Y Combinator
also referred to as: yc
includes Y Combinator Demo Day
59 statements across 31 episodes · 26 bullish · 8 bearish · 10 people on the record · first statement Nov 6, 2024 by Jordi Hays · said 524 times in 109 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by John Coogan (231), Jordi Hays (87), Garry Tan (12), Nichole Wischoff (6), Trae Stephens (4), Daniel Yanisse (4), Matt Schlicht (3), Jason Carman (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 44 mentions in 21 episodes 2 per episode
- Open Source vs. Closed Source, NVIDIA Backs SSI, YC Startup School Fills Stadium | Diet TBPN
- Airbnb CEO on Why AI Will Create a New Era of Consumer Products
- Full Interview: Moltbook Creator’s First Appearance Since Launch
- AI Safety Timeline Takeover, Bending Spoons Acquires Miro, iPhone Duo Reactions | Diet TBPN
- RSI Is Closer Than People Think, Per Tae Kim
- Thinking Machines X Nvidia, Meta Acquires Moltbook, BYD Mulls F1 | Diet TBPN
- Becoming Unsloppable, Anthropic’s Series G, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN
- Become Unsloppable: How to Survive the Great Software Collapse
- 13 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 266 mentions in 65 episodes 4 per episode
- Garry Tan talks the state of YC, the impact of AI, and the dawn of innovation.
- Weekly Recap: Apple WWDC, Andrew Huberman, YC Demo Day, Intern Phone Assembly, $14B Meta x Scale
- We Interviewed the Best Startups From YC Demo Day (June 2025)
- We Interviewed the Best Startups From YC Demo Day
- Wednesday’s Diet TBPN
- The Businesses Making $$$ off Disaster Relief
- Trae Stephens talks Flock Safety, Anduril, and American Dynamism.
- How to Build an $11B Empire Selling Funko Pops | Whatnot CEO Grant Lafontaine Joins TBPN
- 57 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 214 mentions in 23 episodes 9 per episode
- Low T levels at Y-Combinator (ep9)
- CHRISTIANITY: Why it's making a comeback (ep23)
- Fact-Checking The Information (ep10)
- How to Spend a Trillion Dollars Fast (ep13)
- Trump's Secret Career (ep7)
- Surviving a VC Holiday Party (ep22)
- How we became the fastest growing podcast (ep20)
- Taylor Lorenz Trades Teams (ep16)
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
Everything said about Y Combinator, oldest first
Nov 6, 2024 positive
Early YC Batch Loyalty Gives Member Companies an Unfair B2B Distribution Moat
“One of YCs like moats is that if you could be in YC and you don't go in YC and then somebody that's competing for your, in your same category does there, the loyalty is like very real. Like they are going to use your competitor out of At least in the early day…”
Nov 14, 2024 neutral
Nov 14, 2024 neutral
Nov 15, 2024
Hays: Michael Seibel quickly rejected Party Round from Y Combinator
“I interviewed there for party round back in the day with Michael Siebel and got a quick rejection. I don't think I fit even with like, we were already backed by Gradient, one of Google's funds and I just didn't fit the YC mold being non-technical myself.”
Nov 16, 2024
Nov 19, 2024 bullish
Nov 21, 2024 positive
Y Combinator acts as a startup union that ostracizes bad venture capitalists
“YC has become essentially a union for startups. Because if you are a VC and you fuck over one YC company, you go in their database, every YC company hears about you, and instantly you're ostracized from the entire community”
Nov 21, 2024 neutral
Nov 23, 2024 neutral
Nov 30, 2024
Dec 6, 2024 bearish
Dec 6, 2024 positive
Dec 6, 2024 neutral
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Coogan: Y Combinator is extremely supportive of founders pivoting mid-batch
“NYC has always been extremely friendly. Two pivots mid session. Like you can just walk into an office hours and be like, we're doing something completely different. And there's no like hate. It's amazing. It's like such a welcoming environment.”
Dec 12, 2024 positive
Dec 12, 2024 positive
Dec 14, 2024 neutral
Dec 17, 2024 neutral
Hays: AI startups skip intermediate funding rounds by rapidly generating revenue
“We've seen this a lot with AI companies that Raise pre-product and then generate so much revenue and are making so much money so quickly with such a small team that by the time a next financing happens, the company's raising 20 on 200. And it's just really har…”
Dec 19, 2024 bullish
Y Combinator's fixed deal terms allow them to buy at low valuations
“This is the bull case for Y Combinator right now because they have a set structure to their investments and you can't negotiate it. And so they've, they are able to buy into companies effectively artificially low because of their program and brand. And then ev…”
Dec 19, 2024 positive
Y Combinator's Requests for Startups catalyzes Big Tech employees to leave
“The one positive, the positive about the YC requests for startups is If you're working at a FANG, and you see that, and you're like, oh, that's interesting, and then you, that catalyze you, catalyzes you into starting a company, and then you start that company…”
Jan 9, 2025 positive
Jan 16, 2025 negative
Hays: Y Combinator Tells Early Founders Filing Patents Is a Waste
“This is the kind of stuff like founders will join YC. They never built a company before and they'll go into their first partner meeting, whatever. And they're like, yeah, we're filing our patents. For this. And YC will give you the good advice of being like, y…”
Jan 25, 2025 bearish
Hays: One-Person AI Rollup Lacks Edge Over Private Equity
“I would find it hard pressed to invest in the founder, unless it was like a personal relationship, because I don't know that you're going to have any edge over the many other Private equity firms that will all presumably follow the same strategy, right?”
