The Ledger, every show

“And so five years from now, the grand vision would be To think about like running your own hiring process versus just using triple byte as being as outdated as hiring engineers to build a database from scratch versus just using MySQL or Postgres.”

“The agents are going to go out and choose Tools to use to build things, which is going to essentially create a whole economy of agents, like picking and choosing dev tools and maybe other like products and goods and services, who knows, but it will essentially…”

“The whole idea of, like, the human money versus agent money, like, that's kind of where this probably goes at some point, is, like, the, right now the agents are transacting, if you have them transact, they're going to transact in human money, because that mak…”

“Do not give it access to emails would be my number one piece of advice or probably anything. Cause it's not clear how safe it is. And it's probably almost certainly gonna probably a lot of people being prompted injected by it right now”

“Gemini surge, especially over the last few months, just feels like it returns us to a world of where exactly that, like the models are all essentially commoditizing each other. And it's just like the application layer and the startups are going to set up to ha…”

“The models themselves have incrementally improved this year, but there haven't been like major steps forward that have shaken everything up, which is, has a knock on effect. Many episodes ago, we talked about how it was It felt easier than ever to pivot and fi…”

“AI is going to reduce the cost of, like, producing the time to produce things, and so then the expectations from your users and customers will just go up, and you'll need to keep hiring more people to satisfy, like, the growing expectations. I feel like this y…”

“The technical expertise is now actually really like the missing piece for a lot of these things. And we consistently see, at least in YC, that college students are actually at the forefront of this stuff, like actually understanding how to use the models and h…”

“At some point, the AI will get good enough to just, like, design chips better than, like, humans can, and then it will just, like, eliminate one of its bottlenecks for, like, getting greater intelligence, and so it feels like that's already kind of, like, We'r…”

“OpenAI seems like it is continually the one pushing the envelope, but they always seem to be The first ones to make major breakthroughs, but they have never been able to maintain the lead so far.”

“There's so much interest from potential customers to like want a co-pilot that it's actually quite easy to start getting like inbound leads if you pitch this. And if it's even easy to get people to pay you money upfront, but what's really hard is to get them t…”

“So if a founder actually, like, actions on your feedback in sort of like a material way, like, it makes you less than like, if you're a good investor, I think it makes you less than likely to want to invest. You don't want to invest in someone who is relying o…”

“Literally in any YC batch, I could take every single company and like pick out some like fatal flaw. And like, you know that some of them are going to turn out to be worth like billions of dollars, but you can still do it.”

“Cause like, if you think about like, we're like scratching our heads, trying to find examples of times that like a fan company launched a product that killed a fast growing, successful startup. So like clearly more often than not, like structural advantage isn…”

“He genuinely believed that the optimal structure for a giant corporation is one that's more like a holding company that's, like, composed up of lots of more autonomous units are each doing well, and each of those units has operational control and is, you know,…”

“You either want to be focused with the smallest possible team on finding product market fit, or you want to be Realize you have product market fit and just be in full on growing, scaling the team and making a functioning organization. You don't want to do both…”

“Personally, I found it was better than all the other tools for that, and it was better than Perplexity on it, too. Like, Perplexity would be fast, but not always accurate, and Gemini was not quite as fast as Perplexity, but was always pretty accurate if I aske…”

“Yeah, like, post-series A, it actually largely feels, like, the playbook is the same, and the companies might be smaller for the same amount of revenue, but it Feels it's entirely because they hit the revenue so fast and there's still just bottlenecked on how …”

“If this is actually the last window to make money and get rich, then you're basically implying that, you know, that we're going to get some definition of AGI or ASI, or whatever you want to call it. That's like a necessary condition for that to be true. Like, …”

“Because, like, AI has captured the, like, the imagination of everybody, everyone, like, wants to know what's possible and are consistently underwhelmed by what, like, the established software companies can offer them, but they're open to, like, college student…”

“Things that seem like they were niche before AI, you can get people to pay you a lot, lot more money for because they're not just buying software, they're buying like work from you.”

“Oh, three was very rigid, actually. Like it really sticks to the rubric. It's heavily penalizes for anything that doesn't fit like the rubric that you've given it. Whereas Gemini 2.5 pro was actually quite good at being flexible in that it would apply the rubr…”

“I wouldn't go all the way and suggest they should pivot, but I do think companies that are building AI coding agents or AI program engineers are potentially have stuff to think about here, because it seems like O-One in particular is like outperforming on just…”

“And some of the stuff that really stood out is Claude has, even just in six months, from the winter batch to the summer batch, has gone from, like, five percent developer market share to, like, 25%.”

