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.
Today, more than 3% of the world’s lawyers use Legora, and the company has grown from $1 million to $100 million in ARR since launching in October 2024.At Startup School 2026, Legora co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand shares how they built one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the world, from cold emailing lawyers and moving into a customer’s office to freezing sales for six months to rebuild the product. He explains why building a company is ultimately about people, how to create a culture that wants to win, and why founders have to learn to love the hustle.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/max-junestrand-you-need-the-willingness
Susan Kare joined Apple as an art history PhD who barely knew anything about computers. She went on to design many of the icons, typefaces, and symbols that helped make the original Macintosh feel understandable and human, defining a visual language for personal computing that still influences software today.At Startup School 2026, Susan shares the stories behind the Happy Mac, Command key, Chicago font, and more, along with the design lessons she learned from Steve Jobs, Paul Rand, and the original Mac team: make things meaningful and memorable, embrace constraints, iterate constantly, and use just enough detail to make an idea instantly clear.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/susan-kare-on-designing-the-original
Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, for long periods of time, without a human babysitting them.
At Startup School 2026, Physical Intelligence cofounder Chelsea Finn explains what it takes to build general-purpose robots that work in the real world. She shares how reinforcement learning pushed robot throughput up 2x, how their systems can run autonomously for hours, and why she believes robotics is entering its GPT era: moving from specialized models toward general-purpose systems that can work across tasks, robots, and environments.
Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/chelsea-finn-on-the-next-decade-in
Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few months later, OpenClaw had exploded into one of the biggest open source AI projects in the world, with nearly 3,000 contributors and a peak of 4.7 million weekly downloads.At Startup School 2026, Peter tells the story of what happened when OpenClaw took off, what he got wrong as it grew, and how he eventually stopped using the product he had built for himself.He shares why the best products often start with something that annoys you, why focus matters more as building gets easier, and why, in his words, “fun is velocity.”Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/peter-steinberger-what-happens-when
Science is building a retinal implant that restores vision to people who have gone blind. One patient has already used it to read a 300-page novel.Building a company like that requires a lot more than getting the technology right. At Startup School 2026, Science CEO Max Hodak explains how the company buys things and hires people, and why those systems determine how fast it can move.He also gets into why founders can’t delegate their judgment, and why there’s no set of five bullet points that makes a startup work.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/max-hodak-there-are-no-blanket-rules
AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing how they build, ship, and stand out.
In this episode of Design Review, Stephen Haney, founder of AI-native design tool Paper, joins YC General Partner Aaron Epstein to demo the agent-first workflow that's making Paper one of the fastest-growing design tools since Figma.
Using live redesigns of user-submitted websites as examples, they break down the most common AI design tells, show how to fix them in seconds, and explain why the biggest risk for founders isn't moving too slow, it's shipping something that looks like everyone else.
The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before.
At Startup School 2026, YC President & CEO Garry Tan explains why we're entering the era of personal AGI: AI agents that run on your own infrastructure, compound your knowledge over time, and dramatically increase your ability to build. He shares the tools and workflows he uses every day, why every founder should own their intelligence instead of renting it, and what it means to build under your own power.
Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/garry-tan-own-your-intelligence
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space.
In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space. They've since raised $200 million, hit a billion-dollar valuation just 17 months after YC demo day, and filed with the FCC to deploy 88,000 more satellites.
In this episode, Philip walks us through their wild origin story, the engineering challenges behind the Starcloud-1, why they booked a SpaceX launch before they even knew what they were building, and how data centers in space make sense both economically and politically.
Waymo’s first autonomous demo took eighteen months. The product took fifteen years. Today, the Waymo Driver runs 500,000 trips a week — four million fully autonomous miles across fifteen cities, with 17 times fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers.
At Startup School 2026, Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov shares the seven lessons behind that journey, from bridging the gap between a demo and a real product to building systems that can safely operate in the physical world.
Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/dmitri-dolgov-seven-lessons-from
In 2009, Patrick and John Collison went to Startup School in Berkeley, got sushi in Potrero Hill afterward, and decided on the walk home to start Stripe. The reasoning, as Patrick remembers it, was that “we might as well because it probably won't be that hard.”
It took two years to launch.
Seventeen years later, at Startup School 2026, he talks with YC's Harj Taggar about dropping out of MIT twice, why founders should ask what happens if they succeed, and what Stripe's own data says about the best time to start a company.
In 2001, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat did the math and realized Google’s entire search index would fit in RAM — then shipped it in a few days, and search got fast. In 2013, another napkin calculation showed that three minutes of daily speech recognition per user would require doubling Google’s server fleet. That one became the TPU.
