it 17:16 - Personal quality 18:25 - Was it rougher than typical startups 21:12 - Learn to manage people 22:08 - How to find if someone is really" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=MGsalg2f9js) 2013-10-26T03:36Z 2.1M followers, 890.5K engagements "Founder Stories: Saurav Kumar Saurav Kumar was studying CS at UIUC just a few months ago surrounded by cornfields and lecture halls. Now hes in San Francisco building Fleetline a place where being ambitious and taking risks feels completely normal. Anyone can make that leap. Get your application in to the winter batch by 8pm PT tomorrow. All you need is an idea: ycombinator.com/apply" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mzs31xuhON8) 2025-11-10T02:56Z 2.1M followers, 25.7K engagements "Stablecoin Financial Services Stablecoin Financial Services YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=N8ajU0uav80) 2026-02-10T22:00Z 2.1M followers, [----] engagements "Founder Stories: Priya Khandelwal For Priya Khandelwal and her company Nixo the key to growing fast was being part of a community of founders solving tough problems together. She found that sense of momentum and shared purpose at YC. And so can you. ycombinator.com/apply" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=NDHvK8yKar8) 2025-11-07T00:19Z 2.1M followers, 30.1K engagements "How to Create Luck - Dalton Caldwell Y Combinator Partner Dalton Caldwell Y Combinator partner and founder of imeem and Mixed Media Labs on how to create luck. https://twitter.com/daltonc Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ YC Y Combinator How to Create Luck Luck Startups Dalton Caldwell Partner imeem Mixed Media Labs Advice YC Y Combinator How to Create Luck Luck Startups Dalton Caldwell Partner imeem Mixed Media Labs Advice" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=NmEyx9TEkRw) 2019-05-09T16:19Z 2.1M followers, 42.9K engagements "Why Startup Founders Should Launch Companies Sooner Than They Think Launching a company is often pictured as a big splashy event with lots of media attention and hype. This can be scary It also often results in founders delaying their launches which then stalls the crucial lessons they could be learning. In this video YC Partners discuss this common hesitation and why it can be harmful to the journey and growth of a startup. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 -" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nsx5RDVKZSk) 2024-07-12T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 98.2K engagements "Founder Stories: Rishi Choudhary Before YC Rishi Choudhary was working a regular [--] frustrated by how slow things moved and fighting to build anything new. Now as co-founder of Kastle (YC S24) he's able to finally build products that people really want. And you can too. It's not too late to get your application in. ycombinator.com/apply YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=OUJznQbHkI4) 2025-11-16T18:36Z 2.1M followers, 22.1K engagements "The Line Between Software and Service Max Junestrand founder of Legora says AI is blurring the line between software and service. The best companies at the frontier wont just sell toolstheyll act like partners helping clients win through the transition" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ob-DmZg7pbM) 2025-10-20T20:31Z 2.1M followers, 24.5K engagements "Why Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto We are entering the era of Fintech [---]. Regulatory clarity growing consumer adoption and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto and at YC Base and Coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. In this episode of Main Function YC's Harj Taggar and Base's Jesse Pollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they're most excited to see why this is such an exciting time in crypto and what the future could look like onchain. More on our latest RFS: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/build-onchain Apply to Y" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pdne9xaRLUc) 2025-09-23T14:45Z 2.1M followers, 31.1K engagements "Tom Blomfield: How I Created Two Billion-Dollar Fintech Startups There arent a ton of people in the world who can say they founded a billion dollar company. There are far fewer that can say they did it twice. YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield is one of them. Each episode of our series Backstory will introduce you to one of YCs Group Partners and the path they took to get here. If you aspire to change the world with your startup Tom's story exemplifies the joys and trials of pursuing these ambitious ideas. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/Backstory-apply Work at a Startup:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=QKPgBAnbc10) 2024-01-30T22:02Z 2.1M followers, 240K engagements "Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites Cursor Head of Design Ryo Lu has spent his career at the intersection of design and engineeringfrom building fan sites as a kid to designing products at Stripe Asana and Notion. Now he's rethinking how software itself gets made. On this episode of Design Review Ryo joins YC's Aaron Epstein to break down how great product websites communicate what a company does. They walk through sites from early-stage startups calling out the small choices in structure clarity and brand that help users understand a product instantly and the ones that get in the" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=RynySryqM_0) 2025-11-20T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 147.1K engagements "DoorDash's Application Video for YC S13 In [----] DoorDash applied to Y Combinator's Summer [----] batch and they were accepted. This is their application video. YC Y Combinator Doordash Startup Founder Entrepreneurship YC Y Combinator Doordash Startup Founder Entrepreneurship" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rzlr2tNSl0U) 2020-12-09T17:20Z 2.1M followers, 948.1K engagements "Michael Truell: Building Cursor At [--] Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students Michael Truell on June 17th [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. At [--] Michael Truell has already built Cursor into one of the fastest-growing companies in AI coding hitting $100M ARR in just a year. In this fireside chat with YC General Partner Diana Hu he shares the lessons that came from years of failed projects with his co-founders why he believes programming is still essential even as AI changes how we code and how Cursor is taking on GitHub Copilot with the conviction that all of" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TrXi3naD6Og) 2025-09-03T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 55.1K engagements "The AI Economy Is Stabilizing Jared Friedman reflects on one of his biggest surprises of 2025: how much the AI economy has stabilized. After a period of rapid uncertain change in [----] the ecosystem now feels more mature with clear layersmodels infrastructure and applicationsand a more established playbook for building AI-native companies. While models have continued to improve progress has been incremental rather than disruptive helping the overall market settle. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=UZbXWYY7y-A) 2026-01-15T18:15Z 2.1M followers, 16.2K engagements "Don't Just Check Off Boxes Cursor co-founder and CEO Michael Truell's #1 piece of advice for builders: focus less on credentials and more on curiositybuild things you care about with people you like and respect. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=UjcUUN_u4vQ) 2025-10-29T23:18Z 2.1M followers, 25.8K engagements "Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI ChatGPT's Origins and Building AI Hardware A fireside with Sam Altman on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Sam Altman grew up obsessed with technology broke into the Stanford mainframe as a kid and dropped out to start his first company before turning [--]. In this conversation he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAIsharing what hes learned about ambition the weight of responsibility and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career the limits of personal" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=V979Wd1gmTU) 2025-06-21T16:01Z 2.1M followers, 481.9K engagements "How To Keep Your Users Startup School At YC our motto is make something people want. But how do you actually know if youve accomplished that in the early days One of the best ways to measure successful growth is a concept called cohort retention which tracks the fraction of new users that come back time and time again to use your product. In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner David Lieb explains how to define cohorts track active users and determine the appropriate time frame for measuring successful retention rates. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=VNxBZ7ka5J0) 2024-08-29T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 53.4K engagements "Find a Pain Point Worth Solving Billion dollar ideas are everywhere. Start by finding a painful specific problem one that really matters to someone you know and solve it for them" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=VtDBvmxiXnA) 2025-11-24T20:08Z 2.1M followers, 37.8K engagements "Building The World's First Reusable Rockets Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman explain what motivated them to leave comfortable jobs and take on a problem that had never been solved before - fully reusable rockets. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WI_w9po5oz0) 2026-01-23T17:01Z 2.1M followers, 12.3K engagements "How To Design Better AI Apps In this episode of The Breakdown Tom and Dave are joined by fellow YC General Partner Pete Koomen to lay out a new vision for how AI should actually work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don't want to do. From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators they dig into what it means to build AI-native softwareand why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think. Pete's essay "AI Horseless Carriages":" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WJoZK9sMwvw) 2025-05-23T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 98.5K engagements "The Shortcut Rule Be careful not to optimize for a single metric at the expense of everything else. You might hit the target but miss the pointreal progress comes from keeping the bigger picture in mind" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wdxo3AMd44s) 2025-10-08T21:43Z 2.1M followers, 25.3K engagements "Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws Compute and the Future of AI Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model Ankit Gupta YC General Partner sits down with Nick Joseph Anthropic's Head of Pre-training to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claudefrom managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws data strategies team composition and why the hardest problems in AI are often infrastructure problems not ML problems. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=YFeb3yAxtjE) 2025-09-30T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 28.6K engagements "DoorDash at YC Summer [----] Demo Day In August [----] Tony Xu CEO and co-founder at DoorDash presented to a room full of investors at YC S13 Demo Day. YC Y Combinator Doordash startup Entrepreneurship YC Y Combinator Doordash startup Entrepreneurship" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=YNAOXokK--o) 2020-12-09T17:20Z 2.1M followers, 243.5K engagements "The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were Impossible Until Now Every major shift in consumer tech has a moment when it suddenly becomes accessible to millions. Michael Mignano helped spark one of those moments with Anchor making podcast creation something anyone could do with a tap. Now at Lightspeed he sees AI bringing a similar leap to music media and everyday apps. In this conversation he and Garry trace the arc from the early days of social audio to today's consumer AI boomand dig into what founders should focus on as the next generation of creative tools takes shape. Chapters: 00:00 Intro" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z4L4ZqL1xqQ) 2025-11-28T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 67.6K engagements "How To Build A Tech Startup With No Technical Skills Based on the thousands of companies YC has funded over the years the biggest common element between all successful startups is having technical talent on the founding team. But what do you do if you don't know how to code You may think you can get by using no-code tools part-time consultants or dev shops to bring your startup idea to life. But that thinking is wrong. In this episode of Dalton & Michael well discuss exactly why that is and why recruiting a technical co-founder is the single biggest way to create value as someone trying to" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZpKu2wvquWg) 2023-11-30T18:15Z 2.1M followers, 619.7K engagements "Does Your Startup Need To Be In San Francisco Should you and your startup live in San Francisco Y Combinator Partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell debate their different opinions on whether startups are more likely to succeed in the Golden City or elsewhere. Where do they find common ground Watch to find out. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:29 - Dalton's Preference 02:39 - Michael's Preference 05:02 - The Bay Area 05:50 - Follow The .001% 08:23 - The" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZqGOCF4O6ks) 2023-08-01T18:05Z 2.1M followers, 88.4K engagements "The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal an early executive at Palantir and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model. During his time at Palantir he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today. On this episode of The Lightcone he explains how FDEs became central to today's startups why "doing things that don't" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zyw-YA0k3xo) 2025-09-08T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 95.5K engagements "Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI A fireside with Dr. Fei-Fei Li on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Dr. Fei-Fei Li is often called the godmother of AIand for good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it she was helping build the foundation. In this fireside she recounts the creation of ImageNet a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods the shock of seeing convolutional networks outperform expectations in" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_PioN-CpOP0) 2025-07-01T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 196K engagements "How AI Is Changing Enterprise The Lightcone hosts sit down with Aaron Levie the co-founder & CEO of Box to hear reports from the front of how large enterprise and Fortune [---] companies are adapting to the AI age. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Intro 1:15 Why the GPT wrapper was a bad meme 4:44 Enterprise users just care about getting workflow done 8:38 What does it mean for startups as intelligence becomes a commodity 12:47 Do Fortune 500s have any interest in underlying models 20:19 What are enterprise execs" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=aIKfA3gIXwo) 2025-02-19T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 128.7K engagements "How Zepto Became Indias Fastest Growing Startup Imagine ordering groceries and having them show up at your doorstep in just [--] minutes. Thats the promise of Zepto the fastest growing e-commerce company in India. In this episode of How To Build The Future Garry sits down with Aadit Palicha the co-founder and CEO of Zepto to discuss how they got started in a Whatsapp group what its like going up against incumbents like Amazon and Zomato and how the future of e-commerce is changing in the age of intelligence. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=aYK0H85E_oU) 2025-04-18T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 224.8K engagements "AI Native Enterprise Software Salesforce and ServiceNow won by going all-in on the cloud before the incumbents could react. AI is the next waveand it's just as big. The next generation of enterprise software won't just record work it'll help do it. If you're building AI-native tools for the enterprise let's talk. Apply to YC Fall [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=amNO1hHARqI) 2025-08-02T21:05Z 2.1M followers, 33.8K engagements "Make LLMs easy Make LLMs easy YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=asalbJSHS8g) 2026-02-06T17:02Z 2.1M followers, 25.3K engagements "Advantages Of A First-Time Founder Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the advantages of being a first-time founder and the instances when it pays to have experience founding a startup in the past. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:47 - Setup 01:35 - Expert opinions are not what you want 04:07 - Picking your market 05:37 - Novel 06:58 - First time founder have to innovate more 08:08 - Honesty 09:57 - Auto pilot initially but it shuts off 12:07 - Devil's advocate" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bp_kMA-eTsE) 2022-09-15T22:34Z 2.1M followers, 118.7K engagements "How Top 1% Founders Navigate Co-founder Conflict Apply for a YC Summer Fellows Grant: https://events.ycombinator.com/summer-fellows Technical skills build startupsbut oftentimes people skills can save them. So how do you navigate the disagreements and conflict that inevitably arise with a co-founder In this episode of the Lightcone our hosts share what they've learned for managing these critical yet often overlooked challenges offering advice on how to handle the messy realities that go beyond building. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Intro 01:09 Why you should" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bvjyaz4ZiVI) 2025-03-21T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 54.9K engagements "The [--] Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups In the early days of a startup speed is the best moat. But once you build something people want how do you maintain your position and defend against the competition In this episode of Lightcone we dive into Hamilton Helmers Seven Powers framework to find out how these timeless business strategies hold up in today's world of AI startups. