Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Hosted by Y Combinator

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Episodes

334

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

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.

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60 recent

August 13, 202658 min

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

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

August 11, 202641 min

Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"

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

August 10, 202657 min

Max Hodak: How Startups Build Speed

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

August 7, 202656 min

How To Design In The Agent Era

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.

August 6, 202642 min

Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence

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

August 5, 202636 min

Building the First Data Centers in Space

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.

August 4, 202649 min

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

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

August 3, 202630 min

Patrick Collison: "What If You Succeed?"

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.

August 1, 202657 min

Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI

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

July 31, 202632 min

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

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.