Episodes
13 years of tape. Every episode is checked claim by claim and playable.
51 episodes in 2025
🎙Y COMBINATOR
30m The Truth About The AI Bubble · Y Combinator
In this episode of The Light Cone Podcast, Y Combinator partners analyze the major AI trends and unexpected developments of 2025. They examine changing model preferences among founders, deba…
27 statements 11 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
38m From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's Founder Firesides, GP Brad Flora interviews PostHog co-founder and CEO James Hawkins on how the company navigated Pivot Hell to become a $1.4 billion unicor…
18 statements 7 featured 2 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
44m How Amplitude Went From Skeptics to “All In” on AI · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's Lightcone Podcast, Amplitude Co-Founder and CEO Spencer Skates discusses how his enterprise analytics company transitioned from AI skepticism to an AI-first…
23 statements 10 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
39m The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were Impossible Until Now · Y Combinator
Y Combinator President Garry Tan sits down with Lightspeed Ventures Partner Michael Mignano to explore how artificial intelligence is reigniting opportunities in consumer startups. They exam…
21 statements 8 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
35m Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator
In this episode of Design Review, host Aaron Epstein and Rio Lu, Head of Design at Cursor, review user-submitted startup landing pages and AI apps created by Y Combinator founders. They prov…
9 statements 3 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
43m The Startup Playbook for Hiring Your First Engineers and AEs · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Startup School module, Juicebox co-founder and CEO David Paffenholz joins Harj Taggar to deliver a practical playbook on sourcing, interviewing, pitching, and closing to…
25 statements 8 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
39m From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator presentation, Casetext co-founder and CEO Jake Heller shares key frameworks for building high-impact AI startups, drawing lessons from Casetext's $650 million acquisitio…
16 statements 7 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
38m Startup Advice: AI GTM, Pivoting & How To Hire · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Office Hours episode, general partners break down essential strategies for early-stage founders, focusing on AI go-to-market execution, market targeting, pivot decisions…
23 statements 6 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
40m Ask These Questions Before Starting An AI Startup · Y Combinator
Jordan Fisher delivers a Y Combinator presentation exploring the strategic, technical, and ethical paradoxes facing AI founders in an era of rapid technological acceleration. He urges entrep…
25 statements 8 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
1h 4m Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator podcast interview, host Ankit Gupta speaks with Nick Joseph, Head of Pre-Training at Anthropic, about the fundamental principles, hardware infrastructure, organizational…
38 statements 12 featured 2 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
42m Why Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator interview, Coinbase's Jesse Pollak joins Harj Taggar to explain why foundational infrastructure scaling, regulatory clarity, and stablecoin adoption have created a golde…
28 statements 11 featured 6 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
40m Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator AI Startup School talk, Box Co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie joins partner David Lieb to discuss why early-stage AI startups possess a unique advantage over legacy incumbe…
17 statements 5 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
42m The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad · Y Combinator
At the Y Combinator AI Startup School, Replit CEO Amjad Masad presents his vision for the future of software creation, highlighting the transition from traditional development tools to auton…
35 statements 12 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
50m The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew · Y Combinator
Former OpenAI CRO and Palantir executive Bob McGrew joins the Lightcone Podcast to unpack the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) strategy and explain why AI agent startups are reviving this han…
31 statements 7 featured 3 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
27m Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator AI Startup School talk, Michael Truell, CEO and Co-founder of Cursor, shares his journey from early high school AI projects to building a leading AI code editor that sca…
12 statements 4 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
45m How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience) · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Founder Firesides interview, Legora Co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand discusses building a rapidly growing legal AI platform for enterprise law firms without having a le…
38 statements 11 featured 3 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
18m The Sales Playbook For Founders | Startup School · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Startup School lecture, Tom Blomfield outlines a strategic framework for early-stage B2B founders to transition from unpaid design partnerships and free pilots to paid t…
9 statements 3 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
40m Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design · Y Combinator
At Y Combinator's AI Startup School, Figma CEO and Co-founder Dylan Field discusses the evolution of design, building scalable products, and navigating early startup pivots. He shares insigh…
24 statements 7 featured 3 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
46m The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Founder Firesides interview, host Gustaf Alströmer speaks with serial entrepreneurs Chas and Arne Englander, co-founders of Model ML, about building an AI workspace that…
22 statements 7 featured 2 assessments 2 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
40m Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan · Y Combinator
At Y Combinator's Startup School, Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan explores how empirical scaling laws, expanding autonomous task horizons, and theoretical physics heuristics drive the cont…
19 statements 5 featured 4 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
43m Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's Design Review, General Partner Aaron Epstein and Linear co-founder Karri Saarinen analyze startup landing pages to provide actionable advice on brand design…
16 statements 5 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
44m Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator AI Startup School talk, Chelsea Finn presents Physical Intelligence's breakthrough foundation model architecture, π₀, which combines broad multi-robot pre-training with …
29 statements 7 featured 5 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
27m Nobel Laureate John Jumper: AI is Revolutionizing Scientific Discovery · Y Combinator
Nobel Laureate John Jumper presents at Y Combinator's AI Startup School on how DeepMind's AlphaFold solved a 50-year-old biological challenge in protein structure prediction. He details the …
15 statements 5 featured 10 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
43m Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator AI Startup School fireside chat, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas joins General Partner David Lieb to discuss Perplexity's growth, its strategic push toward an agentic AI…
38 statements 14 featured 5 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
43m Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI · Y Combinator
At the Y Combinator AI Startup School, Dr. Andrew Ng delivers a keynote address on how artificial intelligence enables founders to execute at unprecedented speed, breakdown application oppor…
33 statements 11 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
38m How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era · Y Combinator
