Y Combinator Startup Podcast

From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups Oct 28, 2025

Jake Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million.In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he shared how his team did it—from picking the right idea to building AI products that actually work—and how founders can turn a cool demo into a reliable tool used by real customers.

Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution Oct 23, 2025

Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the Transformer.In this video, YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language — from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need — the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era.

YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours Oct 21, 2025

Every founder faces moments where they’re not sure what to do next — such as how to go to market with AI products, when to pivot, and who/when to hire.

In this episode of Office Hours, YC partners Pete Koomen, Brad Flora, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Gustaf Alströmer answer real questions from founders and share stories about how great teams build conviction, learn faster, and make better decisions as they grow.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs Oct 14, 2025

For years, we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work, the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced, and more hopeful.From radiology to software engineering, the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster, demand for human creativity and judgment grows.YC's Garry Tan explores what history, economics, and real companies show us— that technology doesn't replace people, it redefines what we can do.

How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out Oct 13, 2025

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the issue tracking tool used by thousands of high-growth companies. Before Linear, he was the first designer at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb.On Design Review with YC's Aaron Epstein, Karri shares how his design background shaped Linear’s product philosophy, why quality and craft matter from day one, what founders should look for when hiring, and how AI is changing the way teams build. It’s a deep dive into building products that truly stand out.

The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device Oct 09, 2025

Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something that’s never been done before.

They're building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains—capturing CO2 from moving vehicles before it enters the atmosphere, then turning those emissions into revenue by selling it to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products.

In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Gustaf Alströmer visits Remora's headquarters outside Detroit to see how a recent college grad with no engineering background is helping transform the $2 trillion transportation industry.

Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions Oct 07, 2025

Jordan Fisher is the co-founder & CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answers—asking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away.He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right now? What happens when software becomes commoditized? How do you build trust as teams shrink and AI takes on more responsibility?

Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI Oct 01, 2025

Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model?YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with Nick Joseph, Anthropic's Head of Pre-training, to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claude—from managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws, data strategies, team composition, and why the hardest problems in AI are often infrastructure problems, not ML problems.

Fintech 3.0: Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto Sep 23, 2025

We are entering the era of Fintech 3.0. Regulatory clarity, growing consumer adoption, and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto — and at YC, Base, and Coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. In this episode of Main Function, YC's Harj Taggar and Base's Jesse Pollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they're most excited to see, why this is such an exciting time in crypto, and what the future could look like onchain.More on our latest RFS: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/build-onchain

Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era Sep 16, 2025

For nearly two decades, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes work—guiding the company through the rise of mobile, the cloud, and now the age of AI.In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School, Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term, the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves, and why he believes AI represents the most transformative shift yet.

The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad Sep 12, 2025

Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit, now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He's spent nearly a decade making programming accessible to all—and with the rise of AI, that vision is closer than ever.In this talk from AI Startup School on June 17, 2025, Amjad traces the arc of computing from mainframes to personal computers to a future where AI agents can create software on demand. He predicts that the value of traditional software will approach zero, fundamentally reshaping how companies are built and how work gets done.

The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew Sep 08, 2025

Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir, and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model.

During his time at Palantir, he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today.

On this episode of The Lightcone, he explains how FDEs became central to today's startups, why "doing things that don't scale at scale" works, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for founders working in AI.

Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students Sep 03, 2025

Michael Truell on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.At 25, Michael Truell has already built Cursor into one of the fastest-growing companies in AI coding, hitting $100M ARR in just a year. In this fireside chat with YC General Partner Diana Hu, he shares the lessons that came from years of failed projects with his co-founders, why he believes programming is still essential even as AI changes how we code, and how Cursor is taking on GitHub Copilot with the conviction that all of software development will flow through models.

GPT-OSS vs. Qwen vs. Deepseek: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures Aug 29, 2025

OpenAI recently released its first open-weights model since GPT-2, entering a field led by DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen.YC's Ankit Gupta breaks down everything you need to know about these top OSS models, including what sets them apart under the hood. He’ll compare their approaches to mixture-of-experts, long-context training, and post-training techniques that shape reasoning and alignment—and explore how different design choices lead to surprisingly similar performance.