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:00 - The Moat Problem 01:30 - The Seven Powers Framework 04:20 - When to Think About Moats 08:40" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bxBzsSsqQAM) 2025-10-03T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 143.3K engagements "Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence Multiplanetary Life How to Be Useful A fireside with Elon Musk on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Before rockets and robots Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk he walks through the early days of Zip2 the Falcon [--] launches that nearly ended SpaceX and the miracle of Tesla surviving [----]. He shares the thinking that guided himbuilding from first principles doing useful things and the belief that were in the middle of an intelligence big bang. Apply to Y Combinator:" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=cFIlta1GkiE) 2025-06-19T20:22Z 2.1M followers, 663.1K engagements "Should You Quit Your Job At A Unicorn If youre an employee of a late stage company right now how would you know when its time to move on vs. time to double down The fact is there isn't an easy answer it can really vary from person to person and situation to situation. In this video YC Group Partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell share some suggestions on what sort of things an employee of a late stage startup should be looking for the good signs and the bad to best make this decision. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=chAoH_AeGAg) 2023-10-19T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 51.8K engagements "The ML Technique Every Founder Should Know Diffusion is the foundational machine learning framework behind state-of-the-art AI image and video generation including Sora Midjourney and Google Veo. In this episode of Decoded YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with YC Visiting Partner Francois Chaubard to discuss how diffusion works walk through a code sample and explain why everyone training models should understand it. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:33 What is diffusion 02:50 What are" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=dC_3ys349bU) 2026-01-22T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 34.9K engagements "Why Vertical LLM Agents Are The New $1 Billion SaaS Opportunities As LLMs become exponentially better it is clear that vertical AI agents are key to the next generation of billion dollar SaaS companies. In this episode of the Lightcone the hosts sit down with YC alum Jake Heller the co-founder and CEO of Casetext (which sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million in cash in 2023) to discuss what it takes to build a successful vertical AI company and overcome resistance from industry veterans and skeptics. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Coming Up 01:40 Building a" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=eBVi_sLaYsc) 2024-10-04T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 445.6K engagements "Chase the Hard Problems A hard technical problem can be a great moat. Just dont hide behind the difficultystay close to customers while you build so know whether youre solving the right problems" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=eiT9wMgesjI) 2025-11-25T21:35Z 2.1M followers, 26.8K engagements "How Future Billionaires Get Sh*t Done Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel take a look at Paul Graham's essay "Maker's Schedule Manager's Schedule" and share tips on how to be more effective and productive on the journey to creating a billion dollar business. Read PG's essay here: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - How Future Billionaires Get Sh*t Done 00:38 - PG Essay 01:18 - Maker Schedule 03:59 - The Right Time 05:01 -" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ephzgxgOjR0) 2022-03-31T23:57Z 2.1M followers, 736.8K engagements "Inside The Hard Tech Startups Turning Sci-Fi Into Reality YC has become a surprising force in the hard tech world funding startups building physical products from satellites to rockets to electric planes. In this episode of Lightcone we go behind the scenes to explore how YC advises founders on their ambitious startups. We also take a look at a number of YC's hard tech companies and how they got started with little time or money. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Coming Up 02:42 - YC's Model for Hard Tech 04:19 - Mindset Shift and Proving Technical Feasibility 08:30" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=erDE2e69dlc) 2024-04-11T17:15Z 2.1M followers, 86.3K engagements "When to Launch Your Startup and When to Wait Step inside the group partners' lounge to hear Y Combinator Partners Harj Taggar Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss how startups should approach launching and the exceptions to the rules. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Inside the partners' lounge 01:00 - Why don't startups like to launch early and move quickly 01:30 - What is fast 02:18 - V1 of Instacart 03:18 - V1 of Brex 03:59 - Founders perfect launch and" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=f0tPjcgcwnQ) 2022-03-15T15:24Z 2.1M followers, 144.3K engagements "How To NOT Get Screwed As A Software Engineer The stories are true: technical founders (and early technical employees) often end up with the short end of the stick when starting a company. In this episode of Dalton & Michael well discuss the questions and best practices that an aspiring technical founder should think about whom to start a company with and how to think about things like equity split and division of responsibilities. Know what you are worth and act accordingly Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcfVjd_oV1I) 2023-11-01T17:09Z 2.1M followers, 236.7K engagements "Consumer Startup Metrics Startup School In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield dives deeper into the metrics that matter most for consumer startups. Tom discusses paid and organic user growth unit economics net promoter scores and the "magic moment" in your product that is most important to track. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:00 - Growth Rates 01:24 - Organic vs. Paid Growth 05:27 - Cannibalization 06:21 - Paid Growth 10:59 - Unit" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=fdD4y4Civp4) 2024-01-06T17:13Z 2.1M followers, 82.6K engagements "Fundraising Fundamentals By Geoff Ralston YC Partner Geoff Ralston gives an introduction to the key concepts to keep in mind once you enter a fundraising process. Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/ YC Y Combinator Geoff Ralston Startup School YC Y Combinator Geoff Ralston Startup School" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=gcevHkNGrWQ) 2018-10-10T15:28Z 2.1M followers, 284.9K engagements "Inside The Startup Launching AI Data Centers Into Space Starcloud recently made history by launching a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 into orbit the first time a GPU that powerful has ever operated in space. It's the first step toward building AI data centers in orbit powered by continuous sunlight and cooled by radiating heat into deep space. Their approach could one day rival the world's biggest data centers while using less energy zero fresh water and far lower emissions. In this episode of Hard Tech YC's Aaron Epstein visits Starcloud's HQ where co-founders Philip Johnston Ezra Feilden and" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=hKw6cRKcqzY) 2025-11-13T17:08Z 2.1M followers, 301.5K engagements "AI Guidance for Physical Work Much of the AI conversation focuses on which desk jobs will get replaced. But for physical work AI can't yet act in the world. With multimodal models and ubiquitous hardware theres an opportunity to give workers live AI coaching that dramatically reduces training time and unlocks skilled labor at scale. Apply to YC Spring [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=hSDlgCKBx6w) 2026-02-04T18:25Z 2.1M followers, 22.1K engagements "Andrej Karpathy on why we still need humans in the loop Andrej Karpathy talks about the importance of GUIs for working with AI systemsand why we still need to keep a tight leash on agents. Even with fast output the human remains the bottleneck" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=hTT5o2AoewQ) 2025-06-24T21:46Z 2.1M followers, 47.7K engagements "Cursor for Product Managers AI is great at writing code but product success depends on deciding what to build. We think theres an opportunity for an AI-native system focused on helping teams figure out what to build not just how to build it. Apply to YC Spring [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=iLP0YyNwpTc) 2026-02-02T21:04Z 2.1M followers, 56.5K engagements "The Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley What happens when the unconventional becomes conventional Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how the startup world has changed from being dominated by outsiders and nonconformists to now attracting more mainstream conformists looking for status and money. They share stories of what the tech scene was like when they were in school - and how radically different it is today. Dalton and Michael offer advice about navigating a world that doesn't always reward nonconformists embarking on risky entrepreneurial journeys. Don't just think different act" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0) 2023-02-05T19:14Z 2.1M followers, 94.2K engagements "How Replit Went From $10M to $100M ARR In Just [--] Months Amjad Masad started Replit to make programming accessible to anyone anywhere. What began as a tool for learning to code has grown into a platform pushing the limits of AI-assisted software creation and recently surpassed $100M in ARR. On The Breakdown with Tom and Dave Amjad shares the journey from his early days in Jordan working on open-source projects to leading Replit through major pivots from "teach a billion people to code" to "let anyone build software." He discusses the evolving nature of programming the future of work and the" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=kOyIjt6FUrw) 2025-07-17T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 37.8K engagements "The Two Mindsets That Can KILL Your Startup Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the qualities that make a founder overly optimistic or far too pessimistic about their startup. Where is the right middle ground Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:30 - Stereotypes 03:09 - The Two Leaders 05:45 - Pessimistic mistakes 06:28 - Expectation setting 07:14 - Faulty feedback 08:24 - Demo day goals 09:20 - Energy drain 11:22 - Magical thinking 14:23 - Founder" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lJausFj_Dto) 2022-09-09T18:42Z 2.1M followers, 167.3K engagements "Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals YC Partner Adora Cheung covers the importance of defining and tracking KPIs to understand how effectively your startup is reaching your goals. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6j-how-to-set-kpis-and-goals-sus-2019 This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Timestamps 00:00 What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) 00:39 Why do KPIs matter 1:33 What are the right KPIs to set 1:46 Setting your" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lL6GdUHIBsM) 2019-08-01T13:21Z 2.1M followers, 202.6K engagements "The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He's spent nearly a decade making programming accessible to alland with the rise of AI that vision is closer than ever. In this talk from AI Startup School on June [--] [----] Amjad traces the arc of computing from mainframes to personal computers to a future where AI agents can create software on demand. He explains why the value of traditional software will approach zero fundamentally reshaping how companies are built and how work gets done." [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lWmDiDGsLK4) 2025-09-12T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 111K engagements "Startup Experts Share Their Investor Horror Stories For this latest episode of Office Hours the Group Partners are sharing stories from their worst investor meetings. Well outline some of the weird plays weve seen investors try to pull but well also confess times that we as founders bungled meetings we couldve nailed. Well discuss what differentiates a truly great investor and shed a bit of light on something we rarely talk about publicly: the YC Investor Database. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-jobs Chapters (Powered by" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ljVan7CGBiE) 2023-08-17T16:10Z 2.1M followers, 134K engagements "The First 10-person $100B Company New AI tools make it possible to build billion-dollar companies with tiny teams and even solo founders. We want to fund the first 10-person $100B startup. If you're high-agency and ready to move fast let's build. Apply to YC Fall [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lkFiTvXu9Zw) 2025-08-01T13:21Z 2.1M followers, 39.2K engagements "Jessica Livingston : How to Build the Future Jessica is a cofounder of Y Combinator. Y Combinator has funded [----] startups and they are worth more than $70 billion in total. More than [--] of them are worth more than a billion dollars or more. Access podcast and transcript versions of this interview here: https://www.ycombinator.com/future/jessica/ YC Y Combinator how to build the future startups YC Y Combinator how to build the future startups" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=nFOC-cgIWaY) 2016-08-30T18:10Z 2.1M followers, 119.5K engagements "Which Sales Strategy Is Best For Your Startup Our series Versus pits two competing concepts against each other. In this episode Y Combinator Visiting Group Partner Pete Koomen explores two common B2B sales strategies: Top Down and Bottom Up. Pete helps define each and discusses how a startup should choose and build their sales motion. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Sell your product: Bottoms up and Top down 00:23 - Top down sales 02:44 - Bottoms up sales" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=o1HFZ8P4rA8) 2022-12-08T18:04Z 2.1M followers, 51.2K engagements "Startup Business Models and Pricing Startup School YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein talks about different startup business models how to monetize and how to price your product. Pricing and monetization is one of the most common questions from founders and this talk outlines [--] business models as well as highlighting business model lessons from the top YC companies. Business Model Guide: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Gh-business-model-guide Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 -" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=oWZbWzAyHAE) 2022-12-15T20:05Z 2.1M followers, 591.4K engagements "Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan Jared Kaplan on June 16th [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Jared Kaplan started out as a theoretical physicist chasing questions about the universe. Then he helped uncover one of AIs most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable almost physical way. That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language modelsand led him to co-found Anthropic. In this talk he walks through how that discovery reshaped the path to human-level AI what it means for future models like Claude and" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=p8Jx4qvDoSo) 2025-07-29T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 57.7K engagements "How Intelligent Is AI Really ARC-AGI is redefining how to measure progress on the path to AGI - focusing on reasoning generalization and adaptability instead of memorization or scale. During this month's NeurIPS [----] conference YC's Diana Hu sat down with ARC Prize Foundation President Greg Kamradt to find out why most AI benchmarks fail how ARC-AGI reveals the limits of todays models and why measuring intelligence may be harder than building it. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Chapters: 00:11 What ARC Prize is and why it exists 00:38 Franois Chollets definition of" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=pBlIgs6w7Ss) 2025-12-17T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 12.7K engagements "How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience) In this episode of Founder Firesides YC General Partner Gustaf Alstrmer is joined by Max Junestrand co-founder and CEO of Legora one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups in the world. In just [--] months Max and his team scaled from [--] to [---] people raised $80M and cracked the challenge of selling to one of the most skeptical industries. Today Legoras AI workspace is used by tens of thousands of lawyers including top law firms like Goodwin and Cleary Gottlieb. Max shares insights on building a successful vertical" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=pHuXCzM2ntU) 2025-08-26T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 78.5K engagements "AI Powered Agencies AI flips this model by letting firms use software internally to deliver finished work at higher margins turning agencies into software-like businesses that can scale far beyond todays service firms. Apply to YC Spring [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=pOZi4PKW54M) 2026-02-03T22:11Z 2.1M followers, 31.8K engagements "How Pitching Investors is Different Than Pitching Customers - Michael Seibel Michael Seibel on pitching customers vs pitching investors. Michael is CEO and a Partner at YC. He was the co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv and Socialcam. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:04 Difference between investor and customer 00:00:35 Talking to customers 00:01:00 Where to use your customer pitch 00:01:13 Talking to investor 00:02:53 Where to use your investor" [YouTube Link](https://youtube.com/watch?v=pQnOBHNKlgs) 2019-03-14T15:34Z 2.1M followers, 117K engagements Limited data mode. Full metrics available with subscription: lunarcrush.com/pricing
@ycombinator Y Combinator
Y Combinator has been sharing valuable insights and advice for startup founders through various videos and talks. Recently, there has been a focus on AI and its applications, with experts like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alexandr Wang discussing its potential and impact on the future. The organization has also been providing guidance on startup best practices, including fundraising, product development, and hiring.
