Y Combinator, every mention
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every year anyone Lenny Rachitsky 78Gustaf Alströmer 25Jessica Livingston 11Sam Lessin 4Matt Mochary 4Mike Maples, Jr. 3Zoelle Egner 2Oji Udezue 2Karri Saarinen 2Jason Lemkin 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Y Combinator comes up
How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook
- ▶ 26:50 Sam Lessin So, I mean, the, before the book, we did a, we did a class specifically initially for YC founders, right? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 40:10 Sam Lessin Talk about YC companies.
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)
- ▶ 33:10 Jason Lemkin So we picked a, a YC company called Artisan.
- ▶ 49:15 Jason Lemkin So yes, if you're tiny and you have three prospects and you're, you're just getting into Y Combinator, maybe you don't need these tools, but we, we graduate out of that more quickly.
“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (co-founder)
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
- ▶ 12:42 Ethan Smith You can be mentioned on a blog, like a, you know, a brand new YC company launches.
How AI is reshaping the product role | Oji and Ezinne Udezue
- ▶ 10:51 Oji Udezue One of the things I learned from failing a lot at building companies is that sometimes, you know, the way that why see other people pitch it is that, you know, you build something and if it doesn't work, you pivot, you know, stuff like…
How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)
Why ChatGPT will be the next big growth channel (and how to capitalize on it) | Brian Balfour
- ▶ 7:18 Brian Balfour And, you know, YC is pumping up six of
Rapidly test and validate any startup idea with the 2-day Foundation Sprint
- ▶ 1:10:07 Lenny Rachitsky Uh, what, what would make me believe that this is a, the process I should follow versus just, I'm just gonna do what I hear on YC, just build it, launch it, iterate that kind of thing.
Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo
- ▶ 14:58 Lenny Rachitsky I think this is something a lot of founders like, you know, it's hard to find a co-founder that out of the blue, when you have an idea, uh, YC famously doesn't like solo founders.
Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos
- ▶ 40:18 David Placek Startups get going early that, you know, they, they get into Y Combinator or something like that.
- ▶ 55:41 Lenny Rachitsky They got accepted into YC and they're about to like launch a product. 2 times in the scene
AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff
- ▶ 15:25 Lenny Rachitsky I was just listening to the Y Combinator episode where they're talking about prompting techniques and they pointed out that the RLHF post training stuff is with using XML and that's why these elements are so aware and so kind of set up to…
Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)
- ▶ 47:58 Mike Krieger Um, a few thoughts on this, and it's a question I've gotten, you know, we like to do these kind of founder days with, you know, whether it's, uh, you know, Menlo Ventures, who have a lot of investors, and then just, or it's like, we've…
How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)
- ▶ 1:09:45 Lenny Rachitsky And when you look at YC founders and they're where they've come from, I think you may be shared in this in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:17:15 Nabeel S. Qureshi You know, like the classic YC thing is just when you take something to a customer, ask them to pay you a lot of money, and if they say no, then find a new problem.
Inside Devin: The AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code this year | Scott Wu
OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
- ▶ 32:41 Lenny Rachitsky And I hear that a lot with YC, just like, things are, that never were possible now are just becoming possible every few months with the updates to the models.
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)
- ▶ 15:44 Sean Ellis So I actually came up with this question when I was working with, uh, an early YC company called, um, Zobni and, uh, which is inbox spelt backwards.
Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)
- ▶ 1:45:31 Jeff Weinstein And so we just want to take all that complexity and just erase it so that you get the same thing the YC group gets when they start that checklist that they go through.
Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Partner at Floodgate)
- ▶ 32:43 Mike Maples, Jr. And Michael introduced me to Brian Chesky before they applied to Y Combinator. 3 times in the scene
The social radar: Y Combinator’s secret weapon | Jessica Livingston (co-founder of YC, author)
- ▶ 0:04 Lenny Rachitsky Much of what's novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:06 Lenny Rachitsky Jessica is the co-founder of Y Combinator, the first and most famous startup accelerator, which since 2005 has funded over 5000 companies, including over 200 unicorns now worth over a billion dollars, including companies like Airbnb,… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:58 Lenny Rachitsky So he wrote a few months ago, an article by Y Combinator said that early on it had been a one man show. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:54 Lenny Rachitsky So YC, your nickname was The Social Radar. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:53 Lenny Rachitsky And I've read part of the reason you thought about just like the type of person is you're trying to build a specific culture in the early days of YC and you're going to be around these people. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:33 Jessica Livingston Because they'd been around struggling, but had been a company with an idea for, you know, a little while before they applied to Y-
- ▶ 33:51 Jessica Livingston You can come into YC's interview lacking confidence, but we will then help you in the next three months to gain more confidence. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:18 Jessica Livingston I mean, oh my, I spent a lot of my time at Y Combinator when I was there all the time, full time, you know,
- ▶ 38:57 Jessica Livingston And so on the, on YC's application, we asked them what, what project have you worked on before or whatever, but it's really hard to tell when you're the first investor.
- ▶ 49:55 Lenny Rachitsky And you could basically say YC is what it is because of this unfair advantage that you all had in the early days. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 53:40 Jessica Livingston We then like a week later had this YC event in London.
- ▶ 55:54 Jessica Livingston And I was finding that as I was catching up with YC alumni, you know, that would come visit or I'd see, I just loved the conversations we were having. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:02:54 Jessica Livingston Well, remember I've been interviewing people since YC started, um, cause I was working on Founders at Work. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:15:42 Jessica Livingston Like there's so much that he's done with Y Combinator and just in our personal life that is just so admirable.
- ▶ 1:17:44 Lenny Rachitsky Is there a fun story of early days YC, whether it's with Airbnb founders or Paul or anything that comes to mind as just like, wow, what a, what a different time that was, or what a surprising thing that happened back. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:22:56 Lenny Rachitsky Way YC operates. 2 times in the scene
Brian Chesky’s new playbook
- ▶ 1:04:12 Brian Chesky When I started before Y Combinator is a person named Michael Seibel. 2 times in the scene
Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology)
- ▶ 1:01:34 Eric Ries I mean, Paul Graham used to boast about that as one of the features of Y Combinator that the founders they would get to come to the dinners would tell you the true story of what really happened. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:09:05 Lenny Rachitsky I heard, I, I found that out through Twitter where one of the YC partners replied and share that story with me because I also didn't know. 2 times in the scene
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)
- ▶ 5:11 Karri Saarinen These companies can be like very early stage team, like some, some companies just graduated from YC or, or, or a public company.
- ▶ 53:39 Karri Saarinen Yeah, I don't, I don't think there's any, like, complicated, like, processes, and so I think, like, one of the things, like, I, I was in YC in 2012, and one of the, like, things, the main thing they say there is, like, what you should be…
Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform)
- ▶ 4:27 Oji Udezue We talk about fail fasts, the YC doctrine and so on and so forth.
An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)
- ▶ 15:08 Meltem Kuran Berkowitz So there are still, you know, they could be Slack communities, Discord, places that, you know, founders choose to connect with other founders, or we have partnerships with places like the Y Combinator, where, you know, once you go through…
The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework)
- ▶ 24:13 Bob Moesta And then, uh, I helped Techstars and Wicombinator.
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
- ▶ 50:42 Melissa Tan So I wrote actually an article for the YC blog a few years ago with, with Abby Kuzminoff, who was on my team at Dropbox about this, because I felt like even at Dropbox,
Frameworks for product differentiation, team building, and first principles thinking | Ayo Omojola
- ▶ 23:09 Ayo Omojola So I had this experience going through YC where, and, and just like kind of growing up in my career in Silicon Valley, uh, where
Hot takes and techno-optimism from tech’s top power couple | Sriram and Aarthi
- ▶ 31:50 Aarthi Ramamurthy I went through Y Combinator. 2 times in the scene
Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb)
- ▶ 0:42 Lenny Rachitsky Gustav is a group partner at Y Combinator, where he's been for almost six years. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:28 Lenny Rachitsky I was really lucky to get to work with you before you moved on to bigger and better things at YC.