How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience) Aug 26, 2025

In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC General Partner Gustaf Alströmer is joined by Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups in the world. In just 13 months, Max and his team scaled from 10 to 100 people, raised $80M, and cracked the challenge of selling to one of the most skeptical industries. Max shares insights on building a successful vertical AI company, selling to conservative markets, and sheds light on what the future of legal tech looks like.

The Sales Playbook for Founders | Startup School Aug 15, 2025

Navigating B2B sales for the first time can feel slow and overwhelming.Drawing from his experience founding Monzo and GoCardless, YC's Tom Blomfield shares his playbook for running a tight sales process that lands real, recurring revenue. He walks through each step—free and paid pilots, opt-out contracts, long-term deals—and shows how to prove value and close customers.

Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design Aug 08, 2025

Dylan Field on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Dylan Field co-founded Figma to bring the design process online and make it multiplayer. From a meme maker built on WebGL to a design platform powering millions, Figma’s journey hit a major milestone with its IPO last week.In this conversation, Dylan shares the early challenges of building in the browser, the early risks and pivotal choices that shaped Figma’s growth, the principles that guided its product and community, and how he thinks about building tools that empower creativity at scale.

The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street Jul 31, 2025

Brothers Chaz and Arnie Englander started Model ML after building and selling two YC companies.

What began as a tool to help them analyze deals has grown into a full AI-powered workspace purpose-built for financial services, empowering firms to create automations and workflows that reflect exactly how their teams operate. And it's already being used by 10% of the world's top investment banks and private equity firms to automate everything from client-ready PowerPoint decks to deep-dive research and due diligence—by orchestrating AI agents that work like expert team members.

In this conversation with YC Partner Gustaf Alstromer, they discuss going from internal tool to production platform, the power of perseverance, and their ambition to build a billion-dollar company with just ten people.

Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan Jul 29, 2025

Jared Kaplan on June 16th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Jared Kaplan started out as a theoretical physicist chasing questions about the universe. Then he helped uncover one of AI’s most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable, almost physical way.That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language models—and led him to co-found Anthropic.In this talk, he walks through how that discovery reshaped the path to human-level AI, what it means for future models like Claude, and why even the dumbest questions can lead to the biggest breakthroughs. He reflects on memory, oversight, and what’s left to solve as models grow smarter—and longer-horizon tasks come within reach.

Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen Jul 25, 2025

For this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Karri Saarinen, co-founder & CEO of Linear, one of the top designer-founders working today. Together, they'll review several sites from the YC community with an eye for how to build and maintain a high-quality brand.

Thank you to these companies for volunteering to have their sites reviewed*:Sprites AI (https://www.sprites.ai)GigaML (https://gigaml.com)UnReal Milk (https://www.unrealmilk.com)Confident AI (https://www.confident-ai.com)Dropback (https://www.dropback.com)*Some of the featured websites may be updated between the time we film and publish

Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything Jul 22, 2025

Chelsea Finn on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley, where she pioneered meta‑learning methods, and Google Brain, Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and co‑founder of Physical Intelligence, she’s using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy, real-world environments rather than confined lab setups.In this talk, Chelsea traces the evolution of her team’s work—from early experiments on robotic grasping and vision to today’s ambitious efforts at folding laundry, tidying kitchens, and generalizing across tasks—all without hand-crafted code. Instead, they used scalable foundation models and massive datasets, teaching robots physical common sense as they learn by doing. She shares stories of the rocky setbacks, the surprises hidden in data, and the moment it all clicked: robots equipped with generalizable physical intelligence can indeed adapt and assist in the unpredictable world around us.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Coding Agents, Autonomy, and the Future of Work Jul 22, 2025

Amjad Masad started Replit to make programming accessible to anyone, anywhere. What began as a tool for learning to code has grown into a platform pushing the limits of AI-assisted software creation and recently surpassed $100M in ARR.On The Breakdown with Tom and Dave, Amjad shares the journey from his early days in Jordan, working on open-source projects, to leading Replit through major pivots from "teach a billion people to code" to "let anyone build software." He discusses the evolving nature of programming, the future of work, and the next generation of human-computer collaboration.

