Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Y Combinator

We help founders make something people want.

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

    -1 DIA

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

    23/09

    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
  3. Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era

    16/09

    Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era

    For nearly two decades, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes work—guiding the company through the rise of mobile, the cloud, and now the age of AI.In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School, Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term, the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves, and why he believes AI represents the most transformative shift yet.

    40 min
  4. The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad

    12/09

    The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad

    Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit, now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He's spent nearly a decade making programming accessible to all—and with the rise of AI, that vision is closer than ever.In this talk from AI Startup School on June 17, 2025, Amjad traces the arc of computing from mainframes to personal computers to a future where AI agents can create software on demand. He predicts that the value of traditional software will approach zero, fundamentally reshaping how companies are built and how work gets done.

    42 min
  5. The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

    8/09

    The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

    Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir, and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model. During his time at Palantir, he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today. On this episode of The Lightcone, he explains how FDEs became central to today's startups, why "doing things that don't scale at scale" works, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for founders working in AI.

    51 min
  6. Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students

    3/09

    Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students

    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 of software development will flow through models.

    28 min
  7. GPT-OSS vs. Qwen vs. Deepseek: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures

    29/08

    GPT-OSS vs. Qwen vs. Deepseek: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures

    OpenAI recently released its first open-weights model since GPT-2, entering a field led by DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen.YC's Ankit Gupta breaks down everything you need to know about these top OSS models, including what sets them apart under the hood. He’ll compare their approaches to mixture-of-experts, long-context training, and post-training techniques that shape reasoning and alignment—and explore how different design choices lead to surprisingly similar performance.

    13 min
  8. How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)

    26/08

    How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)

    In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC General Partner Gustaf Alströmer is joined by Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups in the world. In just 13 months, Max and his team scaled from 10 to 100 people, raised $80M, and cracked the challenge of selling to one of the most skeptical industries. Max shares insights on building a successful vertical AI company, selling to conservative markets, and sheds light on what the future of legal tech looks like.

    45 min
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