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- [--] Year [---] +90%
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Social Influence
Social category influence vc firms #11 finance 26.7% technology brands 24.43% stocks 11.76% celebrities 8.14% social networks 6.79% countries 1.81% exchanges 1.36% gaming 0.9% automotive brands 0.9%
Social topic influence y combinator #4, ai 32.58%, how to 31.22%, ceo #2585, future #3790, the most 8.6%, the world 6.79%, if you 6.79%, products 5.88%, open ai #2073
Top accounts mentioned or mentioned by @dreamgame @thehiddenpast987 @andrejkarpathy @yahoo @jakewrightnet @cookedrio @tinahuang1 @theprimetimeagen @davidondrej @nimoplanet @markuspodcast @venturekites @incryptotrust @trylaurence @plivoai @orbitonfinance @startuparchive_ @somalisintech @technology_now @fintechloop
Top assets mentioned Alphabet Inc Class A (GOOGL) DoorDash Inc. (DASH) Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN) Thomson Reuters Corporation (TRI) Tesla, Inc. (TSLA)
Top Social Posts
Top posts by engagements in the last [--] hours
"Should You Start A Startup Startup School In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Harj Taggar shares his advice on the types of people best suited to be startup founders and how to prepare to start a company in the future. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:48 - How to decide whether to be a startup founder. 02:42 - Resilience is the most important quality 03:35 - Founder of Benchling (S12) 05:11 - Startup resilience - Initial motivation isn't"
YouTube Link 2022-11-01T17:13Z 2.1M followers, 538.8K engagements
"60 Startup Founders Share How They Met Their Co-Founder At the S23 batch retreat we interviewed [--] founders about how they met their co-founders. By compiling their answers together you get to see their commonalities and differencesand hopefully inspire you to find someone to start a company with. This is the first episode of a new series we're calling Founder FAQ where we'll ask YC founders about their stories and experience. If you're looking for a co-founder sign up for Y Combinator's Co-Founder Matching Platform: https://yc.link/FounderFAQ-cofounder Thank you to all the companies who"
YouTube Link 2023-07-26T16:22Z 2.1M followers, 71.3K engagements
"Why OpenClaw Broke The Internet What Sets OpenClaw Apart From Other Agents YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-12T18:04Z 2.1M followers, 17.9K engagements
"AI Is Eating Logistics Logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that quietly powers the entire global economy and it's shockingly manual. Ryan Petersen founder & CEO of Flexport joins the Lightcone to break down how AI is finally touching the physical world: making shipping cheaper speeding up global trade and automating work that used to live inside emails spreadsheets and phone calls. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:51 What is Flexport and what are they doing with AI 03:17 When did AI tools become serious at the company 06:27 The benefit of internal hackathons 12:03 What internal AI projects"
YouTube Link 2025-11-14T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 59.6K engagements
"Kirsty Nathoo - Managing Startup Finances YC Partner and CFO Kirsty Nathoo shares the most common mistakes startups make with their finances and how they can prevent them. You can find the lecture slides and transcript here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/70 Find more Startup School and YC content at https://www.startupschool.org/library. YC Y Combinator startup school YC Y Combinator startup school"
YouTube Link 2019-08-22T14:54Z 2.1M followers, 296.9K engagements
"Eric Migicovsky - How to Talk to Users YC Partner Eric Migicovsky outlines a framework for asking questions and collecting feedback from your users. This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:27 Best founders maintain a direct connection to users 00:02:03 Write code and talk to users 00:02:43 The Mom Test book - Three common errors when conducting user interviews 00:03:22 [--]. Talk about their"
YouTube Link 2019-07-25T18:32Z 2.1M followers, 465.6K engagements
"The Truth About Building AI Startups Today In the first episode of the Lightcone Podcast YC Group Partners dig into everything they have learned working with the top founders building AI startups today. They share the ideas that are working particularly well mistakes to avoid and take a look at the competitive landscape among the current AI giants. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Intro 00:41 The Lightcone Podcast 01:53 YC Recent Batch 03:34 College Students and AI Startups 04:44 AI Startup Success Factors 05:53 Opportunities in Mundane AI Tasks 07:30 Beware of"
YouTube Link 2024-02-08T21:04Z 2.1M followers, 547.1K engagements
"Building Confidence In Yourself and Your Ideas One trait that many great founders share is conviction. In this episode of Dalton & Michael well talk about finding confidence in what you're building the dangers of inaccurate assumptions and a question founders need to ask themselves before they start trying to sell to anyone else. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Coming Up 00:16 - Intro: How Fast Is Too Fast 00:26 - Rigorous Thinking 02:10 - Superficial Validation 03:26 -"
YouTube Link 2024-02-29T22:58Z 2.1M followers, 193.5K engagements
"The Truth About The AI Bubble [----] was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode the YC partners break down the surprises of the year from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the application layer and why the next wave of AI startups may be just getting started. 00:00 Intro 00:50 Anthropic models are most preferred in the latest YC batch 05:36 Why arent there more AI consumer apps 07:01 Swapping models in and out is becoming the norm 09:08 The big AI bubble question 14:37 Space as the solve for data centers"
YouTube Link 2025-12-22T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 100K engagements
"The Startup Playbook for Hiring Your First Engineers and AEs Most founders think hiring is about interviewing. But it's actually about selling. For Startup School Juicebox co-founder & CEO David Paffenholz joins YC's Harj Taggar to share how early-stage founders can find pitch and close top engineering and sales talent from crafting better outreach to winning great hires from Big Tech even when you're an unknown startup. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 0:00 Why your first hires matter 1:17 What great"
YouTube Link 2025-11-07T17:58Z 2.1M followers, 37K engagements
"Kevin Hale - Startup Pricing [---] YC Partner Kevin Hale goes over the fundamentals of pricing and monetization how it affects your customer acquisition strategy and how to optimize it through a few rules of thumb. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6h-startup-pricing-101 This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 1:35 ROI of monetization 2:50 The pricing thermometer 5:00 Pricing mistakes 6:34 Stages of a"
YouTube Link 2019-09-06T17:33Z 2.1M followers, 205.8K engagements
"Why Your Startup Website Isn't Converting Jorn van Dijk is the CEO and co-founder of Framer one of the most influential website design platforms in the world. As a designer-turned-founder Jorn has helped shape how modern startups think about the power of design when telling their stories. In this episode of Design Review YCs Aaron Epstein sat down with Jorn to review user-submitted websites built using Framer. They'll share practical advice on how to clearly communicate what your product does when animation helps (and when it hurts) and how to use Framers powerful tools without ending up with"
YouTube Link 2026-01-29T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 20.4K engagements
"We're All Addicted To Claude Code Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings Maybe they're addicted to coding agents In this episode of Lightcone Calvin French-Owen a co-founder of Segment and former engineer on OpenAI's Codex team joins us to talk about why coding agents suddenly feel so powerful the differences between Codex Claude Code and Cursor and what the future of work will look like. 0:00 Intro 1:15 Garry cant stop using Claude Code 4:00 Contrast with IDEs context-splitting 6:23 Distribution models top down vs bottom up 9:11 Licensing and"
YouTube Link 2026-02-06T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 83.9K engagements
"Most Important Lifestyle Habits Of Successful Founders Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best approaches to developing a healthy lifestyle that ultimately helps you run and grow a successful startup. Take care of yourselves out there. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:35 - Plan for the punches 01:50 - Adulting harder 03:07 - Audit how you live 04:05 - Good & Bad Habits 07:23 - Information diet 09:22 - Salary bump 12:51 - Hard conversations"
YouTube Link 2022-07-22T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 472K engagements
"AI Native Hedge Funds AI Native Hedge Funds YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-11T15:58Z 2.1M followers, 22.3K engagements
"Great founders actually build"
YouTube Link 2024-05-22T16:18Z 2.1M followers, 150.4K engagements
"OpenClaw Creator: Why 80% Of Apps Will Disappear Youve probably already heard all about OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot). The viral sensation is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own device connects with messaging apps you already use and goes beyond chat to actually execute tasks like managing your email calendars files workflows and more. Now meet the man behind it. YCs Raphael Schaad sat down with Peter Steinberger the creator of OpenClaw to discuss the aha moment behind the viral personal AI agent why local-first agents could replace many of todays apps and how personal"
YouTube Link 2026-02-07T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 465.1K engagements
"Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School [----] Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook at Y Combinator Startup School on October [--] [----]. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Presented in Stanford Memorial Auditorium by Y Combinator and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Y Combinator Facebook Mark Zuckerberg Startup School [----] YC Y Combinator Facebook Mark Zuckerberg Startup School [----] YC"
YouTube Link 2013-10-25T10:40Z 2.1M followers, 643.2K engagements
"Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI Transforming Work With Agents & Competing With China Alexandr Wang started Scale AI to help machine learning teams label data faster. It started as a simple API for human labor but behind the scenes he was tackling a much bigger problem: how to turn messy real-world data into something AI could learn from. Today that early idea powers a multi-hundred-million-dollar engine behind America's AI infrastructurefueling everything from Fortune [---] workflows to real-time military planning. Just last week Meta agreed to invest over $14 billion in Scale valuing the"
YouTube Link 2025-06-18T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 342.6K engagements
"How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails Startup School Whether it's for sales recruiting or making new connections cold outreach is a necessary tool for helping build your startup. But as you probably know most cold emails either are ignored or end up in the trash. So what can you do to make sure your emails break through the noise In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein shares expert advice on how to write cold emails that have all the right ingredients to get noticed and convert new customers. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup:"
YouTube Link 2024-09-12T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 108.4K engagements
"How to Apply and Succeed at Y Combinator by Dalton Caldwell YC Partner Dalton Caldwell gives insight into how YC admissions works and what makes for a successful YC experience. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6t-how-to-apply-and-succeed-at-y-combinator This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 00:35 Why apply to YC 2:53 Creating luck 4:38 Reasons not to apply 10:56 Properties of a good application"
YouTube Link 2018-09-28T01:19Z 2.1M followers, 226.7K engagements
"Vertical AI Agents Could Be 10X Bigger Than SaaS As AI models continue to rapidly improve and compete with one another a new business model is coming into view - vertical AI agents. In this episode of the Lightcone the hosts consider what effect vertical AI agents will have on incumbent SaaS companies what use cases make the most sense and how there could be [---] billion dollar companies in this category alone. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Coming Up 1:01 Jared is fired up about vertical AI agents 7:25 The parallels between early SaaS and LLMs 9:09 Why didnt the big"
YouTube Link 2024-11-22T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 968.4K engagements
"How to Apply And Succeed at Y Combinator Startup School YC Group Partner Dalton Caldwell shares his strategies for how to think about applying to YC. This talk goes beyond the information on YC's website and reflects Dalton's latest advice on the topic. (Fun Fact: An earlier version of this talk is frequently mentioned by YC founders as instrumental in their decision to apply to YC and to getting in) Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Why It's Worth Applying to"
YouTube Link 2023-05-12T17:45Z 2.1M followers, 348.6K engagements
"How David Lieb Turned a Failing Startup Into Google Photos Backstory YC General Partner David Liebs story is all about perseverance. In [----] he co-founded Bump an app used by 150M people to share photos and contact info by bumping their phones together. Though he couldnt find a way to turn it into a sustainable business he didnt quit. Instead Lieb and his team pivoted several times got acquired and eventually went on to build Google Photos. In this episode of Backstory Lieb shares his advice for finding the right idea what mistakes to avoid and how to maintain a positive mindset no matter"
YouTube Link 2024-12-18T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 366.5K engagements
"The Sales Playbook For Founders Startup School Navigating B2B sales for the first time can feel slow and overwhelming. Drawing from his experience founding Monzo and GoCardless YC's Tom Blomfield shares his playbook for running a tight sales process that lands real recurring revenue. He walks through each stepfree and paid pilots opt-out contracts long-term dealsand shows how to prove value and close customers. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:21 - The Typical B2B Sales Progression 01:00 - Common Pitfalls"
YouTube Link 2025-08-15T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 101.2K engagements
"State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents At first prompting seemed to be a temporary workaround for getting the most out of large language models. But over time it's become critical to the way we interact with AI. On the Lightcone Garry Harj Diana and Jared break down what they've learned from working with hundreds of founders building with LLMs: why prompting still matters where it breaks down and how teams are making it more reliable in production. They share real examples of prompts that failed how companies are testing for quality and what the best teams are doing to make LLM outputs"
YouTube Link 2025-05-30T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 320K engagements
"Good News For Startups: Enterprise Is Bad At AI MIT's new State of AI in Business report went viral for claiming that 95% of enterprise AI projects fail. But the real story isn't that AI doesn't work it's just big companies can't build it. In this episode of the Lightcone Garry Harj Diana and Jared break down what the study really says why in-house enterprise AI efforts keep stalling and how startups are filling the gap with products that learn integrate and actually deliver value. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 2:08 The enterprise AI adoption gap and why the failure rate is high 3:32 Even Apple can be"
YouTube Link 2025-10-30T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 118.7K engagements
"Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Reviews Startup Websites Stripes Head of Design Katie Dill is one of the most influential designers in Silicon Valley. Before joining Stripe she led the design team at Lyft and was Head of Experience Design at Airbnb. Throughout her career shes leveraged the power of great design to help build a few of the most successful companies in the world. So whats the secret to her success For Katie its all about focusing on the details and making sure that every pixel counts. In this episode YCs Aaron Epstein and Katie Dill review startup landing pages with a focus on"
YouTube Link 2024-10-01T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 92.8K engagements
"Startup Experts Reveal Their Favorite Pivot Stories You might think that pivoting is something done only by the startups that dont make it. In reality a huge number of the best startups pivoted. In this first episode of our new series Office Hours Y Combinator Group Partners share their favorite stories of entrepreneurs who pivoted and went on to build game-changing companies. The group of startup experts also share their own pivot stories and help answer the questions: How do you know if its time for your startup to pivotand how will you know if that next idea is the one Apply to Y"
YouTube Link 2023-07-21T17:34Z 2.1M followers, 151.8K engagements
"How To Find A Co-Founder Startup School Building a startup and trying to break into an established market is very difficult especially if youre trying to do it alone Thats why its critical to find the right co-founder for the journey. In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Harj Taggar explains why you need a co-founder when to bring them on where you can find one and how to maintain the relationship. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 02:55 - Should you"
YouTube Link 2024-09-27T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 111.2K engagements
"How Do Billion Dollar Startups Start The biggest companies in the world all had to start somewhere. In this episode of Office Hours the Group Partners explore the humble origins of several top YC companies to try and identify common traits of the most successful founders. Theyll explore what it takes to keep your company alive in the early days where to focus your energy and how to find product market fit that leads you to mega success. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc)"
YouTube Link 2024-10-11T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 122.6K engagements
"The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup Many startups fail because they run out of money. So how should you think about how to spend the money you raise In this episode of Office Hours YC General Partners Brad Flora Pete Koomen Nicolas Dessaigne and Gustaf Alstrmer discuss how to spend responsibly at each stage of a startup including advice on when to hire whether to invest in marketing and what spending mistakes to avoid. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:40 - How to think about money"
YouTube Link 2025-02-12T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 73.4K engagements
"Secrets You Can Learn From Your Customers YC partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how spending real time with your users can unlock insights and growth. Hear the stories of how Airbnb and Brex built billion-dollar companies by forging genuine connections with customers. Learn why having too much money and too many people can actually slow down learning. And discover how to accelerate insight into your product by making your users feel special. Successful startups dont just build technology they solve human problems. The key is listening to the people who really matter: your"
YouTube Link 2023-04-28T22:02Z 2.1M followers, 87.5K engagements
"Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale A little over ten years ago Paul Graham published the essay "Do Things That Don't Scale." At the time it was highly controversial advice that spoke to the drastically different needs of an early startup versus the needs of a much larger more established company. YC Partners discuss PG's essay its influence on Silicon Valley and some prime examples of YC founders that embraced the mantra "Do Things That Don't Scale." Read Paul Graham's essay here: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-apply Work at"
YouTube Link 2024-05-30T17:43Z 2.1M followers, 216.5K engagements
"Transformers Explained: The Discovery That Changed AI Forever Nearly every modern AI model from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok is built on the same foundation: the Transformer. In this video YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough [----] paper Attention Is All You Need the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-10-23T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 88.8K engagements
"Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again) Andrej Karpathy's keynote on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/viewusp=sharing Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:25 - Software evolution: From [---] to [---] 04:40 - Programming in English: Rise of Software [---] 06:10 - LLMs as utilities fabs and operating systems 11:04 - The new LLM OS and historical computing analogies 14:39 - Psychology of LLMs: People spirits and cognitive quirks 18:22 - Designing LLM apps with partial autonomy 23:40 - The"
YouTube Link 2025-06-19T01:05Z 2.1M followers, 2.4M engagements
"50 Founders Share How They Got Their First Customers At the start of the S23 batch we interviewed [--] founders about how they managed to get their very first customers. It's a snapshot in time that highlights the different tactics YC founders employ in the early stages to get their companies up and running. Hopefully their experience will offer some insights for anyone wondering about how exactly to go after that first customer. Thank you to all the companies who volunteered to be interviewed for this episode: Artie CandorIQ Accend Mantlebio Fleet Works Sweetspot Shasta Health Kapa Ohmic"
YouTube Link 2023-08-09T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 156.3K engagements
"The Student's Guide To Becoming A Successful Startup Founder If you're a high school or college student with big dreams of starting your own company this video is for you. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel two startup founders who started in the early 20s and are now top investors sit down to share the hard-won advice they wish they had known back in high school. Whether you're already running your own startup or just have an idea you can't stop thinking about Caldwell and Seibel will discuss the skills you need to learn now and how to set yourself up for success after graduating school."