John Jumper: AlphaFold and the Future of Science Jul 15, 2025

John Jumper on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

John Jumper is a physicist-turned-computational biologist who led DeepMind’s AlphaFold team—and earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving protein folding, a decades-old scientific challenge.

In this talk, he shares how a deep learning breakthrough at CASP14 turned into AlphaFold 1 and then AlphaFold 2, delivering atomic accuracy predictions and revolutionizing biology. He explains the scientific puzzle behind protein folding, the key algorithmic breakthroughs, and the impact of making millions of protein structures accessible to researchers worldwide.

Aravind Srinivas: The Race to Build the AI Browser of the Future Jul 11, 2025

Aravind Srinivas on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Aravind Srinivas started Perplexity with one goal: to rethink how we search, browse, and interact with information online. In this conversation, he shares the journey from hacking together a natural-language-to-SQL search tool to building a product used by millions around the world.He talks about the big bet on the AI-powered browser, why agents—not just chatbots—are the next step, and how speed, accuracy, and focus help a startup compete against giants. Along the way, he reflects on co-founder dynamics, early technical challenges, and what it takes to keep building when the biggest players in the world are racing alongside you.

Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI Jul 10, 2025

Andrew Ng on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Andrew Ng has helped shape some of the most influential movements in modern AI—from online education to deep learning to AI entrepreneurship. In this talk, he shares what he’s learning now: why execution speed matters more than ever, how agentic workflows are changing what startups can build, and why concreteness beats vagueness when turning ideas into products. He reflects on the rise of AI coding assistants, the shifting bottlenecks in product development, and why, despite faster software, it’s still human judgment and responsibility that will shape what comes next.

François Chollet: The ARC Prize & How We Get to AGI Jul 03, 2025

François Chollet on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

François Chollet is a leading voice in AI. He's the creator of the Keras library, author of Deep Learning with Python, and the founder of the ARC Prize, a global competition aimed at measuring true general intelligence.

He's spent years thinking deeply about what intelligence actually is—and why scaling up today’s AI models isn’t enough to reach it.

In this talk, he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized skills, and lays out a path toward true general intelligence—AI that can adapt on the fly, reason in new situations, and invent novel solutions. He explains why abstraction and compositionality matter, how ARC became the benchmark for progress, and what his team at a new research lab called Ndea is building next.

Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI Jul 01, 2025

A fireside with Dr. Fei-Fei Li on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Dr. Fei-Fei Li is often called the godmother of AI—and for good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it, she was helping build the foundation.In this fireside, she recounts the creation of ImageNet, a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods, the shock of seeing convolutional networks outperform expectations in 2012, and how those breakthroughs led to captioning, storytelling, and ultimately, generative models.Now, she’s taking on one of AI’s hardest frontiers: spatial intelligence. Fei-Fei shares why modeling the 3D world is essential for AGI—and why it may be even more difficult than language.

Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products Jun 27, 2025

Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades — from Warby Parker to Chime to Dollar Shave Club.

In this conversation with Garry, she shares how great products (not marketing tricks) still win, why AI is unlocking a new kind of emotional relationship between consumers and technology, and what founders can learn from the messy creative stage we're in right now. She also breaks down how shifts in distribution, wellness, and digital behavior are reshaping what it means to build for real human needs.

Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs Jun 25, 2025

A fireside with Satya Nadella on June 17, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Satya Nadella started at Microsoft in 1992 as an engineer. Three decades later, he’s now Chairman & CEO, navigating the company through one of the most profound technological shifts yet: the rise of AI.In this conversation, he shares how Microsoft is thinking about this moment— from the infrastructure needed to train frontier models, to the social permission required to use that compute. He draws parallels to the early PC and internet eras, breaks down what makes a great team, and reflects on what he’d build if he were starting his career today.

Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware Jun 21, 2025

A fireside with Sam Altman at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Sam Altman grew up obsessed with technology, broke into the Stanford mainframe as a kid, and dropped out to start his first company before turning 20.In this conversation, he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAI—sharing what he’s learned about ambition, the weight of responsibility, and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career, the limits of personal productivity, and why, in the end, it's all still about finding people you like working with and doing something that matters.

Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful Jun 21, 2025

A fireside with Elon Musk at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Before rockets and robots, Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk, he walks through the early days of Zip2, the Falcon 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the “miracle” of Tesla surviving 2008. He shares the thinking that guided him—building from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that we’re in the middle of an intelligence big bang.

Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again) Jun 19, 2025

Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We’ve entered the era of “Software 3.0,” where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest.He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itself— that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer.

Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing

Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents And Why Taste Still Matters Jun 11, 2025

Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.

Fusion Energy Is Tech's Next Big Unlock Jun 06, 2025

Fusion may still sound like science fiction— but it might not be for much longer. With AI pushing demand for clean power to new highs, a breakthrough may finally be close.

For Decoded, YC General Partner Gustaf Alstromer traces the history of fusion, the physics behind it, and the engineering challenges that stalled it for nearly a century.

He also looks at how Helion is approaching the problem differently, as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by 2028.

AI Apps Are Broken — Here's How To Fix Them May 23, 2025

In this episode of The Breakdown, Tom and Dave are joined by fellow YC General Partner Pete Koomen to lay out a new vision for how AI should actually work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software, but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don't want to do.

From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators, they dig into what it means to build AI-native software—and why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think.

How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job May 09, 2025

Coding agents are no longer a distant idea—they're already starting to reshape how we work.

YC's Tom Blomfield and David Lieb discuss how AI coding tools are transforming software development, why small, high-agency teams will be able to do what once took armies of engineers, and why there's never been a better time to start something new.

They explore the bigger picture too: a future where there's abundance, knowledge work becomes more accessible, and founders have more leverage than ever before.

If you're thinking about building, there's no better moment than right now.

How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School Apr 25, 2025

AI can't yet one-shot an entire product—but with the rise of vibe coding, it's getting close. YC's Tom Blomfield has spent the last month building side projects with tools like Claude Code, Windsurf, and Aqua, seeing just how far you can push modern LLMs. From writing full-stack apps to debugging with a single paste of an error message, AI is becoming a legit collaborator in the dev process. This is a playbook for anyone who wants to get the most out of vibe coding and build faster.

How Zepto Became India’s Fastest Growing Startup Apr 18, 2025

Imagine ordering groceries and having them show up at your doorstep in just 10 minutes. That’s the promise of Zepto, the fastest-growing e-commerce company in India.

In this episode of How To Build The Future, Garry sits down with Aadit Palicha, the co-founder and CEO of Zepto, to discuss how they got started in a Whatsapp group, what it’s like going up against incumbents like Amazon and Zomato and how the future of e-commerce is changing in the age of intelligence.

Why America Stopped Innovating - And How We Can Start Again Apr 04, 2025

Not long ago, America led the world in building and innovation. But over the past 50 years, bureaucracy and red tape have made it nearly impossible to get big things done.

Still, there’s a growing movement to turn that around — to build faster, smarter, and better than ever before.

In this episode of The Main Function, Garry sits down with Atlantic staff writer and Plain English podcast host Derek Thompson to discuss his new book Abundance (co-authored with Ezra Klein). They discuss how we got here, what needs fixing, and what a bold, more prosperous 2050 could look like.

What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game Mar 28, 2025

In this special episode of Design Review, Aaron sits down with Raphael Schaad, the Head of Calendar at Notion to discuss his leap from designer to founder, why illustration is an important first step when building a new product, and what ultimately makes designers uniquely qualified to start a company today.

How to Build the Future: Tony Xu Mar 26, 2025

12 years after starting DoorDash, co-founder & CEO Tony Xu and his employees still do deliveries every year, staying true to their core value: customer obsession.

Today, DoorDash is the largest food delivery platform in the US.

In this episode of How to Build the Future, Tony explains how their unwavering long-term vision won — helping create a new market while surviving near death and a global pandemic along the way.

Customer Obsession Made Gusto A $9.6 Billion Company Mar 18, 2025

Gusto (https://gusto.com) made payroll and HR painless for small businesses, growing into a $9.6B company along the way.

Co-founder & CEO Josh Reeves joined YC's Harj Taggar to share how they built a payroll company from scratch and their customer-first approach to product design and culture.