In a live podcast recording, Y Combinator partners advise ambitious young engineers and founders on navigating the AI era by building authentic utility, adopting extreme agency, and targetin…
18 statements 6 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
34m François Chollet: How We Get To AGI · Y Combinator
In his Y Combinator AI Startup School talk, François Chollet challenges the dominant pretraining scaling dogma and outlines a roadmap toward AGI centered on fluid intelligence, test-time ada…
14 statements 4 featured 6 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
44m Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator AI Startup School talk, AI pioneer Dr. Fei-Fei Li discusses the history of ImageNet, her career journey, and her latest venture World Labs focused on advancing 3D spatia…
14 statements 5 featured 3 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
35m Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products · Y Combinator
In this episode of 'The Main Function', Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan interviews venture capitalist Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures on the future of consumer AI, go-to-market strategies, a…
21 statements 6 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
40m Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs · Y Combinator
In a wide-ranging interview at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, Microsoft Chairman & CEO Satya Nadella joins YC CEO Garry Tan to discuss AI platform shifts, real-world utility, system archi…
26 statements 8 featured 3 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
42m Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware · Y Combinator
At Y Combinator's AI Startup School, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and YC President Garry Tan discuss the origins of OpenAI, the rapid evolution of AI capabilities, strategic advice for early-stage …
33 statements 11 featured 3 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
49m Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful · Y Combinator
At Y Combinator's AI Startup School, Elon Musk speaks with Garry Tan about the rapid arrival of digital superintelligence, sharing hard-won founder lessons from Zip2, SpaceX, and Tesla along…
24 statements 8 featured 3 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
39m Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again) · Y Combinator
In his keynote at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, Andrej Karpathy explores the historic shift toward Software 3.0 powered by Large Language Models. He analyzes LLM system architectures, co…
16 statements 5 featured 3 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
37m Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan interviews Michael Truell, Co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, exploring how Cursor achieved historic hypergrowth, the technical limits of autonomous AI agents, and w…
26 statements 8 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
31m State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents · Y Combinator
In this episode of The Light Cone Podcast, Y Combinator partners analyze cutting-edge prompt engineering strategies, meta-prompting workflows, and evaluation frameworks used by top AI startu…
28 statements 6 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
30m How To Design Better AI Apps · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's 'The Breakdown,' General Partner Pete Koomen joins hosts Tom Blomfield and David Lieb to discuss why modern AI applications fail when constrained by legacy …
23 statements 7 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
19m How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job · Y Combinator
In this episode of 'The Breakdown,' Y Combinator General Partners Dave Lieb and Tom Blomfield explore how AI coding agents are rapidly transforming software engineering, early-stage startups…
18 statements 5 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
16m How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Startup School guide, General Partner Tom Blomfield and YC founders share actionable best practices for 'vibe coding'—using AI coding assistants to build software effici…
15 statements 7 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
38m How Zepto Became India’s Fastest Growing Startup · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's 'How to Build the Future', host Garry Tan interviews Zepto Co-founder and CEO Aadit Palicha on how the quick-commerce startup scaled to a $5 billion unicorn…
25 statements 8 featured 8 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
34m How To Build A Truly Abundant Future · Y Combinator
In this episode of Main Function, host Garry Tan interviews author and Atlantic writer Derek Thompson to explore how America can build a future of material abundance by reforming administrat…
17 statements 6 featured 6 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
20m What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Design Review episode, host Aaron Epstein interviews Cron founder Raphael Schaad about why design is a critical competitive advantage for startups. Schaad shares actiona…
8 statements 3 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
31m DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator interview, Garry Tan speaks with DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu about the company's origins, overcoming severe fundraising droughts and operational crises, and scal…
19 statements 6 featured 6 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
26m From A Pivot To Building A $9.6 Billion Payroll Company · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Founder Fireside interview, Gusto CEO Joshua Reeves details how his team pivoted from an expert hotline prototype to building a $9.6 billion all-in-one payroll, benefits…
12 statements 5 featured 6 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
37m Figma's Dylan Field: Exploring the idea maze, vibe coding, and the power of “locking in” · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator interview hosted by Garry Tan, Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field discusses how artificial intelligence is transforming software development and elevating the strategi…
20 statements 10 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
31m Vibe Coding Is The Future · Y Combinator
In this episode of The Light Cone Podcast, Y Combinator partners examine how 'vibe coding' and AI development tools are fundamentally transforming software engineering, shifting developer fo…
19 statements 6 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
36m AI Interfaces Of The Future | Design Review · Y Combinator
Hosted by Aaron Epstein alongside Notion's Raphael Schaad, this episode of Y Combinator's Design Review explores next-generation AI interfaces spanning voice agents, workflow canvasses, adap…
9 statements 5 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
34m How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's 'How To Build The Future', host David Lieb interviews Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, about the company's rapid rise, technical breakthr…
19 statements 5 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
29m The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup · Y Combinator
Y Combinator partners discuss essential financial strategies for early-stage startups, detailing how capital allocation must evolve from extreme pre-product-market fit frugality to disciplin…
21 statements 7 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
30m Bob McGrew: AI Agents And The Path To AGI · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator interview hosted by Garry Tan, former OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew discusses the evolution of AGI, the shift from pre-training data bottlenecks to test-time …
24 statements 6 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
43m How To Build The Future: Parker Conrad · Y Combinator
In this interview with Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Rippling Co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad shares lessons from his entrepreneurial journey through SigFig, Zenefits, and Rippling. Conrad de…
17 statements 6 featured 3 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
24m Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Founder Fireside interview, Zip Co-founder and CEO Rujul Zaparde shares his entrepreneurial journey from founding FlightCar as an 18-year-old dropout to scaling Zip into…
14 statements 4 featured 3 assessments