“It seems like, or, 15% of the batch are already using O-one, even though it's not, like, fully available yet.”

“If they just on day one, you could be guaranteed a hundred percent accuracy, like as though you're just building a web app on top of a database, the barrier to entry to build these things goes way down. It's gonna be more competition than ever. And then it wil…”

“If you're not an engineer, I don't think you can do this, and I think you should really focus your time on trying to find a great technical co-founder to start the company with.”

“Failed co-founder relationships is really the number one reason we see startups fail here at Y Combinator.”

“The kinds of teams we don't get so excited about are where the co-founders would never have met each other in sort of any conceivable universe. It's where there's a huge age difference, or they don't have any sort of mutual interest, or they just doesn't seem …”

“You will have to decide on what the equity split will be, and my default advice here would be you should split the equity equally between yourselves, and the reason is if this startup is successful, you will end up working on it for the next 10 years or more, …”

“Another old PG essay about if you, if you're trying to sell technology to someone, and they're not buying, like, see if you can just build a competitor, and so it's like, hey, if you're trying to sell, like fintech company, a copilot, and they're not buying it…”

“If it's like, Hey, like throw your data in here and we'll do like automations on top of it, like for everything, that's probably Hard to compete with whatever one of the foundation models might offer, but if it's like, hey, we're our, give us, like, your sales…”

“Going back to like the chat GBT rapper meme again, I actually think that was great for YC. Because it meant we only got the people who are like tune, who could tune that out. And we're just like, hey, like either I'm just so interested in this technology, I do…”

“You might think you could just look at how well someone has done in school or at work and assume success there would lead to success at startups. That's definitely what I thought when I first started working at YC in 2010 and began reading YC funding applicati…”

“For example, it's become popular to say that you shouldn't start a company just to make money. That's considered a somewhat flimsy motivation, but I actually think it's fine to start a startup to become rich. Startups are one of the few ways to make life-chang…”

“Whereas a first time founder, the only way you're getting your first few users is having a really great product and being really great at selling it. And I think you can just get a little bit lazy on that front as a second time founder.”

“And it's like when you're a second time founder, the investors know that you know more people. They don't want to give you bad feedback, right? Like they're incentivized to tell you nice things so that you'll continue being nice to them. Whereas when you're a …”

“It's like, I think investors end up knowing just enough to be dangerous. And it's a job where you're often selling, so you're very confident in sort of how you articulate your opinions. But like, yeah, you don't actually get the deep insights because you're no…”

“I'm a pretty strong believer that operational experience is pretty important to have in investors, and the reason is, and I think this is another thing that made sort of Paul and sort of Jessica great founders of YC or great investors of Y Cominature is that t…”

“If you raise around prematurely, if you raise like ten million dollars before you've kind of gone through that pain, now you're under pressure to hire people, and you might not have a clear sense of exactly who you need, because every, you know, you keep using…”

“A database tool and like a knock on effect for that for YC company is Superbase has just seen like an explosion at the demand for databases, right? And the age was interesting is the agents are choosing Superbase as a default tool to like set up and host their…”

“Like, because if you like go out and read the documentation online, like Superbase has the best documentation is reasonable for the agents to assume that that's like the best tool to use.”

“Developing an intuitive fuel, like a hands-on fuel for The agents, their limitations, their capabilities, and very specifically around what we're talking about here is like, what type of tools the agents work well with? where do they get stuck? And once you s…”

“I wonder if, like, the best 18 to twenty-two-year-olds, like, five years from now will just have, like, off the charts taste and everything. Because they'll just be so much more prolific. They should be, right? Like, they should just be launching and touching …”

“Now I just think, like, you kind of, like, there's certain types of brains that just have, like, 10 branches going in their heads, but you never have enough hours in the day to actually, like, see any of them through, so they're always, like, half complete, an…”

“It's about fifty-fifty on the YC engineering team.”

“I still don't trust the models enough to be accurate without lots of Prompting. And it's a high value transaction, so you don't want to, like, get incorrect data out of it.”

“Recruiters Can never sell the company as effectively as the founder.”