The Future Of Design With Figma's Dylan Field Mar 13, 2025

Design isn’t just about making things work—it’s about how they work, says Dylan Field, the co-founder & CEO of Figma.
As AI transforms tech, he believes a designer's judgment, taste, and agency will matter more than ever.

Dylan sat down with YC's Garry Tan to discuss the evolving world of design in the age of AI, the challenging early days at Figma, and how his team forever changed the way designers and engineers collaborate.

How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas Feb 21, 2025

YC General Partner David Lieb sits down with Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, to discuss his origins in Silicon Valley, what it's like to compete with Google, and what the future of search could look like.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply

Building A Supersonic Plane Company From The Ground Up Feb 14, 2025

Imagine flying from NY to London in just a few hours. That’s the future that Blake Scholl and his team at Boom Supersonic are working towards.

Blake started as a software engineer and pivoted mid-career to aviation. Now, he’s at the forefront of trying to bring back supersonic travel for all of us.

In this episode of Hard Tech, YC’s Jared Friedman visited Blake in the Mojave desert to find out how someone who didn’t have a background in aerospace engineering was able to build the first-ever independently developed supersonic plane.

The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup Feb 12, 2025

Many startups fail because they run out of money. So how should you think about how to spend the money you raise?

In this episode of Office Hours, YC General Partners Brad Flora, Pete Koomen, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Gustaf Alströmer discuss how to spend responsibly at each stage of a startup— including advice on when to hire, whether to invest in marketing and what spending mistakes to avoid.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply

How To Build The AGI Future: Bob McGrew Jan 31, 2025

According to OpenAI's former Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, reasoning and test-time compute will unlock more reliable and capable AI agents— and a path to scale to AGI.

In this episode of How to Build the Future, YC's @garrytan sits down with Bob to discuss the lessons learned from his time at OpenAI, scaling laws, his advice for startups, and what all of this means for the jobs of the future.

How To Use AI In Your Startup Jan 15, 2025

AI continues to improve at an exponential pace. So what can you do as a founder to take advantage of it?

In this episode of Office Hours, YC Partners discuss what you should consider if you’re thinking about pivoting to or incorporating AI as part of your startup.

How To Build The Future: Parker Conrad Jan 10, 2025

In this episode of How to Build the Future, Garry sits down with Parker Conrad, Co-founder & CEO of Rippling, the all-in-one HR, Finance, and IT software company that’s valued at $13.5 billion.

Parker is the co-founder of two unicorns and has one of the more dramatic startup journeys in recent years. In this interview, he shares his origin story, the lessons learned from his first two companies, how AI is changing the game, and why he thinks the future will be defined by "compound" software startups.

Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder Jan 08, 2025

Two-time founder Rujul Zaparde knows a thing or two about resilience and learning from failure.

After dropping out of college to build FlightCar, he worked as a PM at Airbnb, and later as a visiting partner at YC.

In 2020, he co-founded Zip, a procurement software company that has since raised $370 million and reached a $2.2 billion valuation.

In this conversation with YC's Dalton Caldwell, Rujul demystifies the world of enterprise sales, shares his hard-earned lessons about scaling a business from zero, and explains how founders can use first-principles thinking to better approach the challenges of building a startup.

How David Lieb Turned A Failed Startup Into Google Photos | Backstory Dec 18, 2024

YC General Partner David Lieb’s story is all about perseverance. In 2008 he co-founded Bump, one of the hottest startups of the early iPhone era. But even with 150 million users, he couldn’t find a way to create a sustainable business. For many founders, that would be the end of the road. But he didn’t quit there. Instead, David and his team pivoted several times, got acquired, and eventually went on to build Google Photos.

In this episode of Backstory, he shares his advice for finding the right idea, what mistakes to avoid, and how to maintain a positive mindset no matter what gets thrown at you.

How To Start A Dev Tools Company with Nicolas Dessaigne | Startup School Nov 26, 2024

YC's Nicolas Dessaigne was the co-founder and CEO of @algolia, a Search API used by millions of developers to build great search experiences into their apps and websites. Today it powers over 1.75 trillion searches annually for 17,000+ customers worldwide.

