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.

  1. Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution

    -1 J

    Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution

    Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the Transformer.In this video, YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language — from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need — the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era.

    9 min
  2. YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours

    -3 J

    YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours

    Every founder faces moments where they’re not sure what to do next — such as how to go to market with AI products, when to pivot, and who/when to hire. In this episode of Office Hours, YC partners Pete Koomen, Brad Flora, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Gustaf Alströmer answer real questions from founders and share stories about how great teams build conviction, learn faster, and make better decisions as they grow.

    39 min
  3. What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs

    14 OCT.

    What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs

    For years, we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work, the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced, and more hopeful.From radiology to software engineering, the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster, demand for human creativity and judgment grows.YC's Garry Tan explores what history, economics, and real companies show us— that technology doesn't replace people, it redefines what we can do.

    8 min
  4. How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

    13 OCT.

    How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

    Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the issue tracking tool used by thousands of high-growth companies. Before Linear, he was the first designer at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb.On Design Review with YC's Aaron Epstein, Karri shares how his design background shaped Linear’s product philosophy, why quality and craft matter from day one, what founders should look for when hiring, and how AI is changing the way teams build. It’s a deep dive into building products that truly stand out.

    36 min
  5. The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device

    9 OCT.

    The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device

    Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something that’s never been done before. They're building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains—capturing CO2 from moving vehicles before it enters the atmosphere, then turning those emissions into revenue by selling it to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Gustaf Alströmer visits Remora's headquarters outside Detroit to see how a recent college grad with no engineering background is helping transform the $2 trillion transportation industry.

    13 min
  6. Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions

    7 OCT.

    Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions

    Jordan Fisher is the co-founder & CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answers—asking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away.He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right now? What happens when software becomes commoditized? How do you build trust as teams shrink and AI takes on more responsibility?

    41 min
  7. Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI

    1 OCT.

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

    Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model?YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with Nick Joseph, Anthropic's Head of Pre-training, to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claude—from managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws, data strategies, team composition, and why the hardest problems in AI are often infrastructure problems, not ML problems.

    1 h 4 min
  8. Fintech 3.0: Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto

    23 SEPT.

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

    We are entering the era of Fintech 3.0. Regulatory clarity, growing consumer adoption, and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto — and at YC, Base, and Coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. In this episode of Main Function, YC's Harj Taggar and Base's Jesse Pollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they're most excited to see, why this is such an exciting time in crypto, and what the future could look like onchain.More on our latest RFS: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/build-onchain

    42 min
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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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