Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Y Combinator

We help founders make something people want.

  1. Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design

    6 DAYS AGO

    Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design

    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 how he thinks about building tools that empower creativity at scale.

    41 min
  2. The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street

    31 JUL

    The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street

    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 and due diligence—by orchestrating AI agents that work like expert team members. In this conversation with YC Partner Gustaf Alstromer, they discuss going from internal tool to production platform, the power of perseverance, and their ambition to build a billion-dollar company with just ten people.

    46 min
  3. Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan

    29 JUL

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

    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 future models like Claude, and why even the dumbest questions can lead to the biggest breakthroughs. He reflects on memory, oversight, and what’s left to solve as models grow smarter—and longer-horizon tasks come within reach.

    41 min
  4. Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen

    25 JUL

    Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen

    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.confident-ai.com)Dropback (https://www.dropback.com)*Some of the featured websites may be updated between the time we film and publish

    44 min
  5. Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything

    22 JUL

    Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything

    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 her team’s work—from early experiments on robotic grasping and vision to today’s ambitious efforts at folding laundry, tidying kitchens, and generalizing across tasks—all without hand-crafted code. Instead, they used scalable foundation models and massive datasets, teaching robots physical common sense as they learn by doing. She shares stories of the rocky setbacks, the surprises hidden in data, and the moment it all clicked: robots equipped with generalizable physical intelligence can indeed adapt and assist in the unpredictable world around us.

    45 min
  6. Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Coding Agents, Autonomy, and the Future of Work

    22 JUL

    Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Coding Agents, Autonomy, and the Future of Work

    Amjad Masad started Replit to make programming accessible to anyone, anywhere. What began as a tool for learning to code has grown into a platform pushing the limits of AI-assisted software creation and recently surpassed $100M in ARR.On The Breakdown with Tom and Dave, Amjad shares the journey from his early days in Jordan, working on open-source projects, to leading Replit through major pivots from "teach a billion people to code" to "let anyone build software." He discusses the evolving nature of programming, the future of work, and the next generation of human-computer collaboration.

    36 min
  7. John Jumper: AlphaFold and the Future of Science

    15 JUL

    John Jumper: AlphaFold and the Future of Science

    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 folding, the key algorithmic breakthroughs, and the impact of making millions of protein structures accessible to researchers worldwide.

    27 min
  8. Aravind Srinivas: The Race to Build the AI Browser of the Future

    11 JUL

    Aravind Srinivas: The Race to Build the AI Browser of the Future

    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 startup compete against giants. Along the way, he reflects on co-founder dynamics, early technical challenges, and what it takes to keep building when the biggest players in the world are racing alongside you.

    43 min
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