In this episode of Startup School, @dessaigne shares his advice for founders building a dev tools company from the ground up— covering everything from team and idea to GTM and sales.

Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders | The Breakdown Nov 21, 2024

Since Twitter rebranded to X, the platform has added new features and implemented a few major updates to both its UX and algo. So what can founders interested in product design learn from all this? In the first episode of our new series, The Breakdown, YC’s Tom Blomfield (co-founder of Monzo) and David Lieb (creator of Google Photos) take a closer look at X to find what lessons there are for founders building consumer products.

How To Build The Future: Sam Altman Nov 18, 2024

It’s fair to say that few people in tech are positioned to have a bigger impact on the future than Sam Altman. At OpenAI, Sam and his team have overseen monumental leaps forward in machine learning, generative AI, and most recently, LLMs that can reason at PhD levels. And this is just the beginning. In his latest essay Sam predicted that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) is just a few thousand days away. So how did we get to this point?

In this episode of our rebooted series "How To Build The Future," YC President and CEO Garry Tan sits down with Sam to talk about the origins of OpenAI, what’s next for the company, and what advice he has for founders navigating this massive platform shift.

How Do Billion Dollar Startups Start? | Office Hours Nov 17, 2024

The biggest companies in the world all had to start somewhere. In this episode of Office Hours, the Group Partners explore the humble origins of several top YC companies to try and identify common traits of the most successful founders. They’ll explore what it takes to keep your company alive in the early days, where to focus your energy and how to find product market fit that leads you to mega success.

Why Design Matters: Lessons from Stripe, Lyft and Airbnb | Design Review Nov 16, 2024

Stripe, Airbnb and Lyft are a few of the most successful companies of the past decade. And there are at least two things they all have in common - great design, and Katie Dill. Katie was Head of Experience Design at Airbnb, led the design team at Lyft and is now Head of Design at Stripe. We spoke with Katie about her design philosophy, what sets companies like Stripe apart, and how important it is to instill a culture of design in your startup from day one.

How To Find A Co-Founder with Harj Taggar | Startup School Nov 16, 2024

Building a startup and trying to break into an established market is very difficult, especially if you’re trying to do it alone! That’s why it’s critical to find the right co-founder for the journey. In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Harj Taggar explains why you need a co-founder, when to bring them on, where you can find one and how to maintain the relationship.

How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails with Aaron Epstein | Startup School Nov 16, 2024

Whether it's for sales, recruiting or making new connections, cold outreach is a necessary tool for helping build your startup. But as you probably know, most cold emails either are ignored or end up in the trash. So what can you do to make sure your emails break through the noise? In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein shares expert advice on how to write cold emails that have all the right ingredients to get noticed and convert new customers.

How To Improve Cohort Retention with David Lieb | Startup School Nov 16, 2024

At YC our motto is make something people want. But how do you actually know if you’ve accomplished that in the early days? One of the best ways to measure successful growth is a concept called cohort retention, which tracks the fraction of new users that come back time and time again to use your product. In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner David Lieb explains how to define cohorts, track active users and determine the appropriate time frame for measuring successful retention rates.

Co-Founder Equity Mistakes to Avoid with Michael Seibel | Startup School Nov 16, 2024

In order to get your startup off the ground it's critical to keep your co-founders motivated. One of the best ways to do that is to figure out a fair co-founder equity split. In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Michael Seibel explains the ins and outs of co-founder equity, why it's important to be generous with that equity, and how to avoid bad advice that can lead to co-founder breakups.

How Nothing Founder Carl Pei Built A Multi-Million Dollar Smartphone Brand In Just 2 Years | Main Function Nov 16, 2024

After co-founding the successful Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus, Carl Pei felt the tech industry was missing the fun and wonder he remembered as a dedicated gadget fan growing up in Sweden. Pei decided to launch a new smartphone brand, this time with an increased focus on thoughtful user interface and stylish yet practical designs. In only two years, the brand known as "Nothing" has gained a cult following and gone to $600 million in annualized revenue. On this episode of The Main Function, Pei reflects on the highs and lows that have come with the journey of pursuing excellence in hard tech.

How To Price For B2B with Tom Blomfield | Startup School Nov 16, 2024

If you're a startup founder, how much should you charge for your product or service? It's a simple question that can make many lock up. What number should you pick? In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield guides you on how to come up with a price and then justify that number to customers.

Why Startup Founders Should Launch Companies Sooner Than They Think | Office Hours Nov 16, 2024

Launching a company is often pictured as a big splashy event with lots of media attention and hype. This can be scary! It also often results in founders delaying their launches, which then stalls the crucial lessons they could be learning.

In this episode, YC Partners discuss this common hesitation and why it can be harmful to the journey and growth of a startup.

Enterprise Sales with Pete Koomen | Startup School Nov 16, 2024

Y Combinator Partner Pete Koomen led his startup, Optimizely, to $100M ARR. In this video, Pete breaks down the enterprise sales funnel and shares his top tips on how a technical founder can start closing real deals for their startup.

Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale | Office Hours Nov 16, 2024

A little over ten years ago Paul Graham published the essay "Do Things That Don't Scale." At the time, it was highly controversial advice that spoke to the drastically different needs of an early startup versus the needs of a much larger, more established company.

YC Partners discuss PG's essay, its influence on Silicon Valley, and some prime examples of YC founders that embraced the mantra "Do Things That Don't Scale."

Read Paul Graham's essay here: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

How to Survive the Crypto Boom & Bust Cycle | Main Function Nov 16, 2024

Over the past decade crypto has been declared dead hundreds of times. But with the price of Bitcoin surging over the past few months it’s clear that there are still enormous opportunities in this space. And few people know that better than Chandan Lodha, the co-founder of CoinTracker (W18), a crypto asset management and tax filing platform. He and his team have navigated several boom and bust cycles over the years and in this latest episode of The Main Function, you’ll hear about how they built their company, the time it nearly fell apart, and how they used a crypto winter to retool and emerge stronger than ever.

Consumer Startup Metrics with Tom Blomfield | Startup School Nov 16, 2024

In this episode of Startup School, YC Partner Tom Blomfield dives deeper into the metrics that matter most for consumer startups. Tom discusses paid and organic user growth, unit economics, net promoter scores, and the "magic moment" in your product that is most important to track.

When Should You Trust Your Gut? | Dalton & Michael Podcast Apr 22, 2024

When you’re making important decisions as a founder — like what to build or how it should work — should you spend lots of time gathering input from others or just trust your gut? In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we talk more about this and how to know when you should spend time validating and when to just commit. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Building Confidence In Yourself and Your Ideas | Dalton & Michael Podcast Mar 20, 2024

One trait that many great founders share is conviction. In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we’ll talk about finding confidence in what you're building, the dangers of inaccurate assumptions, and a question founders need to ask themselves before they start trying to sell to anyone else. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Stop Innovating (On The Wrong Things) | Dalton & Michael Podcast Mar 15, 2024

Startups need to innovate to succeed. But not all innovation is made equal and reinventing some common best practices could actually hinder your company. In this episode, Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the common innovation pitfalls founders should avoid so they can better focus on their product and their customers. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Should Your Startup Bootstrap or Raise Venture Capital? | Dalton & Michael Podcast Feb 13, 2024

Within the world of startups, you'll find lots of discourse online about the experiences of founders bootstrapping their startups versus the founders who have raised venture capital to fund their companies. Is one better than the other? Truth is, it may not be so black and white. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the virtues and struggles of both paths. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

How To Build A Tech Startup With No Technical Skills | Dalton & Michael Podcast Jan 15, 2024

Based on the thousands of companies YC has funded over the years, the biggest common element between all successful startups is having technical talent on the founding team. But what do you do if you don't know how to code? You may think you can get by using no-code tools, part-time consultants, or dev shops to bring your startup idea to life. But that thinking is wrong. In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we’ll discuss exactly why that is and why recruiting a technical co-founder is the single biggest way to create value as someone trying to start the next big thing. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

B2B Startup Metrics with Tom Blomfield | Startup School Jan 08, 2024

In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield discusses one of the most important elements of running any startup: metrics! Tom shares what key metrics to track and how to use them to make the best decisions for your company. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

