Episodes
13 years of tape. Every episode is checked claim by claim and playable.
34 episodes in 2026
🎙Y COMBINATOR
57m Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Startup School interview, Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and YC Managing Partner Diana Hu discuss the future of AI engineering, covering long-running autonomous agents…
15 statements 5 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
1h 16m Multi-GPU Kernels, Intelligence per Watt, Heterogeneous Inference, and More | YC Paper Club · Y Combinator
This Y Combinator Paper Club session features expert presentations on the future of AI systems engineering, covering topics such as multi-GPU kernel optimization, intelligence-per-watt effic…
17 statements 5 featured 9 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
32m Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity” · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Startup School keynote, Meta Chief AI Officer and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang joins YC President Garry Tan to share lessons from his entrepreneurial journey, discuss …
18 statements 6 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
50m Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban · Y Combinator
At Y Combinator's Startup School 2026, Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl presents how his company revived civil supersonic flight, detailing key technical and regulatory breakthro…
26 statements 8 featured 13 assessments 4 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
39m Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Startup School 2026 conversation, YC President Garry Tan interviews OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the early days of YC, the rise of hard tech and AI agents, navigating intern…
18 statements 6 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
35m Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt · Y Combinator
At Y Combinator Startup School 2026, Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, discusses the technical breakthroughs of Opus 5, explaining how deleting prompt scaffolding, unhobbling m…
22 statements 6 featured 6 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
48m Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA · Y Combinator
At Y Combinator Startup School 2026, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joins Garry Tan for an in-depth fireside chat exploring NVIDIA's early survival stories, strategic pivots into AI, op…
24 statements 6 featured 3 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
30m How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator Startup School Paris fireside chat, Datadog Co-Founder and CEO Olivier Pomel shares lessons on scaling a multi-billion-dollar enterprise cloud platform, overcoming early…
18 statements 5 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
1h 14m World Models, JEPA And The Path To Sample-Efficient RL · Y Combinator
In this episode of YC Decoded, Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard explore sample efficiency and world models in artificial intelligence, analyzing mathematical decision-making frameworks, rob…
0 statements
🎙Y COMBINATOR
40m Zynga Founder: Consumer Is Not Investible Right Now - Thats Why You Should Build It · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator interview, Garry Tan speaks with Zynga founder Mark Pincus about why consumer tech is poised for a major AI-driven renaissance, detailing practical product frameworks, f…
23 statements 6 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
42m The Age Of The 40-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Here · Y Combinator
Webflow co-founder Bryant Chou joins The Light Cone Podcast to demonstrate Ploy, an automated AI marketing and web design platform, and discuss how AI empowers technical founders to run full…
26 statements 8 featured 3 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
54m The Most AI-Pilled CEO We Know · Y Combinator
In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, Brex Co-Founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi joins Garry Tan and Y Combinator partners to discuss how executive leaders must act as Chief AI Officers, b…
37 statements 15 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
46m Inside YC's AI Playbook · Y Combinator
In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, Y Combinator partners Garry Tan, Jared Friedman, and Pete Koomen discuss how YC transformed its internal operations using custom AI agent infrastruc…
23 statements 8 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
50m How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator interview, Garry Tan speaks with author and Lean Startup creator Eric Ries about his book 'Incorruptible,' exploring how founders can protect their companies from corpor…
25 statements 8 featured 12 assessments 2 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
21m Paul Graham, Founder of Y Combinator, Live from Stockholm · Y Combinator
In a keynote address in Stockholm, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham explains why ambitious entrepreneurs must temporarily immerse themselves in Silicon Valley to calibrate against world-c…
11 statements 3 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
41m Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers · Y Combinator
In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan discusses his return to active software engineering and how leveraging multi-agent AI tools, 'Tokenmaxxing,…
22 statements 7 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
37m Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI · Y Combinator
