The Ledger, every show

“It's already probably the case that the majority of code being written is written by agents.”

“I feel like your real feel the AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Claude Code to build basically an entire startup for you, like replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane.”

“It might be that like the next stuff that like is soda on benchmarks is not the most expensive newest foundation model with the most like GPU training. It's like a swarm of lower cost cheaper models working together just like humans do to solve a problem.”

“We have enough data now from Y Combinator over, over the last 11 years to know that if you simply invested randomly in Demo Day companies, You would actually make money over time.”

“Today, a hundred companies will present at demo day, and probably only two or three of them will be done fundraising before. So, 98% of them are still fundraising at demo day and are open to investment for many qualified investors.”

“In fact, the two or three companies that might have... Finish fundraising before demo day are no better on average than the other companies. It's really quite random which ones choose to fundraise earlier.”

“The vast majority of the use cases people are using it for though is not coding.”

“So like, it definitely feels like we're headed in the direction where this may not be true in, you know, six months.”

“One quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated”

“The other thing I think is interesting about this example is like during the batch before a one came out, diode had tried to do this with GPT four. Oh, and it just flat out didn't work. And then they basically tried the same thing, the same prompts, but fed it…”

“Sam was just telling us that like O-two and O-three are not far behind.”

“Yeah, we surveyed the summer 24 founders, and half the batch is using Cursor, compared to only 12% that's using GitHub Copilot.”

“And I think people are going to look back on this term GPT, GPT wrapper, like similarly how we think of like, how we would look at the term database wrapper, which just seems like silly.”

“Well, it turns out that there are some structural reasons why this idea is hard, which is why in, like, 20 years of people applying to YC with this idea, nobody has actually pulled it off.”

“If you look at the YC top 100 companies, at least 70% of them had their startup ideas organically, rather than by, like, sitting down and explicitly trying to think of a startup idea.”

“Hard tech companies that apply to YC actually have about a 10 x higher acceptance rate than other kinds of applications.”

“In terms of the actual funding results, they're very positive. Almost all the companies you present at Demo Day do raise follow-on funding”

“Late last year, they took the company public at a valuation over four billion dollars.”

“Before Billion to One, most genetic abnormalities could only be detected via amniocentesis, an invasive procedure that is only used in high-risk pregnancies.”

“Like I don't have the Reddit traffic stats, but my guess is like more content was posted on Maltbook in the first two days and was posted on Reddit in like the first two years or something.”

“I was looking earlier today, and if you look at the YC job board, there's over a hundred YC startups that are hiring for a job with the title for deployed engineer and up from basically zero, three years ago”

“I think this vibe coding will enable people who have those kinds of technical minds who come from other technical disciplines like math and physics to become highly productive as programmers much faster than it was in the past.”

“I remember back when he was starting open AI, one of the things that really motivated him to do it was he believed that when we actually had AGI basically be better at doing science than humans were, and therefore would accelerate the rate of all scientific pr…”

“Like the full O-one model, which is coming out any day now is a huge step function above even O-one preview, which is what enabled all these incredible results at the hackathon.”

“Like a year ago doing startup ideas where like the AI agent would talk on the phone just like didn't work. We had a bunch of companies that tried and all the companies didn't work. And over the summer it really started working under the trends from the past tw…”

“And yet we actually don't get that many applications for people working on this.”

“Over the last 10 years, if you started a company that did, like, fintech infrastructure or vertical SaaS for enterprise, the probability that your company became a billion-dollar company was astonishingly high. Whereas if you started something in consumer hard…”

“YC is actually the largest bio seed investor in the world and the largest hard tech seed investor in the world. This includes accelerators, seed funds, every kind of investor.”

“It turns out actually that the cheapest telecommunication satellite that is useful costs like at least ten million dollars to build and launch. And so Astronus' hack was to start with a test satellite. The satellite in this photo was their first satellite. The…”

“For the last few years since ChatGPT, YC has been funding mainly AI companies”

“It didn't just make it easier to answer questions. It dramatically increased the number of questions that we would ask and dramatically increased the scale and complexity of the questions that we would dare to ask.”

“We are announcing that Variance is coming out of stealth and announcing their twenty-one million dollar Series A, and I am really excited to be here with Karine, the co-founder of Variance.”

“And so Agent Mail went the opposite way, and they built, like, the first email provider that's designed for AI agents, and it was doing well even before Open Claw, but once Open Claw got big, it was just, like, exploded.”

“They're actually powering the customer support for Perplexity and Replit and Bolt and a bunch of other like top AI companies now.”

“Meta prompting, which is one of the things we want to talk about, because that's a consistent theme that keeps coming up when we talk to our AI startups.”

“Cause if you're just using Gemini via the API until recently, you did not get the thinking traces and like the thinking traces are like the critical debugging information to like, understand like What's wrong with your prompt? They just added it to the API. So…”

“Today, they actually have this huge plant in Houston that ships out like tanker truck fulls of hydrogen peroxide like every day.”

“I think for summer of 23, it was close to 50% of the batch.”

“And before Brax, if a startup NYC wanted a corporate credit card, they literally could not get one because no bank would give a credit card to a startup.”

“This is exactly how Replik got started. It was just something that Amjad found interesting. It wasn't supposed to be a startup originally.”

“It is weird how many startups apply to YC and we look at their applications and the founders like are actually legitimate experts in something, but the idea that they're applying with is like something completely different.”

“A good example of this is a company called Jetpack Aviation from two batches ago, which is building the flying motorcycle in the picture. And what Jetpack Aviation did was they ran a pre-sale campaign, and they basically sold flying motorcycles to a bunch of p…”

“For example, if you're doing something medical that requires FDA approval, it's actually illegal to do pre-sales, so don't do that.”

“The original Cruise car Was built in less than three months during YC. Kyle basically just, like, was in a garage building this car and writing code for, like, three months solid, and by the end of YC he had an MVP that he could use to drive on the highway to …”

“I think probably half the engineering team that we hired came through Hacker News, and that's not atypical for YC companies.”

“We only have about 500 physical seats in the auditorium, and we have demand for 10 times that many.”

“This is before AWS. This is on a physical server. Originally physically in my dorm room closet, which is how I learned that servers are loud.”

“So when Dropbox launched, there were already about 20 cloud-based file storage companies. Dropbox was like the 20th company in its space to launch.”