At Startup School 2026, Google’s Chief Scientist talks with YC’s Diana Hu through the thought experiments behind both, why inference hardware is the next specialization, and where two or three people in a room can still win.
Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/jeff-dean-the-1-rule-for-building
Alexandr Wang's advice to his 18-year-old self: develop your own internal compass for how the future will unfold, and hold conviction in it against the noise. At Startup School 2026, the Scale AI (YC S16) founder — now leading Meta's Superintelligence Labs — talks with Garry Tan about rebuilding a frontier lab from scratch, why talent density compounds, and how to spot the exponential worth betting your twenties on.
In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither.
Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic (YC W16), the startup building America’s first supersonic airliner, to change that. At Startup School 2026, he shares how a cardboard mockup with Office Depot seats became XB-1, the first independently developed jet to break the sound barrier, and why founders have to build for both the worst day and the best day.
He also answers founder questions about teaching yourself hard things, breaking into hardware without the right resume, and finding work-life harmony while building something ambitious.
In 2005, Sam Altman was a Stanford sophomore in YC’s first batch, building a startup in a little Cambridge office while Paul Graham cooked the founders dinner. Twenty years later, as co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, he closed Startup School 2026 in conversation with YC's Garry Tan — on agents, ambition, and why the ceiling for what a startup can take on has never been higher.
Fresh off the launch of Opus 5, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny joins Diana Hu at Startup School 2026 to talk about what the newest models can do, how Claude Code came to be, and what it means to build products when the underlying capabilities keep accelerating.
NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthroughs in modern computing.At Startup School 2026 at Chase Center, Garry Tan sits down with Founder and CEO Jensen Huang to talk about confronting reality, learning your way into new domains, and why resilience — getting through one day at a time — matters more than anything else.
Why do even our best AI models need tens of thousands of examples to learn skills that a human picks up in a handful of tries?Solving this problem is one of the great open challenges in modern AI. World models, which give AI an internal simulation of its environment, are one of the most promising paths forward.In this episode of Decoded, YC's Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard discuss the intuition and math behind world models, new research, and current applications in self-driving, robotics, and more.
Full Transcript: https://ycrootaccess.substack.com/p/world-models-an-intuitive-introduction
Most founders obsess over dashboards and aggregate metrics, but some of the best product insights come from understanding how individual users actually use their product.
In this episode of Startup School, YC's David Lieb walks through one of his favorite tools for better understanding your users, the dot plot. It's a simple two-dimensional grid that reveals usage patterns no aggregate chart can show you.
He’ll cover why it gives founders a better sense of product health, what patterns to look for, and real-world exam
Bryant Chou co-founded Webflow, which today powers around 1% of all websites on the internet. Now he's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI-powered website and marketing platform that doesn't just build your site — it connects to your analytics, CRM, and search console to optimize your marketing while you sleep. In this episode of the Lightcone he explains how he built Ploy to be “anti slop,” how building today compares to his first startup, and why founders with domain expertise are making a comeback.Chapters:00:00 — What Experience Gives You in the Age of AI00:38 — Meet Bryant Chou, Co-Founder of Webflow01:22 — His New Startup Ploy02:47 — Rebuilding the Posterous website From 200803:27 — Rebuilding the Scribd website From 200705:04 — Rebuilding the Auctomatic website From 200706:19 — Rebuilding the Escher Reality website From 201707:11 — 12% of the YC Batch Uses Ploy08:26 — The D&D Theory of Founder Skills10:05 — Democratizing Marketing and Growth10:50 — Live Demo: The Design Slurper13:21 — Your Website Should Work for You While You Sleep14:26 — Integrations, Analytics, and the Marketing Brain17:27 — Ploy's Anti-Slop Engine: 3,500 Curated Design Prompts20:05 — The Andy Warhol Theory of AI22:35 — Webflow Origin Story24:26 — Building in a Competitive Market Then vs. Now26:01 — First Three Months: Webflow 2013 vs. Ploy 202527:17 — What Experience Teaches You That Models Can't28:51 — Will Better Models Kill Products Like Ploy?30:32 — The Competitive Moat of Purpose-Built AI33:01 — Agents as Customers: CLI, MCP, and AEO35:02 — Young Founders vs. Experienced Founders36:36 — The Idea Maze and Cloning Yourself With AI42:37 — The Magnifying Glass MomentApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
Many founders get stuck trying to find the perfect startup idea before they commit. But the perfect idea doesn't exist in the abstract. The only way to find what works is to pick one, go deep, and get feedback from real customers.
In this episode of Startup School, YC's Jon Xu breaks down how to choose what to build, "burn the other boats," and go deep enough to practically run your customer's business— and why that depth is what surfaces the better idea underneath.