YouTube Link 2023-04-14T19:46Z 2.1M followers, 123.1K engagements
"Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI Andrew Ng on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Andrew Ng has helped shape some of the most influential movements in modern AIfrom online education to deep learning to AI entrepreneurship. In this talk he shares what hes learning now: why execution speed matters more than ever how agentic workflows are changing what startups can build and why concreteness beats vagueness when turning ideas into products. He reflects on the rise of AI coding assistants the shifting bottlenecks in product development and why despite faster software its still"
YouTube Link 2025-07-10T14:02Z 2.1M followers, 423.9K engagements
"How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era AI has upended the once "safe" CS career path. New grads are facing unemployment rates twice those of art history majors and a CS degree is no longer a surefire ticket to wealth. At the same time small focused teams are scaling from zero to eight-figure revenue in months. In a special Lightcone Live at AI Startup School Garry Harj Diana and Jared discuss why it's now more important than ever to focus on building real skills domain expertise and agency rather than just chasing credentials. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a"
YouTube Link 2025-07-08T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 350K engagements
"Gustaf Alstromer - How to Get Users and Grow YC Partner Gustaf Alstrmer who was most recently a growth expert at Airbnb describes strategies for scaling your user base. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Introduction 2:56 Growth - Startup School [----] 4:02 Why is growth important 4:49 Startups = Growth 12:47 You can impact your growth rate. 15:38 Now measure your retention 19:18 Raise your hand if you are measuring your"
YouTube Link 2018-09-12T14:57Z 2.1M followers, 402.7K engagements
"How To Get AI Startup Ideas Apply to AI Startup School in SF: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus Theres never been a better time to launch an AI startup but many prospective founders find themselves stuck when it comes to thinking of a good idea. In this episode the Lightcone hosts look at different ways breakthroughs can be discovered. Apply to Y Combinator applications for X25 are due Feb 11: https://ycombinator.com/apply Learn more about the startups mentioned in this episode: Salient: https://www.trysalient.com Diode: https://diode.computer Spur: https://www.spurtest.com Datacurve:"
YouTube Link 2025-02-07T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 273.3K engagements
"How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas Startup School YC Group Partner Jared Friedman shares a framework for how to get and evaluate startup ideas. He shares many examples of YC companies and the inside stories of how they came up with the ideas that turned into billion dollar companies. Even if you have an existing idea this talk helps founders confirm that their idea is good and/or provide framework for a future pivot. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Finding a promising"
YouTube Link 2022-11-17T16:17Z 2.1M followers, 1.4M engagements
"B2B Startup Metrics Startup School In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield discusses one of the most important elements of running any startup: metrics Tom shares what key metrics to track and how to use them to make the best decisions for your company. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:21 - Importance of Metrics 01:16 - Pre-launch Metrics 02:23 - Metric Overload Caution 03:17 - Key Metrics Selection 04:54 - Consistency in Metrics 07:13 -"
YouTube Link 2023-12-15T18:15Z 2.1M followers, 120.1K engagements
"Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything Chelsea Finn on June 17th [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley where she pioneered metalearning methods and Google Brain Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and cofounder of Physical Intelligence shes using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy real-world environments rather than confined lab setups. In this talk Chelsea traces the evolution of her teams workfrom early experiments on robotic grasping"
YouTube Link 2025-07-22T14:02Z 2.1M followers, 89.3K engagements
"Large Spatial Models Large Spatial Models YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-09T16:31Z 2.1M followers, 22.4K engagements
"The best way to price any product Startups Pricing entrepreneurship Startups Pricing entrepreneurship"
YouTube Link 2023-02-02T22:37Z 2.1M followers, 210.3K engagements
"Co-Founder Mistakes That Kill Companies & How To Avoid Them In the first episode of Rookie Mistakes Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss co-founder mistakes. To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back https://twitter.com/daltonc https://twitter.com/mwseibel Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Rookie Mistakes 00:15 - Note from YC founder 00:32 - Write it down 00:49 - Biggest error - Founders looking for someone with a skill match 01:57 -"
YouTube Link 2021-11-22T18:00Z 2.1M followers, 171.8K engagements
"You should probably still learn how to code"
YouTube Link 2024-06-28T17:37Z 2.1M followers, 477.6K engagements
"How to Get Your First Customers Startup School YC Partner & Former Head of Growth at Airbnb Gustaf Alstrmer gives tactical advice to answer the question: how do I get my first customers Gustaf will cover this topic for all kinds of companies - whether you're B2B or B2C. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:20 - Outline 00:44 - Do things that don't scale 03:40 - Founders should learn how to do sales 08:45 - The sales funnel 13:50 - Charging your first customer"
YouTube Link 2022-12-29T17:19Z 2.1M followers, 589K engagements
"From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups Jake Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th [----] he shared how his team did itfrom picking the right idea to building AI products that actually workand how founders can turn a cool demo into a reliable tool used by real customers. Chapters: 00:00 How We Built a $650M AI Company 01:00 Picking the Right Idea in the AI Era 04:45 Three Types of AI Startups: Assist Replace or Do the Unthinkable 09:25"
YouTube Link 2025-10-28T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 197.6K engagements
"The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street Brothers Chaz and Arnie Englander started Model ML after building and selling two YC companies. What began as a tool to help them analyze deals has grown into a full AI-powered workspace purpose-built for financial services empowering firms to create automations and workflows that reflect exactly how their teams operate. And it's already being used by 10% of the world's top investment banks and private equity firms to automate everything from client-ready PowerPoint decks to deep-dive research and due diligence. In this conversation with"
YouTube Link 2025-07-31T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 58.2K engagements
"Vertical AI Agents At a recent event a founder asked Sam Altman "If you were [--] and starting a startup today what would you build" His answer: A vertical AI agent. Apply to YC Winter [----] at https://ycombinator.com/apply"
YouTube Link 2025-02-03T14:39Z 2.1M followers, 128.7K engagements
"Startup Experts Reveal Their Top Productivity Advice There's only so many hours in a day and running a startup will require most of them. So how do you use that time wisely and be more productive In this episode of Office Hours the Group Partners at Y Combinator share their favorite strategies to be more effective and reduce distractions at work. They'll discuss the benefits of maker/manager schedules in addition to the fake work and productivity fads that can do more harm than good. If you're going to build a big business you'll learn it requires working smarter AND harder to win. Apply to Y"
YouTube Link 2023-10-06T16:44Z 2.1M followers, 167.5K engagements
"Startup Advice: AI GTM Pivoting & How To Hire Every founder faces moments where theyre not sure what to do next such as how to go to market with AI products when to pivot and who to hire. In this episode of Office Hours YC partners Pete Brad Nico and Gustaf answer real questions from founders and share stories about how great teams build conviction learn faster and make better decisions as they grow. Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Building an AI company in a legacy industry 7:00 - Time to grow vs long term defensibility 14:31 - Spending for temporary edge vs waiting for model leap 16:10 - When"
YouTube Link 2025-10-21T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 42.7K engagements
"Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code Superintelligent AI Agents And Why Taste Still Matters Michael Truell co-founder and CEO of Anysphere the company behind Cursor joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all timeand why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually"
YouTube Link 2025-06-11T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 244.2K engagements
"The Secrets To Setting Smarter Goals If you're looking to maximize your startup's potential start by setting the right goals. Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell provide tips and strategies for setting goals that will help keep you and your new business focused on successplus provide examples of bad goals to avoid as a startup. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Setting Goals: The Stupid Games 01:18 - What's a Too Aggressive Goal 03:35 - What are the Fake"
YouTube Link 2023-01-11T19:13Z 2.1M followers, 167.3K engagements
"The secret to better product demos Your stale product demos may be hurting rather than helping. Pete Koomen shares how storytelling can help your customers connect with your product. YC Y Combinator yt:cc=on YC Y Combinator yt:cc=on"
YouTube Link 2023-05-07T22:18Z 2.1M followers, 58.3K engagements
"Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder Two-time founder Rujul Zaparde knows a thing or two about resilience and learning from failure. After dropping out of college to build FlightCar the AirBnB of car-sharing he pivoted to become a product manager at Airbnb and later a visiting partner at YC. In [----] he co-founded Zip a procurement software company that has since raised $370 million and reached a $2.2 billion valuation. In this conversation with managing partner Dalton Caldwell Rujul demystifies the world of enterprise sales shares his hard-earned lessons about"
YouTube Link 2025-01-08T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 94.6K engagements
"Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era For nearly two decades Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes workguiding the company through the rise of mobile the cloud and now the age of AI. In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves and why he believes AI represents the most transformative shift yet. Chapters: 00:00 AI hype vs. reality inside companies 01:00 Early days:"
YouTube Link 2025-09-16T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 88.9K engagements
"How to Get and Test Startup Ideas - Michael Seibel Michael Seibel on getting and testing startup ideas. Michael is CEO and a Partner at YC. He was the co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv and Socialcam. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:52 Start with a Problem 00:01:26 Personal connection is helpful 00:02:07 Brainstorm with Friends 00:02:38 Once You've Found an Interesting Problem 00:02:45 Why Are You Uniquely Qualified to Work on This Problem 00:03:43 Your MVP"
YouTube Link 2019-04-04T22:45Z 2.1M followers, 356.6K engagements
"Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design Dylan Field on June 17th [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Dylan Field co-founded Figma to bring the design process online and make it multiplayer. From a meme maker built on WebGL to a design platform powering millions Figmas journey hit a major milestone with its IPO last week. In this conversation Dylan shares the early challenges of building in the browser the early risks and pivotal choices that shaped Figmas growth the principles that guided its product and community and how he thinks about building tools that empower"
YouTube Link 2025-08-08T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 36.7K engagements
"How To Get Your First Users When you're starting out it isnt enough to just build a minimum viable product. You also need a minimum evolvable product - one that can adapt to the needs of those critical early customers. In this episode of Main Function YC General Partner Ankit Gupta offers an update to the classic MVP playbook. Hell outline strategies for getting your first customers the power of adaptability and how feedback from early users will ultimately shape the future of your product and your company. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup:"
YouTube Link 2026-01-14T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 85.6K engagements
"Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems Multi-agent systems are powerful but hard to build. Think agentic MapReduce with thousands of subagents running in parallel. We're looking for folks who've felt the pain of scaling these systems and want to make operating fleets of agents as easy as deploying a web service. Apply to YC Fall [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-08-01T22:29Z 2.1M followers, 24.5K engagements
"Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search Aravind Srinivas on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Aravind Srinivas started Perplexity with one goal: to rethink how we search browse and interact with information online. In this conversation he shares the journey from hacking together a natural-language-to-SQL search tool to building a product used by millions around the world. He talks about the big bet on the AI-powered browser why agentsnot just chatbotsare the next step and how speed accuracy and focus help a startup compete against giants. Along the way he"
YouTube Link 2025-07-11T14:37Z 2.1M followers, 129.6K engagements
"How Much Equity to Give Your Cofounder - Michael Seibel Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on splitting equity between cofounders. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 How much equity to give your cofounders 00:00:23 Equity splits should maximize motivation 00:01:32 Safety mechanism for equity - Vesting and Cliff 00:02:21 More generous with"
YouTube Link 2019-06-06T16:09Z 2.1M followers, 352.1K engagements
"When is the Right Time to Apply to Y Combinator - Jared Friedman Y Combinator partner and Scribd cofounder Jared Friedman answers the question when is the right time to apply to Y Combinator https://twitter.com/snowmaker Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ YC Y Combinator Jared Friedman When is the Right Time to Apply to Y Combinator when should you apply to y combinator when should you apply to yc when to apply to y combinator when to"
YouTube Link 2019-05-16T17:09Z 2.1M followers, 31.8K engagements
"Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents Pivoting In [--] Hours And The Future of Coding Varun Mohan didn't set out to build one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools. He just knew his company had to change or die. After initially betting on GPU virtualization he saw the writing on the wall: if there was a future for his company it would be at the AI application layer not infra. Over a single weekend he and his team pivoted to building Windsurf a tool to help everyone both technical and non-technical write code faster and smarter. In this conversation Varun shares the inside story of how they"
YouTube Link 2025-05-02T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 253.1K engagements
"From Startup to Scaleup Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman Sam Altman sits down with Reid Hoffman to talk about the key changes founders should think about as they transition from a startup to a scaleup. This conversation took place at The Scaleup Offsite a private CEO gathering hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners in April [----]. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2017-05-31T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 112.5K engagements
"How Surbhi Sarna Built A $275M Biotech Company From Nothing In our new documentary series Backstory were profiling the extraordinary Group Partners at the heart of YC. And were kicking it off with Surbhi Sarna YCs first healthcare and biotech focused Group Partner. In [----] Surbhi Sarna sold her company nVision for $275 million to one of the worlds leading healthcare companies. But to understand how Surbhi got where she is today you have to go back to her sophomore year in high school when a cancer scare upended her life and set her on an entirely new path. In this episode Surbhi opens up"
YouTube Link 2023-09-29T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 56K engagements
"Dont Be Afraid to Talk About Price If you can solve a real problem ask customers what its worthand disqualify the ones who arent ready or willing to buy. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-09-19T01:51Z 2.1M followers, 26.6K engagements
"Things That Don't Scale The Software Edition Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on software hacks that don't scale. Companies discussed include Google Facebook Twitch and imeem. Watch the first video on doing things that don't scale here: https://youtu.be/4RMjQal_c4U Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Do things that don't scale 00:56 - 90/10 solution - Paul Buchheit 01:35 - Gmail 05:40 - Facebook 10:05 - Twitch part [--] 12:07 - Friendster vs MySpace 15:03 - Imeem 16:59 - Twitch part [--] 20:17 - Google 23:39 - Startup advice"
YouTube Link 2022-02-16T15:30Z 2.1M followers, 193.8K engagements
"Fusion Energy Will Power the AI Boom Fusion may still sound like science fictionbut it might not be for much longer. With AI pushing demand for clean power to new highs a breakthrough may finally be close. In this episode of YC Decoded General Partner Gustaf Alstrmer explains the history of fusion the physics behind it and the engineering challenges that stalled it for nearly a century. He also looks at how Helion Energy is approaching the problem differently as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by [----]. Apply to Y Combinator:"
YouTube Link 2025-06-06T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 57K engagements
"Team and Execution with Sam Altman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 2) How to Start a Startup is a series of video lectures initially given at Stanford in Fall [----]. Lecture Transcript: http://www.tech.genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-2-ideas-products-teams-and-execution-part-ii-annotated Sam Altman finishes up "Ideas Products Teams and Execution" by covering Team and Execution in Lecture [--] of How to Start a Startup. See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec02 Discuss this lecture:"
YouTube Link 2017-03-17T16:58Z 2.1M followers, 67.1K engagements
"Peter Reinhardt on Finding Product Market Fit at Segment Peter Reinhardt - https://twitter.com/reinpk - is cofounder and CEO of Segment - https://segment.com/ Segment helps companies capture data from every customer touchpoint and send it to the tools where it can be used most effectively. They were part of the YC Summer [----] batch. The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon *** Topics 00:00 - What is Segment 1:30 - Segments first customers 3:05 - Their YC application 4:00 - Going through YC 5:30 - Realizing their first product didnt work 10:30 - Launching"
YouTube Link 2018-09-06T13:08Z 2.1M followers, 75.7K engagements
"How to Be a Great Founder with Reid Hoffman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 13) Lecture Transcript: http://www.genius.com/Reid-hoffman-lecture-13-how-to-be-a-great-founder-annotated So you've learned how to get started how to raise money how to build products and how to grow. Reid Hoffman founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock Ventures addresses many of the questions and confusions that might be cropping up - How to be a Great Founder. See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec13 Discuss this lecture:"
YouTube Link 2017-04-17T20:05Z 2.1M followers, 130.2K engagements
"Satya Nadella on Leadership Successful leaders bring clarity create energy and solve over-constrained problemsat every stage"
YouTube Link 2025-08-11T20:23Z 2.1M followers, 31K engagements
"Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen For this episode of Design Review YCs Aaron Epstein is joined by Karri Saarinen co-founder & CEO of Linear one of the top designer-founders working today. Together they'll review several sites from the YC community with an eye for how to build and maintain a high-quality brand. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Thank you to these companies for volunteering to have their sites reviewed*: Sprites AI (https://www.sprites.ai/) GigaML (https://gigaml.com/) UnReal Milk (https://www.unrealmilk.com/) Confident AI"
YouTube Link 2025-07-25T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 35.8K engagements
"Sam Altman on Choosing Projects Creating Value and Finding Purpose Sam Altman - https://twitter.com/sama - expands on ideas that have come up in several of his essays. Specifically: choosing projects creating value and finding purpose. Sams the president of YC Group - https://ycombinator.com/ - and co-chairman of OpenAI - https://openai.com/ The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon *** Topics :55 From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that dont really matter. Its hard to overstate how"
YouTube Link 2018-11-08T15:27Z 2.1M followers, 485.2K engagements
"Critiquing AI Startup Websites with YC President Garry Tan When it comes to your startup's website you probably have a lot to say but not a lot of time to say it. For this episode of Design Review Group Partner Aaron Epstein invited YC President and CEO Garry Tan to break down whats working (and whats not) on the websites of five different AI startups. Watch along as they provide concrete advice that will help you improve your own site designs regardless of what type of company youre building. And if you'd like to have your startup's website reviewed please submit your info here:"
YouTube Link 2023-06-15T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 149.2K engagements
"How Nothing Founder Carl Pei Built A Multi-Million Dollar Smartphone Brand In Just [--] Years After co-founding the successful Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus Carl Pei felt the tech industry was missing the fun and wonder he remembered as a dedicated gadget fan growing up in Sweden. Pei decided to launch a new smartphone brand this time with an increased focus on thoughtful user interface and stylish yet practical designs. In only two years the brand known as "Nothing" has gained a cult following and gone to $600 million in annualized revenue. On this episode of The Main Function Pei reflects"
YouTube Link 2024-08-13T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 127.6K engagements
"What Would Elon Musk Work On If He Were [--] Sam Altman asked Elon Musk what he would work in if he were [--] today. This is a clip from a longer interview which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=tnBQmEqBCY0 Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:06 If [--] problems you will work on 00:00:55 AI 00:01:41 Genetics 00:02:06 High bandwidth interface to the brain YC Y Combinator Elon Musk Sam Altman How To Build The Future Advice YC Y Combinator Elon Musk Sam Altman How To Build The Future Advice"
YouTube Link 2017-01-10T00:32Z 2.1M followers, 5.3M engagements
"Stablecoins [---] Crypto is here to stay and stablecoins are the killer use case. They're now a real threat to the legacy payment networks and growth will only accelerate with a better regulatory environment coming. We'd love to fund builders working on stablecoin ideas. Apply to YC Winter [----] at https://ycombinator.com/apply"
YouTube Link 2024-11-11T22:15Z 2.1M followers, 12.8K engagements
"Early Decision for Students Introducing Early Decision. For students who want to do a startup but also want to finish school first. Apply now get funded the moment you're accepted and do YC after you graduate. ycombinator.com/early-decision"
YouTube Link 2025-09-24T17:34Z 2.1M followers, 29.8K engagements
"Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston on the beginnings of YC"
YouTube Link 2024-09-16T22:03Z 2.1M followers, [----] engagements
"David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit David Rusenko details the story of how Weebly developed one of the most popular website creation and hosting sites on the web today. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ YC Y Combinator David Rusenko Startup School Weebly Product Market Fit YC Y Combinator David Rusenko Startup School Weebly Product Market Fit"
YouTube Link 2018-09-05T15:59Z 2.1M followers, 861.5K engagements
"Enterprise Sales Startup School Y Combinator Group Partner Pete Koomen led his startup Optimizely to $100M ARR. In this video Pete breaks down the enterprise sales funnel and shares his top tips on how a technical founder can start closing real deals for their startup. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 03:29 - Prospecting 05:15 - Outreach 10:09 - Qualification 15:00 - Pricing 18:13 - Closing 18:58 - Avoid surprises in procurement process 20:02 - Implement 22:01 - Outro"
YouTube Link 2024-07-08T18:40Z 2.1M followers, 175.4K engagements
"Sam Altman - How to Succeed with a Startup Sam Altman President of Y Combinator shares his thoughts on how you can succeed with a startup. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:11 A product so good people tell friends 00:00:53 Easy to understand 00:01:13 Exponential growth in market 00:02:00 Real trends vs Fake trends 00:03:30 Evangelical founder 00:04:04 Ambitious vision 00:04:22 Hard startup vs Easy"
YouTube Link 2018-08-29T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 2.2M engagements
"Kevin Hale - How to Pitch Your Startup In this lecture YC Partner Kevin Hale goes over how to package up your idea and communicate it to an investor. He shares his tips on how to craft your pitch in a clear and concise way that effectively grabs your audience's attention. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6q-how-to-pitch-your-startup This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00"
YouTube Link 2019-09-13T13:01Z 2.1M followers, 413.7K engagements
"Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP YC CEO and Partner Michael Seibel shares his approach to building an MVP and getting your first users as a pre-launch startup. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvp This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Introduction 0:41 First talk to users 1:40 Goal: launch"
YouTube Link 2019-08-01T13:21Z 2.1M followers, 830K engagements
"Infrastructure for Government Fraud Hunters Infrastructure for Government Fraud Hunters YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-06T17:02Z 2.1M followers, 11.2K engagements
"From dorm rooms to million-dollar companies You can just do things. And YC can help. Apply to W26 by November 10: http://ycombinator.com/apply YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-11-03T18:04Z 2.1M followers, 31.4K engagements
"Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets Stoke Space is racing to build the world's first fully reusable rockets that can launch survive reentry and fly again and again. In this episode of Hard Tech YCs Aaron Epstein sits down with Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman to find out why they chose to take on one of the hardest problems in rocket science how an obsession with efficiency gives them an edge and what full reusability could unlock for the future of spaceflight. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup:"
YouTube Link 2026-01-08T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 32.5K engagements
"Competition is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup 2014: 5) Lecture Transcript: http://www.tech.genius.com/Peter-thiel-lecture-5-business-strategy-and-monopoly-theory-annotated Peter Thiel founder of Paypal and Palantir discusses business strategy and monopoly theory in "Competition is For Losers". See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec05 Discuss this lecture: http://www.startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64034 Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:50 - Outline 00:00:57 -"
YouTube Link 2017-03-22T19:32Z 2.1M followers, 2.3M engagements
"DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market In this episode of How To Build The Future Garry sits down with Tony Xu Co-founder and CEO of DoorDash to discuss their origin story how the company survived several near death experiences and what it takes to transform an entire industry. Apply for a YC Summer Fellows Grant: https://events.ycombinator.com/summer-fellows Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 02:45 - How they landed on the idea of DoorDash 05:16 - Doing things that"
YouTube Link 2025-03-26T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 192.6K engagements
"Do Technical Founders Need Business Co-Founders Whether or not you need a co-founder is always a hotly debated topic but going one level deeper founders often wonder what kind of co-founder they need. Its also common for technical founders to be told by investors and advisors that they would benefit from a co-founder with non-technical expertise in things like business or marketing. Are they correct Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel dive into exactly that question. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by"
YouTube Link 2024-01-11T19:47Z 2.1M followers, 167.6K engagements
"The Engineering Unlocks Behind DeepSeek YC Decoded Chinese AI company DeepSeek recently made waves when it announced R1 an open-source reasoning model that it claimed achieved comparable performance to OpenAIs o1 at a fraction of the cost. But for those following AI developments closely DeepSeek and R1 didnt come out of nowhere. In this episode of YC Decoded General Partner Diana Hu breaks down the key engineering optimizations behind DeepSeek's remarkable new models and contextualizes them within the broader history of recent AI breakthroughs. Apply to Y Combinator:"
YouTube Link 2025-02-05T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 216.8K engagements
"How To Price For B2B Startup School If you're a startup founder how much should you charge for your product or service It's a simple question that can make many lock up. What number should you pick In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield guides you on how to come up with a price and then justify that number to customers. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:19 - The Value Equation 04:28 - Cost 06:26 - Competition 10:08 - Pricing 13:42 - Free"
YouTube Link 2024-07-25T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 134K engagements
"Franois Chollet: How We Get To AGI Franois Chollet on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Franois Chollet is a leading voice in AI. He's the creator of the Keras library author of Deep Learning with Python and the founder of the ARC Prize a global competition aimed at measuring true general intelligence. He's spent years thinking deeply about what intelligence actually is and why scaling up todays AI models isnt enough to reach it. In this talk he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized skills and lays out a path toward true general intelligence AI that can adapt"
YouTube Link 2025-07-03T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 138.8K engagements
"From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn In just a few years James Hawkins took PostHog from an idea hacked together right before YC's W20 deadline to a unicorn powering product analytics for thousands of teams. In this episode of Founder Firesides he sits down with YC's Brad Flora to talk about surviving six months of "pivot hell" why open-source analytics was the breakthrough and how PostHog grew from fighting for its first users to launching full product lines. James also shares what he's learned about momentum staying close to customers and using transparency and humor to build a company"
YouTube Link 2025-12-10T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 28.7K engagements
"The Hard Part About Being Contrarian Some of the biggest breakthroughs like OpenAI and SpaceX started as ideas most people thought were impossible. But the best founders stay contrarian long enough to be right learning from criticism but staying true to their convictions and users who believe in the same vision. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-10-24T18:59Z 2.1M followers, 25.8K engagements
"Elon Musk's Video Game Recommendations Sam Altman asked Elon Musk for video game recommendations. This is a clip from a longer interview which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=tnBQmEqBCY0 Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:00 New video game recommendation 00:00:28 Elon to Sam - Do you play games YC Sam Altman Y Combinator How To Build The Future Advice Elon Musk hearthstone overwatch blizzard video games gaming the last of us uncharted YC Sam Altman Y Combinator How To Build The Future Advice Elon Musk hearthstone overwatch blizzard video games gaming"
YouTube Link 2017-01-10T00:32Z 2.1M followers, 7.4M engagements
"Dalton Caldwell - All About Pivoting YC Partner and Head of Admissions Dalton Caldwell talks about pivoting for startups and shares his advice on when and how founders should consider it for their companies. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6p-all-about-pivoting This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Introduction 0:29 What is a "pivot" 1:54 Why pivot 3:09 Good and bad"
YouTube Link 2019-08-29T15:13Z 2.1M followers, 135.3K engagements
"How To Cold Email Investors - Michael Seibel Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on how to cold email investors. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ *** Topics 00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Make it short i.e. [--] seconds or less to read 00:58 - Interested in: the problem you're trying to solve what your solution is have you launched do you have growth how big you think the market could be do you have"
