Y Combinator

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2 天前

How To Pick A Startup Idea

Many founders get stuck trying to find the perfect startup idea before they commit. But the perfect idea doesn't exist in the abstract. The only way to find what works is to pick one, go deep, and get feedback from real customers. In this episode of Startup School, YC's Jon Xu breaks down how to choose what to build, "burn the other boats," and go deep enough to practically run your customer's business— and why that depth is what surfaces the better idea underneath.

2 天前

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12 分鐘
5月8日

Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers

We're entering a new era of software where a single person, working with AI agents, can build products that previously required entire teams.In this episode of Lightcone, the hosts break down the rise of AI coding agents, "tokenmaxxing", and the emerging workflows behind tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw. They discuss why AI systems today feel less like productivity tools and more like collaborators, why the future of AI should be personal and user-controlled, and how founders are starting to build software in completely new ways.

5月8日

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41 分鐘
4月16日

The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here

Physical Intelligence is building a foundation model that can control any robot to do any task — what the team describes as the GPT-1 moment for robotics. The company's cross-embodiment approach trains across many different robot platforms, and recent results show tasks being performed zero-shot that last year required hundreds of hours of data collection. In this episode of The Lightcone, co-founder Quan Vuong sat down with Garry, Jared, Diana, and Harj to talk about why robotics is finally ready for its scaling moment, how PI runs its models in the cloud rather than on-device, and the playbook for what Quan sees as a Cambrian explosion of vertical robotics companies.

4月16日

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49 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
3月31日

This Startup Secretly Detects Fraud For Fortune 500s

In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC Managing Partner Jared Friedman talks to Karine Mellata, co-founder of Variance (W23), who is coming out of stealth and announcing their $21 million Series A. Variance builds purpose-built AI agents for risk and compliance — automating fraud detection, content review, and identity verification for Fortune 500 companies and platforms like GoFundMe. They discuss why Variance built in the shadows for three years, detecting state-sponsored fraud rings, and the accident that nearly ended the company.

3月31日

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31 分鐘
2025/12/03

What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs

Spenser Skates has spent more than a decade building Amplitude from a YC startup into a public company, and in that time, he's had to reinvent himself just as much as the product.Joining the Lightcone pod, he talks through the shift from founder to large-company CEO, the skepticism his team initially had toward AI, and the moment they realized the next wave of analytics would require a full reset.He walks through the hard reorganizations, the bottom-up experiments, and the mindset changes that let Amplitude move fast again.

2025/12/03

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44 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
2022/08/18

YC Founders Made These Fundraising Mistakes

Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell are back for episode 2 of Rookie Mistakes to discuss common mistakes founders make when fundraising, and how to avoid them. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

2022/08/18

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8 分鐘
2025/11/14

AI Is Eating Logistics

Logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that quietly powers the entire global economy — and it's shockingly manual.Ryan Petersen, founder & CEO of Flexport, joins the Lightcone to break down how AI is finally touching the physical world: making shipping cheaper, speeding up global trade, and automating work that used to live inside emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls.

2025/11/14

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34 分鐘
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

Make something people want.