Mar 8, 2025 negative
Garry Tan says Initialized Capital would have failed if YC collapsed.
“I realized that actually if I stayed at initialized and didn't come back and heed the call of Paul and Jessica to write the ship at YC I would be out of a business. I, you know, I had initialized would have been out of business if YC itself was not going in th…”
Mar 8, 2025 neutral
Mar 8, 2025 bullish
Garry Tan: VCs hard-allocate over $1B yearly to Y Combinator companies
“The other thing is I have more than a billion dollars a year in capital that's basically just, like, hard allocated to YC companies, ah, not from us, from, like, you know, Hundreds of VCs who now are all coming back to Demo Day in droves.”
Mar 8, 2025 bullish
Mar 8, 2025 positive
Mar 8, 2025 neutral
Mar 8, 2025 neutral
Mar 8, 2025 neutral
Mar 8, 2025 bullish
Tan: YC founder conference unlocked $10B–$100B in value
“I think that we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. You know, there are about 60 or 70 unicorns represented. And I think that we unlocked, you know, easily 10 to a hundred billion dollars in new market cap like that very night”
Mar 9, 2025 positive
Giffon: Senior execs at larger firms are untapped talent for running startups
“There's a lot of C-suite and senior executives at a business that's two or three times bigger than maybe the business you're looking at. And those are people who are like highly capable, has at least some entrepreneurial spirit, but maybe they're not, you know…”
Mar 24, 2025 negative
Mar 25, 2025 positive
Apr 9, 2025 bearish
Apr 26, 2025 bearish
Wischoff: Beyond OpenAI, Claude, and Perplexity, consumer AI lacks daily stickiness
“I don't know that I found anything even personally sticky enough that I'm like every day, like, you know, like messing around with it. And I, well, I guess it's not fair. Like obviously like open AI, like Claude and perplexity. But I think like on the everyday…”
Apr 26, 2025 positive
Tisch: Y Combinator continues to compound founder satisfaction and justify its equity cost
“What has been amazing to me about YC is they've just continued to compound quality of the satisfaction to their customer. They are not free, right? You're giving YC equity. And yet if you look at like the happiness factor, the MPS or whatever cheesy acronym yo…”
May 1, 2025 positive
May 1, 2025 bullish
May 1, 2025 positive
May 1, 2025 positive
Wishoff: Current YC startups are targeting global markets from day one
“This is, like, the first batch maybe ever that I'm hearing from some growth investors where everyone from the start is international. Normally, it's, like, US market or. But everyone is starting off saying, like, we serve, we're global.”
Jun 14, 2025 bullish
Jun 14, 2025
Jun 14, 2025
Jun 14, 2025
Jun 14, 2025
Jun 23, 2025 positive
Jun 23, 2025 bullish
Jun 23, 2025
Jun 23, 2025 positive
Tan: YC Spring 2025 batch is 90% AI, batch revenue growth hit 12%
“It's like 90% AI. It's about 10% 11% hard tech, which is awesome. And then the really crazy stat is, you know, how the last four batches, about the last year you know, the batch itself as a whole has been growing revenue by 10%. This time it's 12.”
Oct 22, 2025 neutral
Oct 31, 2025
Whatnot pitched Y Combinator as a Funko Pop marketplace without video
“Our initial pitch was basically A social commerce like marketplace for Funko Pops, which are like little vinyl dolls. And that was it. You can, that's what's in the YC application. And we didn't have any idea we were going to do video.”
Nov 13, 2025 neutral
Coogan: YC applications are intended to be unedited one-minute webcam videos
“You're supposed to just turn on the webcam and basically just talk for one minute. That's how you apply to YC. Yeah. You're supposed to just one shot at no editing because they don't want it to turn into, oh, to apply to YC, you spend two weeks doing an edited…”
Nov 13, 2025 negative
Hays: Rage baiting causes potential investors and hires to root against startups
“Running a successful VC backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you win. Getting media investors, talent, and customers on your side is not an easy task. Rage baiting, whether at the marketing level or product level, is the …”