Y Combinator, every mention
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every year anyone Shawn Wang 23Michael Royzen 17Qasar Younis 9Alistair Pullen 7Kyle Corbitt 5Ben Firshman 5Alessio Fanelli 5Paul Klein 4Vivek Ravisankar 2Loïc Houssier 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Y Combinator comes up
When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
- ▶ 21:14 unnamed speaker The YC one is pretty big too.
AI Agents Need Computers: 74% MoM Growth, 850K/Day Runs, & New Agent Cloud — Ivan Burazin, Daytona
- ▶ 51:59 Ivan Burazin Um, and that has been historically, the thing that we have found in this AI transition is, and so we haven't talked about Daytona's customers are everything from, you know, the single developer, the YC startup to people say fortune, I'll…
The Agent-Native Cloud: 3M Users, 100K Signups/Wk, Data Centers, & Death PRs — Jake Cooper, Railway
- ▶ 1:20:50 Shawn Wang I mean, speaking of, maybe you talk about the founder side, um, you're famously like, you know, the YC, uh, the SF consensus is you go to YC, you get a co-founder, you could do all these things. 2 times in the scene
The $15B Physical AI Company: Simulation, Autonomy OS, Neural Sim, & 1K Engineers—Applied Intuition
- ▶ 2:45 Alessio Fanelli I think most people have heard of Applied Intuition tied to YC when it was first started, and then you were kind of in stealth for a long time.
- ▶ 5:05 Qasar Younis Yeah, I think the, the scale reason is because we're all YC universe companies, you know, and so, uh, but it was a very, very different company. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:02:38 Qasar Younis I think always, yes, that is the old YC, like go really deep and then, you know, rather than very broad and shallow, 6 times in the scene
Why Your AI Agents Don’t Work with Dex Horthy of HumanLayer | In-Context Cooking
- ▶ 5:55 unnamed speaker And then you went through Y Combinator, right? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:05 Dex Horthy 10 to 20 person engineering teams at, like, a bunch of, bunch of random, like, YC startups.
Dylan Patel Explains the AI War While Cooking | In-Context Cooking
- ▶ 38:49 unnamed speaker Because you said that NVIDIA's kind of covering their bases with the Rubin CPX, uh, the garage chips, standard GPUs, um, and there's a lot more startups out there that are very specialized, and even, like, a lot of YC companies, right,…
Inside AI’s $10B+ Capital Flywheel — Martin Casado & Sarah Wang of a16z
- ▶ 17:38 Alessio Fanelli Um, let's talk maybe about what's not being invested in, like maybe some interesting ideas that you will see more people build, or it seems in a way, you know, as YC has gotten more popular, it's like X has gotten more popular.
The Future of Email: Superhuman CTO on Your Inbox As the Real AI Agent (Not ChatGPT) — Loïc Houssier
- ▶ 30:19 Loïc Houssier There's, uh, we're doing probably some discovery discussion with, like, some YC companies about, like, a model on device, uh, as well, uh, because... 2 times in the scene
Anthropic, Glean & OpenRouter: How AI Moats Are Built with Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures
- ▶ 45:44 Shawn Wang And that's why I like, I don't really know how to categorize anthology funds because it looks like a kind of like a, what Conviction's doing, what, uh, what YC is doing maybe, but like later stage, right?
⚡️ The State of AI Engineer Hiring: Cheating, AI Adoption,Junior Devs — Vivek Ravisankar, HackerRank
- ▶ 8:07 Vivek Ravisankar I grew up mostly in India, and I moved here to start HackerRank, and we were the, um, first Indian-based company to get into Y Combinator. 2 times in the scene
The Agents Economy Backbone - with Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe
- ▶ 19:39 Emily Glassberg Sands So like Shadeform, the, the YC startup is a great example.