In this episode of YC Decoded, hosts Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard explore how test-time recursive compute depth in continuous latent space—highlighted by Hierarchical Reasoning Models (…
19 statements 6 featured 7 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
40m Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough · Y Combinator
At the Y Combinator x Google DeepMind Startups Day, CEO Demis Hassabis discusses the path to artificial general intelligence, key architectural challenges like continual learning and meta-co…
32 statements 10 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
39m Replit's CEO On The Only Two Jobs Left In The Company Of The Future · Y Combinator
In this Founder Firesides interview hosted by Y Combinator's Andrew Miklas, Replit CEO Amjad Massad discusses how AI agents and natural language interfaces are democratizing software creatio…
21 statements 10 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
21m How to Make Claude Code Your AI Engineering Team · Y Combinator
Garry Tan presents GStack, an open-source framework that transforms Claude Code into a full-stack AI engineering team. Through a live build of a tax document retrieval application, he demons…
8 statements 4 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
43m How Stripe Built Their New Website · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's Design Review, host Aaron Epstein talks with Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe, to explore the strategy, custom prototyping tools, AI integration, and cu…
18 statements 5 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
49m The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here · Y Combinator
In this episode of The Light Cone, Physical Intelligence co-founder Quan Vuong joins Y Combinator hosts to discuss how general-purpose AI foundation models, cross-embodiment training, and re…
30 statements 13 featured 4 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
20m BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems · Y Combinator
Host Jared Friedman tours BillionToOne with co-founders Oguzhan Atay and David Tsao to explore how the company revolutionized cell-free DNA diagnostics using Quantitative Counting Templates …
17 statements 6 featured 5 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
31m This Startup Catches Fraud at Scale · Y Combinator
In this episode of Founder Firesides, Y Combinator Managing Partner Jared Friedman interviews Karine Mellata, Co-founder and CEO of Variance, as the company emerges from stealth with a $21 m…
14 statements 6 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
57m François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator podcast episode, François Chollet discusses why scaling traditional large language models alone is insufficient for reaching AGI, detailing his work on symbolic program …
31 statements 11 featured 4 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
39m AI Is Unlocking Millions Of New Builders · Y Combinator
In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, Y Combinator partners interview Emergent co-founders Mukund and Madhav Jha about how their AI coding platform reached $100M ARR in eight months by e…
27 statements 6 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
53m The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's 'How to Build the Future,' host Garry Tan interviews Max Hodak, Founder and CEO of Science and former President of Neuralink, to explore groundbreaking adva…
41 statements 10 featured 14 assessments 2 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
37m Common Mistakes With Vibe Coded Websites · Y Combinator
Y Combinator's Aaron Epstein and Raphaël Schaad review AI-built startup landing pages to highlight common AI design tropes, user experience pitfalls, and actionable strategies for founders t…
11 statements 3 featured
🎙Y COMBINATOR
19m The Powerful Alternative To Fine-Tuning · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's The Light Cone, Poetiq Co-founder Ian Fischer discusses how recursively self-improving reasoning harnesses provide a cost-effective alternative to model fin…
12 statements 4 featured 2 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
23m The AI Agent Economy Is Here · Y Combinator
In this episode of Y Combinator's Light Cone podcast, partners Garry Tan, Jared Friedman, Harj Taggar, and Diana Hu explore how the rapid rise of autonomous AI coding agents and platforms li…
17 statements 5 featured 4 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
50m Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny · Y Combinator
Boris Cherny, Creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, joins Y Combinator partners on The Light Cone podcast to discuss the genesis, design philosophy, and future of AI-native developer…
34 statements 12 featured 3 assessments 1 contradicted
🎙Y COMBINATOR
22m OpenClaw Creator: Why 80% Of Apps Will Disappear · Y Combinator
In this episode of Founder Firesides, host Raphael Schaad interviews OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger about how local-first AI execution, autonomous problem solving, and swarm intelligence…
10 statements 4 featured 1 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
45m We're All Addicted To Claude Code · Y Combinator
In this episode of The Light Cone, hosts Garry Tan, Diana Hu, Harj Taggar, and Jared Friedman interview Segment co-founder and former OpenAI Codex developer Calvin French-Owen about the revo…
46 statements 10 featured 4 assessments
🎙Y COMBINATOR
15m Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets · Y Combinator
In this Y Combinator 'HARD TECH' feature, host Aaron Epstein tours Stoke Space in Kent, Washington, where co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman showcase their mission to build fully and rap…
13 statements 4 featured 2 assessments