Y Combinator
also referred to as: yc
13 statements across 8 episodes · 3 bullish · 4 bearish · 9 people on the record · first statement Nov 3, 2023 by Michael Royzen · said 126 times in 41 episodes since 2023 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Shawn Wang (23), Michael Royzen (17), Qasar Younis (9), Alistair Pullen (7), Kyle Corbitt (5), Ben Firshman (5), Alessio Fanelli (5), Paul Klein (4)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 19 mentions in 7 episodes 3 per episode
- The $15B Physical AI Company: Simulation, Autonomy OS, Neural Sim, & 1K Engineers—Applied Intuition
- Why Your AI Agents Don’t Work with Dex Horthy of HumanLayer | In-Context Cooking
- The Agent-Native Cloud: 3M Users, 100K Signups/Wk, Data Centers, & Death PRs — Jake Cooper, Railway
- When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
- AI Agents Need Computers: 74% MoM Growth, 850K/Day Runs, & New Agent Cloud — Ivan Burazin, Daytona
- Dylan Patel Explains the AI War While Cooking | In-Context Cooking
- Inside AI’s $10B+ Capital Flywheel — Martin Casado & Sarah Wang of a16z
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 41 mentions in 19 episodes 2 per episode
- Why RL Won — Kyle Corbitt, OpenPipe (acq. CoreWeave)
- Browserbase: Browser Infrastructure For Your AI Agents
- Beating Google at Search with Neural PageRank and $5M of H200s — with Will Bryk of Exa.ai
- The Future of Email: Superhuman CTO on Your Inbox As the Real AI Agent (Not ChatGPT) — Loïc Houssier
- ⚡️ The State of AI Engineer Hiring: Cheating, AI Adoption,Junior Devs — Vivek Ravisankar, HackerRank
- Personalized AI Language Education — with Andrew Hsu, Speak
- Building Manus AI (first ever Manus Meetup)
- Anthropic, Glean & OpenRouter: How AI Moats Are Built with Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures
- 11 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 44 mentions in 12 episodes 4 per episode
- A Brief History of the Open Source AI Hacker - with Ben Firshman of Replicate
- Is finetuning GPT4o worth it?
- The State of AI in production — with David Hsu of Retool
- Building the Silicon Brain - Drew Houston of Dropbox
- Production AI Engineering starts with Evals
- Building AGI in Real Time (OpenAI Dev Day 2024)
- The Ultimate Guide to Prompting - with Sander Schulhoff from LearnPrompting.org
- Building AGI with OpenAI's Structured Outputs API
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
Everything said about Y Combinator, oldest first
Nov 3, 2023 neutral
Feb 7, 2024 negative
Hsu: YC Demo Day is driven by startups over-promising and under-delivering
“And in demo day, I mean, maybe you two have seen a lot of videos, like it's a lot of, Honestly over-promising and usher delivery, because every startup, you know, says, oh yeah, you know, I'm going to be the next Google or something, and then you appear under …”
Feb 7, 2024 positive
Hsu: Retool had 5-6 years of runway paying founders $30k-$40k
“I think that at that point we had raised something like maybe a million dollars, maybe a million and a half coming out of YC. So, I mean, to us to people, you know, that was a huge amount of money. I was like, wow, like how are you ever gonna spend a million a…”
Feb 7, 2024 neutral
Retool skipped its initial YC Demo Day due to having zero traction
“So we were supposed to present at the March demo day, but then we basically felt like we had nothing really going on and no traction. We had no customers. And so we're like, okay, well, why don't we, you know, take six months to go find all that before present…”
Feb 28, 2024
Firshman: Replicate Entered Late YC Batch With No Product or Users
“We didn't have, we hadn't built a product. We had no users. We had no idea what our business was going to be because we couldn't get anybody to like buy something which doesn't exist. And actually there was quite a way through our, I think it was like two thir…”
Aug 22, 2024
Aug 22, 2024 negative
Aug 22, 2024 positive
Cosine built code retrieval tooling before LLMs could support autonomous agents
“Well, there are going to be some things that you need to build this when the tech does catch up. So retrieval being one of the most important things, like the model is going to have to be able to like pull code out for code base somehow. So we were like, well,…”
Jan 10, 2025
Feb 28, 2025 positive
Oct 16, 2025 negative
Corbitt: Ambitious startups benefit more from long-term vision than fast YC shipping
“If I do another startup, like I would like, I think at least some points I probably would have done better to be like heads down and execute on my vision for longer and like, kind of like go for the more ambitious thing, but that would take longer to sort of l…”