Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more
Michael Truell on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.At 25, 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 ...
YC's Ankit Gupta delves into the technical specifics of top open-source large language models: GPT-OSS, Qwen 3, and DeepSeek V3. He explores their diverse approaches to mixture-of-experts, long-context training, and post-training techniques for reasoning and alignment. The discussion reveals how these models achieve surprisingly similar benchmark performance through distinct architectural and training philosophies, emphasizing the empirical nature of current AI research.
Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora, shares how his legal AI startup rapidly scaled from 10 to 100 people and raised $80M in 13 months by transforming legal work with generative AI, overcoming the challenge of selling to a skeptical market. He details Legora's AI-powered workspace, innovative features like tabular review and Word add-ins, and how they built a successful vertical AI company by embracing humility, client feedback, and a fast-paced development strategy. The episode also explores the future of legal work and advice for aspiring vertical AI founders.
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 step—free and paid pilots, opt-out contracts, long-term deals—and shows how to prove value and close customers.
Dylan Field on June 17th, 2025 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, Figma’s 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 Figma’s growth, the principles that guided its product and community, and ho...
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 ...
Jared Kaplan on June 16th, 2025 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 AI’s most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable, almost physical way.That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language models—and 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 fut...
For this episode of Design Review, YC’s 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. 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 (https://www.confiden...
Chelsea Finn on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley, where she pioneered meta‑learning methods, and Google Brain, Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and co‑founder of Physical Intelligence, she’s 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 he...
Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, shares the company's journey from making programming accessible to pushing the limits of AI-assisted software creation, achieving significant growth. He details how advancements in AI agent autonomy, enabled by Replit's unique transactional infrastructure, are shifting the bottleneck in software development from engineering time to generating ideas. The discussion also covers the impact on team dynamics, the critical role of security in AI-generated code, and the broader implications for the future of work, SaaS, and what skills will be most valuable for creators.
John Jumper on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. John Jumper is a physicist-turned-computational biologist who led DeepMind’s AlphaFold team—and earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving protein folding, a decades-old scientific challenge. In this talk, he shares how a deep learning breakthrough at CASP14 turned into AlphaFold 1 and then AlphaFold 2, delivering atomic accuracy predictions and revolutionizing biology. He explains the scientific puzzle behind protein ...
Aravind Srinivas on June 16, 2025 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 agents—not just chatbots—are the next step, and how speed, accuracy, and focus help a s...
Andrew Ng on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Andrew Ng has helped shape some of the most influential movements in modern AI—from online education to deep learning to AI entrepreneurship. In this talk, he shares what he’s 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 bottlene...
François Chollet on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. François 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 today’s AI models isn’t enough to reach it. In this talk, he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized skil...
AI leader Fei-Fei Li reflects on her pivotal work creating ImageNet, which fueled the data-driven deep learning revolution and led to breakthroughs in computer vision like image captioning and generative models. She explains why spatial intelligence—understanding and interacting with the 3D world—is the crucial next frontier for AGI, highlighting its complexity compared to language. Li also shares insights from her journey founding World Labs to tackle this challenge and offers advice on entrepreneurship and intellectual fearlessness.
Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades — 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, an...
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlines the company's platform, product, and partner strategy for the AI era, emphasizing AI's potential to drive economic growth and the need for social permission to consume energy. He discusses the evolution of the AI application layer, challenges in change management for integrating AI into workflows, and the future of software development. Nadella also touches on the importance of trust, privacy, and security in AI systems, Microsoft's quantum computing progress, and offers advice on career growth and team success for the next generation of builders.
Sam Altman reflects on the early, challenging decision to start OpenAI and how they attracted talent for a unique mission. He details the rapid evolution of AI models, the potential for AI companions and new interfaces, and the infrastructure challenges of scaling. Altman also covers the future of robotics, AI's role in manufacturing, strategies for startup defensibility, the importance of conviction and resilience, and his long-term vision for abundance driven by AI and energy breakthroughs.
In this fireside chat at AI Startup School, Elon Musk shares his journey from early internet ventures like Zip2 and PayPal to the ambitious goals of SpaceX and Tesla. He discusses the importance of building useful things, applying first principles thinking to overcome perceived impossibilities, and the challenges faced in the early days of his companies. Musk also delves into the potential impacts of AI, the rise of robotics, the critical need to become a multi-planetary species, and his views on AI safety and the future of intelligence.
Andrej Karpathy explores the fundamental shift in software with the rise of large language models, dubbing this new era "Software 3.0" where natural language becomes the programming interface. He analogizes LLMs to utilities, fabs, and early operating systems, highlighting their unique properties, superpowers, and cognitive deficits. Karpathy outlines opportunities in building partial autonomy applications with human oversight via GUIs and "autonomy sliders," and stresses the importance of redesigning software and documentation to be directly accessible and programmable by AI agents.
Michael Truell, CEO of Anysphere/Cursor, discusses his company's vision to replace traditional coding with a higher-level, description-based building process. He covers the current state and challenges of AI coding, technical bottlenecks for future AI agents, the importance of human "taste" in software creation, and the implications for developer productivity and niche software. Michael also shares the company's journey, including pivoting from an AI CAD project, their strategic decision to build a custom editor, key growth metrics, hiring philosophy, and thoughts on durable moats in the AI market, expressing excitement for a decade of magnified building ability.
Fusion may still sound like science fiction— 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....
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 software—and why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think....
Coding agents are no longer a distant idea—they'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 befor...
AI can't yet one-shot an entire product—but 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.
Imagine ordering groceries and having them show up at your doorstep in just 10 minutes. That’s 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 it’s like going up against incumbents like Amazon and Zomato and how the future of e-commerce is changing in the age of intelligence.
Derek Thompson discusses his book "Abundance," co-authored with Ezra Klein, exploring how to reignite American innovation. They examine the shift from a 'growth machine' to an 'anti-growth machine,' the impact of bureaucracy, and the need for institutional renewal. The conversation highlights the importance of technology in solving climate change and improving the standard of living, advocating for policies that foster experimentation and competition in science and technology.
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.
Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, discusses the company's journey, from its early days delivering hummus to becoming the largest food delivery platform in the US. He shares insights on customer obsession, building a market, navigating crises, and the importance of a long-term vision. Xu emphasizes the opportunity to empower physical businesses and grow the GDP of cities.
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.