YouTube Link 2019-09-24T14:25Z 2.1M followers, 125.5K engagements
"How To Deal With Setbacks Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best approaches to managing the many setbacks startup founders can face over the lifetime of starting and running a business. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:26 - Punches that land 01:04 - The setback cycle 02:05 - Fundraising 04:27 - YC - No for now 05:42 - Survivorship bias 06:28 - Co-founders 08:02 - The magical deal 09:15 - After the deal credits don't roll 11:21 - A bad launch"
YouTube Link 2022-05-25T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 100.6K engagements
"Tim Brady - How Much Equity Should I Give My First Employees Tim Brady explains how much equity you should offer your early employees. Tim is a partner at YC and was a Co-founder and Partner at Imagine K12. Formerly CEO at QuestBridge and Chief Product Officer at @yahoo. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2021-01-25T15:39Z 2.1M followers, 87.8K engagements
"How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding Startup School AI can't yet one-shot an entire productbut with the rise of vibe coding it's getting close. YC's Tom Blomfield has spent the last month building side projects with tools like Claude Code Windsurf and Aqua seeing just how far you can push modern LLMs. From writing full-stack apps to debugging with a single paste of an error message AI is becoming a legit collaborator in the dev process. This video is a playbook for anyone who wants to get the most out of vibe coding and build faster. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work"
YouTube Link 2025-04-25T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 344.7K engagements
"Top Ways Startups Waste Money Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss what startups waste money onfrom marketing and sales to legal and hiring. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 02:19 - Hiring lies 04:50 - Contractors 06:51 - Marketing spend 09:53 - Brand advertising 11:02 - Approach events like a startup founder 12:20 - PR 16:01 - Lawyers 20:22 - Advisors 24:39 - Devil's advocate Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup:"
YouTube Link 2022-07-07T19:11Z 2.1M followers, 375.9K engagements
"Jared Friedman - Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders YC Partner Jared Friedman covers hard-tech companies and why founders should consider starting one. He also covers a couple of the most common problems hard-tech companies face and how to solve them with examples from seven YC companies. You can find the lecture slides and transcript here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/78 Find more Startup School and YC content at https://www.startupschool.org/library. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:36 - Outline 00:56 - What is a Hard Tech Company"
YouTube Link 2019-09-20T10:46Z 2.1M followers, 91.2K engagements
"Michael Seibel - Building Product YC CEO Michael Seibel outlines how successful startups think about building something people want. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:53 What allowed us to survive 00:03:50 What problem are you solving 00:10:11 Who is your customer 00:18:39 Does your MVP actually solve the problem 00:21:10 Which customers should you go after first (the easy ones) 00:25:46 Should you"
YouTube Link 2018-09-05T15:59Z 2.1M followers, 1.1M engagements
"Why Design Matters: Lessons from Stripe Lyft and Airbnb Stripe Airbnb and Lyft are a few of the most successful companies of the past decade. And there are at least two things they all have in common - great design and Katie Dill. Katie was Head of Experience Design at Airbnb led the design team at Lyft and is now Head of Design at Stripe. We spoke with Katie about her design philosophy what sets companies like Stripe apart and how important it is to instill a culture of design in your startup from day one. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DesignReview-apply Work at a startup:"
YouTube Link 2024-10-16T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 60.8K engagements
"Don't Make These Hiring Mistakes Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the many different mistakes founders make when they approach hiring for their startup and how to grow your team the correct way. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:41 - Challenges in startup hiring 02:15 - Lies about hiring and how it doesn't solve all problems 10:14 - Devil advocate - Big"
YouTube Link 2022-05-19T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 128.9K engagements
"The Biggest Mistakes First-Time Founders Make - Michael Seibel Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on the biggest mistakes first-time founders make. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ *** Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:10 - Solving a problem you don't care about 01:01 - Helping users you don't care about 01:47 - Choosing co-founders you don't know well"
YouTube Link 2019-08-16T17:04Z 2.1M followers, 337.5K engagements
"Should Your Startup Bootstrap or Raise Venture Capital Within the world of startups you'll find lots of discourse online about the experiences of founders bootstrapping their startup versus the founders who have raised venture capital to fund their company. Is one better than the other Truth is it may not be so black and white. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the virtues and struggles of both paths. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Coming Up 00:31 - Lopsided"
YouTube Link 2024-02-05T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 210.5K engagements
"AI Interfaces Of The Future Design Review AI is dramatically changing the way we interact with software. So for this episode of Design Review YC General Partner Aaron Epstein sat down with Raphael Schaad the founder and designer of Cron (now Notion Calendar) to critique some groundbreaking AI user interfaces. Together theyll review a wide variety of examples from agents and adaptive UI to video prompts and realistic voice APIs all in an effort to get a glimpse of how AI is changing the future of software. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Thank you to these companies for"
YouTube Link 2025-02-27T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 171.4K engagements
"Ask These Questions Before Starting An AI Startup Jordan Fisher is the co-founder & CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th [----] he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answersasking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away. He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right now What happens when software becomes commoditized How do you build trust as teams shrink and AI takes on more"
YouTube Link 2025-10-07T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 46.9K engagements
"Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas YC Partner Kevin Hale walks us through the process of evaluating ideas and how founders should think about their startups. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6e-how-to-evaluate-startup-ideas This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ *** Topics"
YouTube Link 2019-07-25T18:32Z 2.1M followers, 746.5K engagements
"Understanding SAFEs and Priced Equity Rounds by Kirsty Nathoo YC Partner Kirsty Nathoo gives the lowdown on several different ways to capitalize your company and how those impact founder equity and cap tables overall. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6m-understanding-safes-and-priced-equity-rounds This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Introduction 3:53 SAFEs 10:15"
YouTube Link 2018-10-17T14:22Z 2.1M followers, 358.5K engagements
"Inference AI Infra in the World of Test-Time Compute Theres room to rebuild the AI infrastructure stack: better software at inference-layer tooling cheaper ways to handle GPU workloads and optimizations that let AI apps scale without bleeding money. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-01-31T21:53Z 2.1M followers, 38.2K engagements
"This Startup Is Trying To Delete 29% Of All CO2 Emissions Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something thats never been done before. Theyre building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains. It's a system that captures CO2 from moving vehicles before those emissions ever enter the atmosphere. Then they turn those captured emissions into revenue by selling to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products. In this episode of Hard Tech YCs Gustaf Alstrmer visited Remora's headquarters outside of Detroit to find out how a recent college graduate"
YouTube Link 2025-10-09T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 50.5K engagements
"Reindustrialize With Modern Metal Mills Reindustrialize With Modern Metal Mills YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-08T04:17Z 2.1M followers, [----] engagements
"Simple Products That Became Big Companies Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about OpenSea Gusto and the importance of building simple products that solve a real problem. To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Rookie Mistakes 00:42 - Note from YC founder 01:02 - Boiling the ocean 02:00 - Googlitis 02:32 - OpenSea 04:33 - Gusto 05:34 - Having lots of features is"
YouTube Link 2022-01-26T15:07Z 2.1M followers, 190.8K engagements
"Tarpit Ideas: The Sequel The long awaited follow-up to their original tarpit ideas video Dalton and Michael dispel some misconceptions about what a tarpit idea actually is and how it applies to current technology trends like artificial intelligence. Don't get stuck Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:29 - Tarpit [---] 02:47 - Key Factors 04:18 - Technology & Historical Factor 05:18 - X for Y 06:16 - Current Technology 06:54 - Artificial Intelligence 08:48 - Changing Behavior 10:09 - Arbitrage 12:40 - Takeaway 13:40 - Outro YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2024-07-19T18:10Z 2.1M followers, 92.7K engagements
"Billion-Dollar Unpopular Startup Ideas Nine out of ten people might tell you you're crazy. The tenth might see what you see. Garry Harj Jared and Diana talk about contrarian bets the ideas that look impossible until they work. From Uber and Coinbase to DoorDash and Flock Safety they share how founders find opportunity where others see dead ends. Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 2:00 - AI verticals are becoming more crowded 6:22 - Non-obvious successes 9:50 - End users can get regulations changed 18:05 - Finding contrarian ideas what founders should look for 25:10 - Flock Safety and selling to local"
YouTube Link 2025-10-17T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 120.7K engagements
"Vibe Coding Is The Future Andrej Karpathy recently coined the term vibe coding to describe how LLMs are getting so good that devs can simply give in to the vibes embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists. We dive into this new way of programming and what it means for builders in the age of AI. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Intro 0:42 What is vibe coding 1:00 What founders in the current YC batch are saying 4:35 Debugging and building systems 6:59 The models people are using now 10:01 What"
YouTube Link 2025-03-05T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 286.8K engagements
"Founder Stories: Cathy Di Five minutes before the deadline Cathy Di applied to YC with an idea: Dedalus Labs. Months later she's now running a company that's just raised $11M. The deadline to apply for the winter batch is tonight at 8pm PT - there's still time to get your app in ycombinator.com/apply"
YouTube Link 2025-11-11T01:25Z 2.1M followers, 30.5K engagements
"What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs For years we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced and more hopeful. From radiology to software engineering the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster demand for human creativity and judgment grows. YC's Garry Tan explores what history economics and real companies show us that technology doesn't replace people it redefines what we can do. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-10-14T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 314.3K engagements
"Finding Opportunity in Outdated Rules Many big shifts happen when outdated rules no longer match how the world works. The opportunity is in noticing where technology has outpaced the law and building something that clearly benefits users while finding the right path forward. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-12-05T17:12Z 2.1M followers, 25.1K engagements
"The Next Breakthrough In AI Agents Is Here In recent months AI agents have gone from experimental to increasingly useful with platforms like DeepSeek and OpenAI's Deep Research redefining whats possible. Now a new contender has entered the fieldManus a general purpose AI agent thats managed to capture global attention. In this episode of YC Decoded President and CEO Garry Tan dives into how Manus' unique architecture sets it apart what its launch says about the broader debate around GPT "wrappers" and why they might actually be more valuable than they first appear. Apply to attend our"
YouTube Link 2025-04-08T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 278.8K engagements
"Where Do Great Startup Ideas Come From Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about where the ideas for Airbnb Coinbase and Stripe came from. Then they discuss what you can learn from these founders. To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Rookie Mistakes 00:30 - [--] common themes 00:35 - [--]. Timing 00:48 - [--]. Idea 00:59 - [--]. Market 01:10 - AirbnB 01:24 - Competition 02:47 -"
YouTube Link 2022-01-19T18:22Z 2.1M followers, 214.5K engagements
"Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design Tom Brown co-founded Anthropic after helping build GPT-3 at OpenAI. A self-taught engineer he went from getting a B-minus in linear algebra to becoming one of the key people behind AI's scaling breakthroughs. And his work is paying off. Today Anthropic's Claude is the go-to choice for developers and his team is overseeing what he calls "humanity's largest infrastructure buildout ever." On this episode of The Lightcone he discusses his unconventional path from YC founder to AI researcher the discovery of scaling"
YouTube Link 2025-08-19T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 131.6K engagements
"Startup Ideas You Can Now Build With AI There's never been a better time to start an AI company. Not just because there are new ideas but because the tech finally makes old ones actually work. On the Lightcone Garry Harj Diana and Jared talk through the kinds of startups that are suddenly viable thanks to LLMsfrom full-stack law firms to personalized tutors to recruiting platforms that can finally scale. They share the patterns they're seeing the ideas they're excited about and what it means to live at the edge of the future where breakthroughs often look like second chances. If you've been"
YouTube Link 2025-05-16T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 286.2K engagements
"How We Redesigned Our Website In this special episode of Design Review YC General Partner Aaron Epstein and YC Product Designer Eve Bouffard break down how they went about redesigning the YC homepage from the ground up. Theyll discuss the motivations for the redesign the unconventional process they took and lessons for founders building their own sites. Chapters: 00:00 Designing A New Website 01:00 The Old Homepage 02:30 Centering the Story on Founders 04:00 The New Vision: Inspire Dont Sell 05:30 Visualizing Founder Transformation 07:00 Letting Founders Speak for Themselves 08:45 Bringing"
YouTube Link 2026-01-30T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 19.7K engagements
"How To Earn Customers For Life In this first in-person episode Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell reveal how startups can gain a competitive advantage by doing something deceptively simple. They share compelling stories of companies that built loyal relationships and achieved success by making personal connections with users. In contrast they discuss the traps early-stage founders make by trying to emulate big tech. If you want to build a business that customers love and that thrives in the long run this advice on why caring deeply about your customers is key. Apply to Y Combinator:"
YouTube Link 2023-03-03T00:16Z 2.1M followers, 108.3K engagements
"Mark Zuckerberg : How to Build the Future Mark is a cofounder of Facebook. Facebook is one of the most influential companies in the history of the world. Over [---] billion people use it every day. Access podcast and transcript versions of this interview here: http://www.ycombinator.com/future/mark/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:12 The early days of Facebook 00:02:17 Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started 00:03:16 Something that made Facebook different from other projects that you built 00:04:26 Advice that you give to other"