Why RL Won — Kyle Corbitt, OpenPipe (acq. CoreWeave)
- ▶ 1:36 Kyle Corbitt Um, so yes, I was at, I was at Y Combinator for about four and a half years and led the startup school team there. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:56 Shawn Wang So you left YC, you spent a year in the, kind of, the wilderness. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:06:18 Shawn Wang What's a thing from YC that guided you through your entrepreneurship journey? 4 times in the scene
Taste is your Moat (Dylan Field of Figma)
- ▶ 48:18 Alessio Fanelli Because I remember I was working at a YC company and we were all on Sketch, uh, Kickback.
Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
- ▶ 1:08:11 Alessio Fanelli You know, there was like a couple of YC companies doing, oh, we're like a new version control system.
A Technical History of Generative Media
- ▶ 45:07 unnamed speaker I'll tell you a side comment about a Silicon Valley trend I'm seeing, which I cannot explain, which is that all these YC startups and all these, they're spending
⚡️OpenCode: Claude Code but Open Source, with Any Model, and frontier TUI - with Dax Reed (@thdxr)
- ▶ 35:37 Shawn Wang So I'm glad that you decided to do it, you know, because like, um, there's, there's a lot of people who, who would, you know, turn this as like the next YC project and then it would just die after like a year or two, you know?
AI is Eating Search
- ▶ 23:43 Robert McCloy But one thing I'll say about startups, and we've done like a lot of reviews of like Y Combinator startups, for example, is like startups are really, really bad at describing what they do on their homepage.
Personalized AI Language Education — with Andrew Hsu, Speak
- ▶ 4:01 Andrew Hsu We do this company trip every year, and we played our original YC application video on screen, and it was really funny because the things we were saying in that video were the exact same things that I still say today.
- ▶ 21:26 Andrew Hsu In addition to the market on the other side of the world, our first iOS engineer that we hired threw a YC referral.
DeepWiki: The GitHub Encyclopedia
- ▶ 22:09 unnamed speaker I think you need, you should add, um, code execution and then people can just test, you know, I think that's something maybe like, uh, 18 months ago, two years ago, there was like, um, a few YC companies that tried to do like interactive…
SF Compute: Commoditizing Compute
- ▶ 1:07:16 Evan Conrad And then I think, um, I think it was Gustaf at YC.
Claude Plays Pokémon Hackathon: Escape from Mt. Moon!
- ▶ 27:56 unnamed speaker Um, spent some time at Uber with YC Winter 20.
Building Manus AI (first ever Manus Meetup)
- ▶ 11:35 unnamed speaker Because, you know, during the mass, uh, one of my interns, uh, he goes to the YSA's website and found that doing YSA's W-W-W-W-W-W batch, 2 times in the scene
Browserbase: Browser Infrastructure For Your AI Agents
- ▶ 49:38 Paul Klein Eric from pig.dev in this upcoming YC batch or last YC batch, like he's building, I'll run tons of Windows operating systems for you to control with your agent. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 53:03 unnamed speaker YC forces me to get a co-founder.
- ▶ 57:01 Paul Klein And I've just found that those people tend to be just really great early hires for a company. 2 times in the scene
Raycast: Your AI Automation Assistant
- ▶ 3:36 Alessio Fanelli And I've been following the journey along since we did YC
Bee AI: The Wearable Ambient Agent
- ▶ 6:29 Ethan Sutin And, uh, so we, we pivoted, we went to YC and long story, but like we pivoted to
Beating Google at Search with Neural PageRank and $5M of H200s — with Will Bryk of Exa.ai
- ▶ 1:05 unnamed speaker What do you enter YC with? 4 times in the scene
Building the Silicon Brain - Drew Houston of Dropbox
- ▶ 1:04:41 Drew Houston And so, for example, you know, when I was just starting in 2007, it really was just like coding and talking to customers and sort of like the YC ethos, you know, make so many people want and coding and talking to customers are really all… 2 times in the scene
Production AI Engineering starts with Evals
- ▶ 1:54:27 unnamed speaker For, for those who don't know, every YC batch, she, uh, makes like the best of the, the batch and she like puts it all into one product.
Building AGI in Real Time (OpenAI Dev Day 2024)
- ▶ 34:00 Olivier Godement Like, you know, if you're, like, you know, the amazing, like, super bold, like, startup out of YC, you're gonna build, like, the next, like, billion, like, you know, user application to make it, like, truly audio-first and make it feel…
The Ultimate Guide to Prompting - with Sander Schulhoff from LearnPrompting.org
- ▶ 7:18 Sander Schulhoff So like a couple of YC companies even, and I look at their demos and their demos are like,
Building AGI with OpenAI's Structured Outputs API
- ▶ 1:12:00 Michelle Pokrass Like, the YC ethos of build something people want is, is very true at OpenAI as well.
Is finetuning GPT4o worth it?
- ▶ 1:10 Shawn Wang And around about, you started working on a stealth startup that became a YC startup.
- ▶ 2:00 Alistair Pullen And then a friend of ours that we went to Exeter with started a YC startup during COVID. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:27 Alistair Pullen So we, we applied to YC. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:08 Shawn Wang Which is a little bit, you know, for a year or so, YC companies had like a direct Slack channel to open AI.
- ▶ 13:16 Shawn Wang So it's a little bit of a diminishing of the YC advantage there. 3 times in the scene
High Agency Pydantic over VC Backed Frameworks — with Jason Liu of Instructor
- ▶ 39:44 unnamed speaker Um, so I think, I feel like this must have co-founder idea mostly comes from YC, and most, everyone else copies it, and then, yeah, you, like, plenty of companies break up over co-founder
Supervise the Process of AI Research — with Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller of Elicit
- ▶ 10:17 unnamed speaker Was it the YC list?
Personal AI Meetup - Bee, BasedHardware, LangChain LangFriend, Deepgram EmilyAI
- ▶ 0:53 Shawn Wang Uh, it's, it, it's one of these like YC, YC startups.
A Brief History of the Open Source AI Hacker - with Ben Firshman of Replicate
- ▶ 17:10 Ben Firshman That's what we applied to YC with. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:22 unnamed speaker So was YC helpful? 10 times in the scene
The State of AI in production — with David Hsu of Retool
- ▶ 1:09 Shawn Wang Um, you, you were in YC-seventeen, um, uh, winter 17, uh, and, uh, you know, it's just been a straight line up from there, right?
- ▶ 2:55 unnamed speaker So a demo that you did YC, but you didn't present a demo day initially because you were too embarrassed, um, of what you have built. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:03 David Hsu 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.
- ▶ 16:44 Shawn Wang Um, you know, in my mind, I, I don't know if there was someone clearly before you in, in this, but, you know, you've, you've clearly taken over and dominated, um, every month YC, you know, there, there's a new YC startup launching with…
The AI-First Graphics Editor - with Suhail Doshi of Playground AI
- ▶ 4:23 unnamed speaker And, uh, I was there at YC demo day when you first announced it.
Beating GPT-4 with Open Source Models - with Michael Royzen of Phind
- ▶ 18:20 Michael Royzen Um, we pivoted to make this for programmers in June of twenty-twenty-two, around the time that, um, we were getting into YC.
- ▶ 29:27 Michael Royzen Like once we got into YC, we scrapped our own index because 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 51:29 Michael Royzen So, uh, flashback to last summer, we're in the YC batch. 13 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:07:32 Michael Royzen Because I was doing both that and the startup at the same time, and then I graduated, and then it was YC, and then everything was kind of one after another.
Why AI Agents Don't Work (yet) - with Kanjun Qiu of Imbue
- ▶ 1:00:50 Shawn Wang Now it's like a Y, like YC before YC type of thing. 2 times in the scene
Generating your AI Media Empire - with Youssef Rizk of Wondercraft.ai
- ▶ 9:12 Shawn Wang I'll, I'll bring it up to Wondercraft, and you started Wondercraft, uh, in April of this year, and it's been, it's been about five months, uh, going through YC in, in the winter batch.
- ▶ 41:55 Youssef Rizk Applied to YC, we got in, long story short, we got in, and we're like, cool, let's see who's done this.
- ▶ 1:07:26 Shawn Wang There's Play.ht, which is probably the other big YC alum.