- ▶ 9:24 Gustaf Alströmer They really care about the time at YC and they tried to recreate YC inside Airbnb a couple of times with, with demo day and with, with sort of like new products completely isolated from the rest, starting with doing things that don't scale… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:32 Lenny Rachitsky So you mentioned YC and this kind of is a good segue to where I want to focus most of our time. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:03 Lenny Rachitsky You mentioned YC office hours, and I had a question around this.
- ▶ 22:53 Gustaf Alströmer But if I take like the most recent experience of how to NYC, I would say, 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:51 Gustaf Alströmer Airbnb is sort of like the, one of the best stories inside YC of, of, of doing this well.
- ▶ 32:15 Gustaf Alströmer I actually recorded, I'm, I'm happy about these videos, but I recorded two videos on, on YouTube as part of YC Startup School last, last fall. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:29 Lenny Rachitsky So I know YC looks to having a technical co-founder. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:01 Gustaf Alströmer And we built something called co-founder matching where those funders can meet.
- ▶ 38:46 Gustaf Alströmer They might not be co-founders per YCSF definition of having 10%, but they feel like they're the founding team.
- ▶ 40:53 Lenny Rachitsky If you just think about the most successful startups, NYC, or even just the companies you worked with, if you had to pick just like one or two attributes of what's most common across successful companies, what would, what would that be? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 45:07 Lenny Rachitsky So maybe like you, and then just generally YC, like how good are you all at knowing what's going to work out? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 57:46 Gustaf Alströmer Reset my thinking coming from a growth team joining YC is you can't start a startup with a growth team mindset, because that is just scalable things all the time.
- ▶ 59:04 Lenny Rachitsky So my understanding is you're instrumental in pushing YC to focus on climate tech as a focus area. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:18:39 Lenny Rachitsky Favorite interview question that you like to ask YC founders when you're interviewing them? 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:23:31 Gustaf Alströmer The most, uh, useful things that I put out is probably on the YCC YouTube channel. 7 times in the scene
Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO)
- ▶ 43:18 Lenny Rachitsky It's often like, I think YCs are like, do not do that.
Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner
- ▶ 20:34 Zoelle Egner So, like, I was, I was closely tracking Y Combinator and, like, that whole ecosystem, so I knew I wanted to find a smaller company where they maybe were having more difficulty hiring because they were less well-known or a little bit less,… 2 times in the scene
How to work through fear, give hard feedback, and doing layoffs with grace | Matt Mochary
- ▶ 1:29 Lenny Rachitsky He's also coached partners at VCs like Sequoia, YC, Benchmark, many others.
- ▶ 6:39 Matt Mochary They couldn't get into YC cause YC doesn't accept students.
- ▶ 54:37 Matt Mochary And I didn't know the answer and someone then shared with me, but it was obvious that YC startups were crushing and, and just iterating so much faster. 3 times in the scene
Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)
- ▶ 12:52 Sachin Monga We actually, we did a thing that on all hands a little while ago where Substack went through Y Combinator.
The role of AI in new product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub)
- ▶ 29:40 Lenny Rachitsky Altimeter, SVB Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Y Combinator.
How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable)
- ▶ 3:42 Lenny Rachitsky Salesforce Ventures and Y Combinator.
Persuasive communication and managing up | Wes Kao (Maven, altMBA, Section4)
- ▶ 2:29 Lenny Rachitsky Altimeter, SVB Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Y Combinator.
The nature of product | Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group
- ▶ 35:14 Lenny Rachitsky Altimeter, SVB Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Y Combinator.