YouTube Link 2016-08-16T17:46Z 2.1M followers, 2M engagements
"Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School [----] Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School [----]. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals https://www.startupschool.org/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:49 - What was the first thing you wrote 08:19 - Why did Facebook win 12:55 - Network for college students 14:12 - When did you realize you were going to do it 17:16 - Personal quality 18:25 - Was it rougher than typical startups 21:12 - Learn to manage people 22:08 - How to find if someone is really"
YouTube Link 2013-10-26T03:36Z 2.1M followers, 890.5K engagements
"Founder Stories: Saurav Kumar Saurav Kumar was studying CS at UIUC just a few months ago surrounded by cornfields and lecture halls. Now hes in San Francisco building Fleetline a place where being ambitious and taking risks feels completely normal. Anyone can make that leap. Get your application in to the winter batch by 8pm PT tomorrow. All you need is an idea: ycombinator.com/apply"
YouTube Link 2025-11-10T02:56Z 2.1M followers, 25.7K engagements
"Stablecoin Financial Services Stablecoin Financial Services YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-10T22:00Z 2.1M followers, [----] engagements
"Founder Stories: Priya Khandelwal For Priya Khandelwal and her company Nixo the key to growing fast was being part of a community of founders solving tough problems together. She found that sense of momentum and shared purpose at YC. And so can you. ycombinator.com/apply"
YouTube Link 2025-11-07T00:19Z 2.1M followers, 30.1K engagements
"How to Create Luck - Dalton Caldwell Y Combinator Partner Dalton Caldwell Y Combinator partner and founder of imeem and Mixed Media Labs on how to create luck. https://twitter.com/daltonc Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200) twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ YC Y Combinator How to Create Luck Luck Startups Dalton Caldwell Partner imeem Mixed Media Labs Advice YC Y Combinator How to Create Luck Luck Startups Dalton Caldwell Partner imeem Mixed Media Labs Advice"
YouTube Link 2019-05-09T16:19Z 2.1M followers, 42.9K engagements
"Why Startup Founders Should Launch Companies Sooner Than They Think Launching a company is often pictured as a big splashy event with lots of media attention and hype. This can be scary It also often results in founders delaying their launches which then stalls the crucial lessons they could be learning. In this video YC Partners discuss this common hesitation and why it can be harmful to the journey and growth of a startup. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 -"
YouTube Link 2024-07-12T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 98.2K engagements
"Founder Stories: Rishi Choudhary Before YC Rishi Choudhary was working a regular [--] frustrated by how slow things moved and fighting to build anything new. Now as co-founder of Kastle (YC S24) he's able to finally build products that people really want. And you can too. It's not too late to get your application in. ycombinator.com/apply YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-11-16T18:36Z 2.1M followers, 22.1K engagements
"The Line Between Software and Service Max Junestrand founder of Legora says AI is blurring the line between software and service. The best companies at the frontier wont just sell toolstheyll act like partners helping clients win through the transition"
YouTube Link 2025-10-20T20:31Z 2.1M followers, 24.5K engagements
"Why Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto We are entering the era of Fintech [---]. Regulatory clarity growing consumer adoption and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto and at YC Base and Coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. In this episode of Main Function YC's Harj Taggar and Base's Jesse Pollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they're most excited to see why this is such an exciting time in crypto and what the future could look like onchain. More on our latest RFS: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/build-onchain Apply to Y"
YouTube Link 2025-09-23T14:45Z 2.1M followers, 31.1K engagements
"Tom Blomfield: How I Created Two Billion-Dollar Fintech Startups There arent a ton of people in the world who can say they founded a billion dollar company. There are far fewer that can say they did it twice. YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield is one of them. Each episode of our series Backstory will introduce you to one of YCs Group Partners and the path they took to get here. If you aspire to change the world with your startup Tom's story exemplifies the joys and trials of pursuing these ambitious ideas. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/Backstory-apply Work at a Startup:"
YouTube Link 2024-01-30T22:02Z 2.1M followers, 240K engagements
"Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites Cursor Head of Design Ryo Lu has spent his career at the intersection of design and engineeringfrom building fan sites as a kid to designing products at Stripe Asana and Notion. Now he's rethinking how software itself gets made. On this episode of Design Review Ryo joins YC's Aaron Epstein to break down how great product websites communicate what a company does. They walk through sites from early-stage startups calling out the small choices in structure clarity and brand that help users understand a product instantly and the ones that get in the"
YouTube Link 2025-11-20T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 147.1K engagements
"DoorDash's Application Video for YC S13 In [----] DoorDash applied to Y Combinator's Summer [----] batch and they were accepted. This is their application video. YC Y Combinator Doordash Startup Founder Entrepreneurship YC Y Combinator Doordash Startup Founder Entrepreneurship"
YouTube Link 2020-12-09T17:20Z 2.1M followers, 948.1K engagements
"Michael Truell: Building Cursor At [--] Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students Michael Truell on June 17th [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. At [--] Michael Truell has already built Cursor into one of the fastest-growing companies in AI coding hitting $100M ARR in just a year. In this fireside chat with YC General Partner Diana Hu he shares the lessons that came from years of failed projects with his co-founders why he believes programming is still essential even as AI changes how we code and how Cursor is taking on GitHub Copilot with the conviction that all of"
YouTube Link 2025-09-03T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 55.1K engagements
"The AI Economy Is Stabilizing Jared Friedman reflects on one of his biggest surprises of 2025: how much the AI economy has stabilized. After a period of rapid uncertain change in [----] the ecosystem now feels more mature with clear layersmodels infrastructure and applicationsand a more established playbook for building AI-native companies. While models have continued to improve progress has been incremental rather than disruptive helping the overall market settle. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-01-15T18:15Z 2.1M followers, 16.2K engagements
"Don't Just Check Off Boxes Cursor co-founder and CEO Michael Truell's #1 piece of advice for builders: focus less on credentials and more on curiositybuild things you care about with people you like and respect. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-10-29T23:18Z 2.1M followers, 25.8K engagements
"Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI ChatGPT's Origins and Building AI Hardware A fireside with Sam Altman on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Sam Altman grew up obsessed with technology broke into the Stanford mainframe as a kid and dropped out to start his first company before turning [--]. In this conversation he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAIsharing what hes learned about ambition the weight of responsibility and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career the limits of personal"
YouTube Link 2025-06-21T16:01Z 2.1M followers, 481.9K engagements
"How To Keep Your Users Startup School At YC our motto is make something people want. But how do you actually know if youve accomplished that in the early days One of the best ways to measure successful growth is a concept called cohort retention which tracks the fraction of new users that come back time and time again to use your product. In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner David Lieb explains how to define cohorts track active users and determine the appropriate time frame for measuring successful retention rates. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a"
YouTube Link 2024-08-29T17:00Z 2.1M followers, 53.4K engagements
"Find a Pain Point Worth Solving Billion dollar ideas are everywhere. Start by finding a painful specific problem one that really matters to someone you know and solve it for them"
YouTube Link 2025-11-24T20:08Z 2.1M followers, 37.8K engagements
"Building The World's First Reusable Rockets Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman explain what motivated them to leave comfortable jobs and take on a problem that had never been solved before - fully reusable rockets. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-01-23T17:01Z 2.1M followers, 12.3K engagements
"How To Design Better AI Apps In this episode of The Breakdown Tom and Dave are joined by fellow YC General Partner Pete Koomen to lay out a new vision for how AI should actually work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don't want to do. From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators they dig into what it means to build AI-native softwareand why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think. Pete's essay "AI Horseless Carriages":"
YouTube Link 2025-05-23T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 98.5K engagements
"The Shortcut Rule Be careful not to optimize for a single metric at the expense of everything else. You might hit the target but miss the pointreal progress comes from keeping the bigger picture in mind"
YouTube Link 2025-10-08T21:43Z 2.1M followers, 25.3K engagements
"Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws Compute and the Future of AI Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model Ankit Gupta YC General Partner sits down with Nick Joseph Anthropic's Head of Pre-training to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claudefrom managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws data strategies team composition and why the hardest problems in AI are often infrastructure problems not ML problems. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply"
YouTube Link 2025-09-30T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 28.6K engagements
"DoorDash at YC Summer [----] Demo Day In August [----] Tony Xu CEO and co-founder at DoorDash presented to a room full of investors at YC S13 Demo Day. YC Y Combinator Doordash startup Entrepreneurship YC Y Combinator Doordash startup Entrepreneurship"
YouTube Link 2020-12-09T17:20Z 2.1M followers, 243.5K engagements
"The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were Impossible Until Now Every major shift in consumer tech has a moment when it suddenly becomes accessible to millions. Michael Mignano helped spark one of those moments with Anchor making podcast creation something anyone could do with a tap. Now at Lightspeed he sees AI bringing a similar leap to music media and everyday apps. In this conversation he and Garry trace the arc from the early days of social audio to today's consumer AI boomand dig into what founders should focus on as the next generation of creative tools takes shape. Chapters: 00:00 Intro"
YouTube Link 2025-11-28T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 67.6K engagements
"How To Build A Tech Startup With No Technical Skills Based on the thousands of companies YC has funded over the years the biggest common element between all successful startups is having technical talent on the founding team. But what do you do if you don't know how to code You may think you can get by using no-code tools part-time consultants or dev shops to bring your startup idea to life. But that thinking is wrong. In this episode of Dalton & Michael well discuss exactly why that is and why recruiting a technical co-founder is the single biggest way to create value as someone trying to"
YouTube Link 2023-11-30T18:15Z 2.1M followers, 619.7K engagements
"Does Your Startup Need To Be In San Francisco Should you and your startup live in San Francisco Y Combinator Partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell debate their different opinions on whether startups are more likely to succeed in the Golden City or elsewhere. Where do they find common ground Watch to find out. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:29 - Dalton's Preference 02:39 - Michael's Preference 05:02 - The Bay Area 05:50 - Follow The .001% 08:23 - The"
YouTube Link 2023-08-01T18:05Z 2.1M followers, 88.4K engagements
"The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal an early executive at Palantir and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model. During his time at Palantir he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today. On this episode of The Lightcone he explains how FDEs became central to today's startups why "doing things that don't"
YouTube Link 2025-09-08T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 95.5K engagements
"Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI A fireside with Dr. Fei-Fei Li on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Dr. Fei-Fei Li is often called the godmother of AIand for good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it she was helping build the foundation. In this fireside she recounts the creation of ImageNet a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods the shock of seeing convolutional networks outperform expectations in"
YouTube Link 2025-07-01T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 196K engagements
"How AI Is Changing Enterprise The Lightcone hosts sit down with Aaron Levie the co-founder & CEO of Box to hear reports from the front of how large enterprise and Fortune [---] companies are adapting to the AI age. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Intro 1:15 Why the GPT wrapper was a bad meme 4:44 Enterprise users just care about getting workflow done 8:38 What does it mean for startups as intelligence becomes a commodity 12:47 Do Fortune 500s have any interest in underlying models 20:19 What are enterprise execs"
YouTube Link 2025-02-19T15:00Z 2.1M followers, 128.7K engagements
"How Zepto Became Indias Fastest Growing Startup Imagine ordering groceries and having them show up at your doorstep in just [--] minutes. Thats the promise of Zepto the fastest growing e-commerce company in India. In this episode of How To Build The Future Garry sits down with Aadit Palicha the co-founder and CEO of Zepto to discuss how they got started in a Whatsapp group what its like going up against incumbents like Amazon and Zomato and how the future of e-commerce is changing in the age of intelligence. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup:"
YouTube Link 2025-04-18T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 224.8K engagements
"AI Native Enterprise Software Salesforce and ServiceNow won by going all-in on the cloud before the incumbents could react. AI is the next waveand it's just as big. The next generation of enterprise software won't just record work it'll help do it. If you're building AI-native tools for the enterprise let's talk. Apply to YC Fall [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-08-02T21:05Z 2.1M followers, 33.8K engagements
"Make LLMs easy Make LLMs easy YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-06T17:02Z 2.1M followers, 25.3K engagements
"Advantages Of A First-Time Founder Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the advantages of being a first-time founder and the instances when it pays to have experience founding a startup in the past. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:47 - Setup 01:35 - Expert opinions are not what you want 04:07 - Picking your market 05:37 - Novel 06:58 - First time founder have to innovate more 08:08 - Honesty 09:57 - Auto pilot initially but it shuts off 12:07 - Devil's advocate"
YouTube Link 2022-09-15T22:34Z 2.1M followers, 118.7K engagements
"How Top 1% Founders Navigate Co-founder Conflict Apply for a YC Summer Fellows Grant: https://events.ycombinator.com/summer-fellows Technical skills build startupsbut oftentimes people skills can save them. So how do you navigate the disagreements and conflict that inevitably arise with a co-founder In this episode of the Lightcone our hosts share what they've learned for managing these critical yet often overlooked challenges offering advice on how to handle the messy realities that go beyond building. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Intro 01:09 Why you should"
YouTube Link 2025-03-21T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 54.9K engagements
