The show, episode by episode

Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Y Combinator

We help founders make something people want. The Y Combinator Podcast is where builders talk about building. From the earliest days of an idea to scaling a company that changes the world, YC partners and founders share real stories, lessons, and tactics from the frontlines.

341 episodes tracked Similar shows

Y Combinator Startup Podcast

The State of Startups in 2026

8 Ways To Improve Your Outbound Sales

Open Models Change The Economics of AI

Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders

The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew

Max Junestrand: You Need The Willingness To Learn Faster Than Anyone Else

Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac

Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics

Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"

Max Hodak: How Startups Build Speed

How To Design In The Agent Era

Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence

Building the First Data Centers in Space

Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: "Move Fast And Ship Safely"

Patrick Collison: "What If You Succeed?"

Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI

Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity”

Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban

Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

Boris Cherny: Building Claude Code

Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

World Models, Explained

How To Better Understand Your Users

Why Domain Experts Are Winning In The Age Of AI

How To Pick A Startup Idea

"The CEO Must Be the Chief AI Officer"

How to Build an AI-Native Services Company

How To Build Superintelligence Inside Your Company

How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot

Paul Graham: Should you move to Silicon Valley?

Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers

Beyond Bigger Models: Recursion As The Next Scaling Law In AI

How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis

The $9B Startup That Wants to Create a Billion New Developers

The Playbook For Building An AI Native Company

Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Breaks Down Their New Website

The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here

This Startup Wants To Catch Cancer Before It Spreads

This Startup Secretly Detects Fraud For Fortune 500s

How François Chollet Is Building A New Path To AGI

Inside The Startup Reinventing America’s Trillion Dollar Chemical Industry

Building A Global AI Startup From India

The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces with Science's Max Hodak

How To Avoid AI Design Slop

The Fastest Path To Super Intelligence

The AI Agent Economy Is Here

Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny

The New Way To Build A Startup

OpenClaw And The Future Of Personal AI Agents

We're All Addicted To Claude Code

How To Get Your First Customers

Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets

What Surprised Us Most In 2025

How Intelligent Is AI, Really?

The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide

From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn

The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were "Impossible" Until Now

Cursor Head of Design Reviews Startup Websites

Inside The Startup Launching AI Into Space

How To Recruit The Best Engineers And Sales Reps

From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups

Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution

YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs

How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device

Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions

Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI

Fintech 3.0: Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto

Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era

The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad

The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students

GPT-OSS vs. Qwen vs. Deepseek: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures

How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)

The Sales Playbook for Founders | Startup School

Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design

The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street

Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan