Y Combinator

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3月16日

Building A Global AI Startup From India

In this episode of The Lightcone, we talk with Mukund and Madhav Jha, the founders of Emergent - an AI platform that lets anyone build and ship production-ready software. In just eight months, users have created more than 7 million apps on Emergent, with the number doubling in just the last 45 days. We discuss how they built one of the most powerful AI coding agents, why they focused on non-technical users and what it's like building in India for a global audience. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:06 - What Is Emergent? 01:18 - Founder Backstory 02:09 - From AI Testing to General Coding Agents 02:52 - Getting Ahead of the Market 04:18 - The Pivot to Non-Technical Users 05:22 - Why Second Movers Can Win in AI 09:04 - Building for Production, Not Just Prototypes 18:21 - Live Demo: Building Apps with Emergent 24:40 - How Emergent Hires and Runs a Lean Team 29:04 - Is SaaS Dead? The Rise of Personalized Software 34:04 - The Future: Niche Apps, Solo Builders and AI Agency

3月16日

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40 分鐘
3 天前

Inside The Startup Reinventing America’s Trillion Dollar Chemical Industry

Solugen is reinventing the trillion-dollar chemical manufacturing industry by combining biology and chemistry in a new way. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Jared Friedman visits co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt at their Houston HQ to see how they went from a $7,000 PVC reactor to a billion-dollar company competing with industry giants. They cover the breakthrough behind their enzymatic + catalytic production, how they found their first customers, and why starting small and staying close to customers let them win in a capital-intensive industry. Chapters:00:00 - A New Kind of Chemical Plant01:02 - Fusing Biology + Chemistry In a New Way02:23 - The Eureka Moment: From Pancreatic Cancer to Hydrogen Peroxide03:30 - Using A Sugar Feedstock Over Oil and Gas 04:22 - Proving Enzymes Work at Scale In Chemical Manufacturing05:16 - The $7K PVC Reactor06:44 - Finding First Customers at YC08:12 - What The Co-founders Got Out of YC09:33 - Seed Round to Bio Forge10:32 - Scaling to a Full-Size Plant (Bioforge)11:57 - The Future of American Manufacturing12:29 - The Next Decade of Solugen Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

3 天前

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13 分鐘
2月27日

The Fastest Path To Super Intelligence

Poetiq is a new startup founded by former DeepMind researchers that recently achieved a major jump on the ARC-AGI and Humanity's Last Exam benchmark by layering a recursive self-improvement system on top of existing models. In this episode of Lightcone, Poetiq's Founder & CEO Ian Fischer joined us to discuss how small teams can build “reasoning harnesses” that outperform base models, what that means for startups and why automating prompt engineering may be one of the most powerful levers in AI today.Chapters:00:00 – Intro00:40 – What Is Poetiq?01:07 – Recursive Self-Improvement Explained02:07 – The Fine-Tuning Trap02:59 – “Stilts” for LLMs03:14 – Recursive Self-Improvement vs. Fine-Tuning05:05 – Taking the Top Spot on ARC-AGI06:37 – Beating Claude on Humanity’s Last Exam08:40 – How the Meta-System Works10:26 – Beyond RL: A New S-Curve11:32 – Automating Prompt Engineering13:37 – From 5% to 95% Performance14:50 – Early Access & Putting Your Agent on Stilts16:17 – From YC Founder to DeepMind Researcher18:29 – Advice for Engineers in the AI EraApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

2月27日

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20 分鐘
3月9日

The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces with Science's Max Hodak

YC alum Max Hodak is the co-founder of Neuralink and founder of Science, a company building brain-computer interfaces that can restore sight.Science has developed a tiny retinal implant that stimulates cells in the eye to help blind patients see again. More than 40 patients have already received the treatment in clinical trials, including one who recently read a full novel for the first time in over a decade.In this episode of How to Build the Future, Max joined Garry to discuss how BCIs work, what it takes to engineer the brain, and why brain-computer interfaces may become one of the most important technologies of the next decade.

3月9日

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53 分鐘
3月6日

How To Avoid AI Design Slop

As no-code design tools become more common, so do the pitfalls. You know what they look like - the purple gradients, annoying hover effects, sections that fade as you scroll. So how do you avoid a site that feels vibe coded while still taking advantage of these new tools? In this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Visiting Partner Raphael Schaad, the founder and designer of Cron (now Notion Calendar). Together they’ll review user submitted sites with an eye for how to leverage these tools and avoid the common vibe coding mistakes.

3月6日

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37 分鐘
2025/11/28

The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were "Impossible" Until Now

Every major shift in consumer tech has a moment when it suddenly becomes accessible to millions. Michael Mignano helped spark one of those moments with Anchor, making podcast creation something anyone could do with a tap. Now at Lightspeed, he sees AI bringing a similar leap to music, media, and everyday apps.In this conversation, he and Garry trace the arc from the early days of social audio to today's consumer AI boom—and dig into what founders should focus on as the next generation of creative tools takes shape.

2025/11/28

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40 分鐘
2月21日

The AI Agent Economy Is Here

With the takeoff of OpenClaw and MoltBook, a new agent-driven economy is taking shape. In this episode of the Lightcone, we took a look at the explosive growth of AI dev tools and whether the time has come for builders to make something agents want.

2月21日

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23 分鐘
2月17日

Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny

A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, sits down to share the incredible journey of developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era.

2月17日

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50 分鐘
2月14日

The New Way To Build A Startup

In the AI era, startups aren't winning by hiring faster — they're winning by automating as many internal functions as possible. In this episode of Main Function, Garry breaks down how tiny teams are beating companies 20x their size by building automations into every workflow, from engineering to ops to customer support.

2月14日

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8 分鐘
2025/12/22

What Surprised Us Most In 2025

2025 was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode, the YC partners break down the surprises of the year, from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the application layer, and why the next wave of AI startups may be just getting started.

2025/12/22

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30 分鐘

Make something people want.