"The [--] Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups In the early days of a startup speed is the best moat. But once you build something people want how do you maintain your position and defend against the competition In this episode of Lightcone we dive into Hamilton Helmers Seven Powers framework to find out how these timeless business strategies hold up in today's world of AI startups. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:00 - The Moat Problem 01:30 - The Seven Powers Framework 04:20 - When to Think About Moats 08:40"
YouTube Link 2025-10-03T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 143.3K engagements
"Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence Multiplanetary Life How to Be Useful A fireside with Elon Musk on June [--] [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Before rockets and robots Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk he walks through the early days of Zip2 the Falcon [--] launches that nearly ended SpaceX and the miracle of Tesla surviving [----]. He shares the thinking that guided himbuilding from first principles doing useful things and the belief that were in the middle of an intelligence big bang. Apply to Y Combinator:"
YouTube Link 2025-06-19T20:22Z 2.1M followers, 663.1K engagements
"Should You Quit Your Job At A Unicorn If youre an employee of a late stage company right now how would you know when its time to move on vs. time to double down The fact is there isn't an easy answer it can really vary from person to person and situation to situation. In this video YC Group Partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell share some suggestions on what sort of things an employee of a late stage startup should be looking for the good signs and the bad to best make this decision. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs"
YouTube Link 2023-10-19T16:00Z 2.1M followers, 51.8K engagements
"The ML Technique Every Founder Should Know Diffusion is the foundational machine learning framework behind state-of-the-art AI image and video generation including Sora Midjourney and Google Veo. In this episode of Decoded YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with YC Visiting Partner Francois Chaubard to discuss how diffusion works walk through a code sample and explain why everyone training models should understand it. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:33 What is diffusion 02:50 What are"
YouTube Link 2026-01-22T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 34.9K engagements
"Why Vertical LLM Agents Are The New $1 Billion SaaS Opportunities As LLMs become exponentially better it is clear that vertical AI agents are key to the next generation of billion dollar SaaS companies. In this episode of the Lightcone the hosts sit down with YC alum Jake Heller the co-founder and CEO of Casetext (which sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million in cash in 2023) to discuss what it takes to build a successful vertical AI company and overcome resistance from industry veterans and skeptics. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Coming Up 01:40 Building a"
YouTube Link 2024-10-04T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 445.6K engagements
"Chase the Hard Problems A hard technical problem can be a great moat. Just dont hide behind the difficultystay close to customers while you build so know whether youre solving the right problems"
YouTube Link 2025-11-25T21:35Z 2.1M followers, 26.8K engagements
"How Future Billionaires Get Sht Done Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel take a look at Paul Graham's essay "Maker's Schedule Manager's Schedule" and share tips on how to be more effective and productive on the journey to creating a billion dollar business. Read PG's essay here: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - How Future Billionaires Get Sht Done 00:38 - PG Essay 01:18 - Maker Schedule 03:59 - The Right Time 05:01 -"
YouTube Link 2022-03-31T23:57Z 2.1M followers, 736.8K engagements
"Inside The Hard Tech Startups Turning Sci-Fi Into Reality YC has become a surprising force in the hard tech world funding startups building physical products from satellites to rockets to electric planes. In this episode of Lightcone we go behind the scenes to explore how YC advises founders on their ambitious startups. We also take a look at a number of YC's hard tech companies and how they got started with little time or money. Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Coming Up 02:42 - YC's Model for Hard Tech 04:19 - Mindset Shift and Proving Technical Feasibility 08:30"
YouTube Link 2024-04-11T17:15Z 2.1M followers, 86.3K engagements
"When to Launch Your Startup and When to Wait Step inside the group partners' lounge to hear Y Combinator Partners Harj Taggar Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss how startups should approach launching and the exceptions to the rules. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Inside the partners' lounge 01:00 - Why don't startups like to launch early and move quickly 01:30 - What is fast 02:18 - V1 of Instacart 03:18 - V1 of Brex 03:59 - Founders perfect launch and"
YouTube Link 2022-03-15T15:24Z 2.1M followers, 144.3K engagements
"How To NOT Get Screwed As A Software Engineer The stories are true: technical founders (and early technical employees) often end up with the short end of the stick when starting a company. In this episode of Dalton & Michael well discuss the questions and best practices that an aspiring technical founder should think about whom to start a company with and how to think about things like equity split and division of responsibilities. Know what you are worth and act accordingly Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by"
YouTube Link 2023-11-01T17:09Z 2.1M followers, 236.7K engagements
"Consumer Startup Metrics Startup School In this episode of Startup School YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield dives deeper into the metrics that matter most for consumer startups. Tom discusses paid and organic user growth unit economics net promoter scores and the "magic moment" in your product that is most important to track. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:00 - Growth Rates 01:24 - Organic vs. Paid Growth 05:27 - Cannibalization 06:21 - Paid Growth 10:59 - Unit"
YouTube Link 2024-01-06T17:13Z 2.1M followers, 82.6K engagements
"Fundraising Fundamentals By Geoff Ralston YC Partner Geoff Ralston gives an introduction to the key concepts to keep in mind once you enter a fundraising process. Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/ YC Y Combinator Geoff Ralston Startup School YC Y Combinator Geoff Ralston Startup School"
YouTube Link 2018-10-10T15:28Z 2.1M followers, 284.9K engagements
"Inside The Startup Launching AI Data Centers Into Space Starcloud recently made history by launching a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 into orbit the first time a GPU that powerful has ever operated in space. It's the first step toward building AI data centers in orbit powered by continuous sunlight and cooled by radiating heat into deep space. Their approach could one day rival the world's biggest data centers while using less energy zero fresh water and far lower emissions. In this episode of Hard Tech YC's Aaron Epstein visits Starcloud's HQ where co-founders Philip Johnston Ezra Feilden and"
YouTube Link 2025-11-13T17:08Z 2.1M followers, 301.5K engagements
"AI Guidance for Physical Work Much of the AI conversation focuses on which desk jobs will get replaced. But for physical work AI can't yet act in the world. With multimodal models and ubiquitous hardware theres an opportunity to give workers live AI coaching that dramatically reduces training time and unlocks skilled labor at scale. Apply to YC Spring [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-04T18:25Z 2.1M followers, 22.1K engagements
"Andrej Karpathy on why we still need humans in the loop Andrej Karpathy talks about the importance of GUIs for working with AI systemsand why we still need to keep a tight leash on agents. Even with fast output the human remains the bottleneck"
YouTube Link 2025-06-24T21:46Z 2.1M followers, 47.7K engagements
"Cursor for Product Managers AI is great at writing code but product success depends on deciding what to build. We think theres an opportunity for an AI-native system focused on helping teams figure out what to build not just how to build it. Apply to YC Spring [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-02T21:04Z 2.1M followers, 56.5K engagements
"The Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley What happens when the unconventional becomes conventional Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how the startup world has changed from being dominated by outsiders and nonconformists to now attracting more mainstream conformists looking for status and money. They share stories of what the tech scene was like when they were in school - and how radically different it is today. Dalton and Michael offer advice about navigating a world that doesn't always reward nonconformists embarking on risky entrepreneurial journeys. Don't just think different act"
YouTube Link 2023-02-05T19:14Z 2.1M followers, 94.2K engagements
"How Replit Went From $10M to $100M ARR In Just [--] Months Amjad Masad started Replit to make programming accessible to anyone anywhere. What began as a tool for learning to code has grown into a platform pushing the limits of AI-assisted software creation and recently surpassed $100M in ARR. On The Breakdown with Tom and Dave Amjad shares the journey from his early days in Jordan working on open-source projects to leading Replit through major pivots from "teach a billion people to code" to "let anyone build software." He discusses the evolving nature of programming the future of work and the"
YouTube Link 2025-07-17T14:00Z 2.1M followers, 37.8K engagements
"The Two Mindsets That Can KILL Your Startup Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the qualities that make a founder overly optimistic or far too pessimistic about their startup. Where is the right middle ground Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Introduction 00:30 - Stereotypes 03:09 - The Two Leaders 05:45 - Pessimistic mistakes 06:28 - Expectation setting 07:14 - Faulty feedback 08:24 - Demo day goals 09:20 - Energy drain 11:22 - Magical thinking 14:23 - Founder"
YouTube Link 2022-09-09T18:42Z 2.1M followers, 167.3K engagements
"Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals YC Partner Adora Cheung covers the importance of defining and tracking KPIs to understand how effectively your startup is reaching your goals. Transcript and lecture slides here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6j-how-to-set-kpis-and-goals-sus-2019 This lecture is part of YC's Startup School a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at https://www.startupschool.org/ Timestamps 00:00 What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) 00:39 Why do KPIs matter 1:33 What are the right KPIs to set 1:46 Setting your"
YouTube Link 2019-08-01T13:21Z 2.1M followers, 202.6K engagements
"The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He's spent nearly a decade making programming accessible to alland with the rise of AI that vision is closer than ever. In this talk from AI Startup School on June [--] [----] Amjad traces the arc of computing from mainframes to personal computers to a future where AI agents can create software on demand. He explains why the value of traditional software will approach zero fundamentally reshaping how companies are built and how work gets done."
YouTube Link 2025-09-12T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 111K engagements
"Startup Experts Share Their Investor Horror Stories For this latest episode of Office Hours the Group Partners are sharing stories from their worst investor meetings. Well outline some of the weird plays weve seen investors try to pull but well also confess times that we as founders bungled meetings we couldve nailed. Well discuss what differentiates a truly great investor and shed a bit of light on something we rarely talk about publicly: the YC Investor Database. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/OfficeHours-jobs Chapters (Powered by"
YouTube Link 2023-08-17T16:10Z 2.1M followers, 134K engagements
"The First 10-person $100B Company New AI tools make it possible to build billion-dollar companies with tiny teams and even solo founders. We want to fund the first 10-person $100B startup. If you're high-agency and ready to move fast let's build. Apply to YC Fall [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2025-08-01T13:21Z 2.1M followers, 39.2K engagements
"Jessica Livingston : How to Build the Future Jessica is a cofounder of Y Combinator. Y Combinator has funded [----] startups and they are worth more than $70 billion in total. More than [--] of them are worth more than a billion dollars or more. Access podcast and transcript versions of this interview here: https://www.ycombinator.com/future/jessica/ YC Y Combinator how to build the future startups YC Y Combinator how to build the future startups"
YouTube Link 2016-08-30T18:10Z 2.1M followers, 119.5K engagements
"Which Sales Strategy Is Best For Your Startup Our series Versus pits two competing concepts against each other. In this episode Y Combinator Visiting Group Partner Pete Koomen explores two common B2B sales strategies: Top Down and Bottom Up. Pete helps define each and discusses how a startup should choose and build their sales motion. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Sell your product: Bottoms up and Top down 00:23 - Top down sales 02:44 - Bottoms up sales"
YouTube Link 2022-12-08T18:04Z 2.1M followers, 51.2K engagements
"Startup Business Models and Pricing Startup School YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein talks about different startup business models how to monetize and how to price your product. Pricing and monetization is one of the most common questions from founders and this talk outlines [--] business models as well as highlighting business model lessons from the top YC companies. Business Model Guide: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Gh-business-model-guide Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 -"
YouTube Link 2022-12-15T20:05Z 2.1M followers, 591.4K engagements
"Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan Jared Kaplan on June 16th [----] at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Jared Kaplan started out as a theoretical physicist chasing questions about the universe. Then he helped uncover one of AIs most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable almost physical way. That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language modelsand led him to co-found Anthropic. In this talk he walks through how that discovery reshaped the path to human-level AI what it means for future models like Claude and"
YouTube Link 2025-07-29T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 57.7K engagements
"How Intelligent Is AI Really ARC-AGI is redefining how to measure progress on the path to AGI - focusing on reasoning generalization and adaptability instead of memorization or scale. During this month's NeurIPS [----] conference YC's Diana Hu sat down with ARC Prize Foundation President Greg Kamradt to find out why most AI benchmarks fail how ARC-AGI reveals the limits of todays models and why measuring intelligence may be harder than building it. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Chapters: 00:11 What ARC Prize is and why it exists 00:38 Franois Chollets definition of"
YouTube Link 2025-12-17T15:01Z 2.1M followers, 12.7K engagements
"How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience) In this episode of Founder Firesides YC General Partner Gustaf Alstrmer is joined by Max Junestrand co-founder and CEO of Legora one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups in the world. In just [--] months Max and his team scaled from [--] to [---] people raised $80M and cracked the challenge of selling to one of the most skeptical industries. Today Legoras AI workspace is used by tens of thousands of lawyers including top law firms like Goodwin and Cleary Gottlieb. Max shares insights on building a successful vertical"
YouTube Link 2025-08-26T14:01Z 2.1M followers, 78.5K engagements
"AI Powered Agencies AI flips this model by letting firms use software internally to deliver finished work at higher margins turning agencies into software-like businesses that can scale far beyond todays service firms. Apply to YC Spring [----] at ycombinator.com/apply. YC Y Combinator YC Y Combinator"
YouTube Link 2026-02-03T22:11Z 2.1M followers, 31.8K engagements
"How Pitching Investors is Different Than Pitching Customers - Michael Seibel Michael Seibel on pitching customers vs pitching investors. Michael is CEO and a Partner at YC. He was the co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv and Socialcam. https://twitter.com/mwseibel Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:04 Difference between investor and customer 00:00:35 Talking to customers 00:01:00 Where to use your customer pitch 00:01:13 Talking to investor 00:02:53 Where to use your investor"
YouTube Link 2019-03-14T15:34Z 2.1M followers, 117K engagements
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