Episodit
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Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades ā from Warby Parker to Chime to Dollar Shave Club.
In this conversation with Garry, she shares how great products (not marketing tricks) still win, why AI is unlocking a new kind of emotional relationship between consumers and technology, and what founders can learn from the messy creative stage we're in right now. She also breaks down how shifts in distribution, wellness, and digital behavior are reshaping what it means to build for real human needs.
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A fireside with Satya Nadella on June 17, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Satya Nadella started at Microsoft in 1992 as an engineer. Three decades later, heās now Chairman & CEO, navigating the company through one of the most profound technological shifts yet: the rise of AI.In this conversation, he shares how Microsoft is thinking about this momentā from the infrastructure needed to train frontier models, to the social permission required to use that compute. He draws parallels to the early PC and internet eras, breaks down what makes a great team, and reflects on what heād build if he were starting his career today.
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A fireside with Sam Altman 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 20.In this conversation, he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAIāsharing what heās 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 productivity, and why, in the end, it's all still about finding people you like working with and doing something that matters.
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A fireside with Elon Musk 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 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the āmiracleā of Tesla surviving 2008. He shares the thinking that guided himābuilding from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that weāre in the middle of an intelligence big bang.
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Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. Weāve entered the era of āSoftware 3.0,ā where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest.He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itselfā that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer.
Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing
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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 timeāand 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 replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.
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Fusion may still sound like science fictionā but it might not be for much longer. With AI pushing demand for clean power to new highs, a breakthrough may finally be close.
For Decoded, YC General Partner Gustaf Alstromer traces 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 is approaching the problem differently, as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by 2028.
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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 softwareāand why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think.
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Coding agents are no longer a distant ideaāthey're already starting to reshape how we work.
YC's Tom Blomfield and David Lieb discuss how AI coding tools are transforming software development, why small, high-agency teams will be able to do what once took armies of engineers, and why there's never been a better time to start something new.
They explore the bigger picture too: a future where there's abundance, knowledge work becomes more accessible, and founders have more leverage than ever before.
If you're thinking about building, there's no better moment than right now.
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AI can't yet one-shot an entire productābut 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 is a playbook for anyone who wants to get the most out of vibe coding and build faster.
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Imagine ordering groceries and having them show up at your doorstep in just 10 minutes. Thatās 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 itās like going up against incumbents like Amazon and Zomato and how the future of e-commerce is changing in the age of intelligence.
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Not long ago, America led the world in building and innovation. But over the past 50 years, bureaucracy and red tape have made it nearly impossible to get big things done.
Still, thereās a growing movement to turn that around ā to build faster, smarter, and better than ever before.
In this episode of The Main Function, Garry sits down with Atlantic staff writer and Plain English podcast host Derek Thompson to discuss his new book Abundance (co-authored with Ezra Klein). They discuss how we got here, what needs fixing, and what a bold, more prosperous 2050 could look like.
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In this special episode of Design Review, Aaron sits down with Raphael Schaad, the Head of Calendar at Notion to discuss his leap from designer to founder, why illustration is an important first step when building a new product, and what ultimately makes designers uniquely qualified to start a company today.
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12 years after starting DoorDash, co-founder & CEO Tony Xu and his employees still do deliveries every year, staying true to their core value: customer obsession.
Today, DoorDash is the largest food delivery platform in the US.
In this episode of How to Build the Future, Tony explains how their unwavering long-term vision won ā helping create a new market while surviving near death and a global pandemic along the way.
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Gusto (https://gusto.com) made payroll and HR painless for small businesses, growing into a $9.6B company along the way.
Co-founder & CEO Josh Reeves joined YC's Harj Taggar to share how they built a payroll company from scratch and their customer-first approach to product design and culture.
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Design isnāt just about making things workāitās about how they work, says Dylan Field, the co-founder & CEO of Figma.
As AI transforms tech, he believes a designer's judgment, taste, and agency will matter more than ever.Dylan sat down with YC's Garry Tan to discuss the evolving world of design in the age of AI, the challenging early days at Figma, and how his team forever changed the way designers and engineers collaborate.
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YC General Partner David Lieb sits down with Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, to discuss his origins in Silicon Valley, what it's like to compete with Google, and what the future of search could look like.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply
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Imagine flying from NY to London in just a few hours. Thatās the future that Blake Scholl and his team at Boom Supersonic are working towards.
Blake started as a software engineer and pivoted mid-career to aviation. Now, heās at the forefront of trying to bring back supersonic travel for all of us.
In this episode of Hard Tech, YCās Jared Friedman visited Blake in the Mojave desert to find out how someone who didnāt have a background in aerospace engineering was able to build the first-ever independently developed supersonic plane.
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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 Alstrƶmer discuss how to spend responsibly at each stage of a startupā 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
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According to OpenAI's former Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, reasoning and test-time compute will unlock more reliable and capable AI agentsā and a path to scale to AGI.
In this episode of How to Build the Future, YC's @garrytan sits down with Bob to discuss the lessons learned from his time at OpenAI, scaling laws, his advice for startups, and what all of this means for the jobs of the future.
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