Should You Be Optimistic About The Future of Technology? | Dalton & Michael Podcast Jan 01, 2024

Social media often promotes a doom and gloom outlook about our future society. But is that worldview accurate? In this episode, Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best ways for founders and aspiring founders to think about weighing optimism and pessimism in their day to day lives. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

AI and the Future of Law: The 10 Year "Overnight" Success Story | Main Function Dec 28, 2023

Casetext started out in 2013 as a crowdsourced law library — a sort of “Wikipedia meets Reddit” for the law. Ten years later, Casetext is one of the biggest wins to date in AI, capable of turning weeks of arduous legal work into hours or minutes. Just months ago it was acquired for $650 million dollars.

What happened between those two points?

For this episode of Main Function, YC President Garry Tan sits down with Casetext co-founder Jake Heller to learn the real story of their 10-year “overnight” success: the 3 a.m. origin story, how the company evolved as fast as tech would allow, and the “magic demo” that helped turn Casetext into a rocket ship. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/MainFunction-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/MainFunction-jobs

How To NOT Get Screwed As A Software Engineer | Dalton & Michael Podcast Dec 21, 2023

The stories are true: technical founders (and early technical employees!) often end up with the short end of the stick when starting a company. In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we’ll discuss the questions and best practices that an aspiring technical founder should think about — whom to start a company with, and how to think about things like equity split and division of responsibilities. Know what you are worth and act accordingly! Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Should You Quit Your Job At A Unicorn? | Dalton & Michael Podcast Nov 06, 2023

If you’re an employee of a late stage company right now, how would you know when it’s time to move on vs. time to double down? The fact is there isn't an easy answer — it can really vary from person to person and situation to situation. In this video, YC Group Partners, Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell share some suggestions on what sort of things an employee of a late stage startup should be looking for — the good signs and the bad — to best make this decision. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply

Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Does Your Startup Need To Be In San Francisco? Aug 29, 2023

Should you and your startup live in San Francisco? Y Combinator Partners, Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell, debate their different opinions on whether startups are more likely to succeed in the Golden City or elsewhere. Where do they find common ground? Watch to find out. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Will OpenAI Kill All Startups? Jul 24, 2023

How will the rise of AI impact startups and entrepreneurs? Join Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell for a discussion on the opportunities and challenges AI brings for founders. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply

Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Silicon Valley's Cargo Culting Problem Jul 13, 2023

When it comes to building a startup you’re never doing it entirely from scratch. Inspiration and ideas can come from a variety of places, including other successful startups. But there’s a thin line between borrowing smart ideas and copying them blindly - otherwise known as Cargo Culting.

In this episode Dalton and Michael break down the problem with Cargo Culting and offer advice on the right way to draw inspiration from other successful companies. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply
Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Setting KPIs and Goals with Divya Bhat | Startup School Jul 05, 2023

YC Visiting Group Partner Divya Bhat talks about how to set your KPIs (key metrics) and how to prioritize your time. This talk helps founders launch faster and set goals in order to make real progress. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

Tips For Technical Startup Founders | Startup School Jun 08, 2023

YC Group Partner Diana Hu was the CTO of her YC startup Escher Reality, which was acquired by Niantic (makers of Pokemon Go). She shares her advice for being a technical founder at the earliest stages - including topics like how to ship an MVP fast, how to deal with technology choices and technical debt, and how and when to hire an engineering team.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

Secrets You Can Learn From Your Customers Jun 05, 2023

Successful startups don’t just build technology – they solve human problems. The key is listening to the people who really matter: your customers.

In this episode, Michael and Dalton discuss how spending real time with your users can unlock insights and growth. Hear the stories of how Airbnb and Brex built billion-dollar companies by forging genuine connections with their customers and learn why having too much money and too many people can actually slow down learning.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

The Student's Guide To Becoming A Successful Startup Founder Apr 25, 2023

If you're a high school or college student with big dreams of starting your own company, this video is for you. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel, two startup founders who started in the early 20s and are now top investors, sit down to share the hard-won advice they wish they had known back in high school. Whether you're already running your own startup or just have an idea you can't stop thinking about, Dalton and Michael cover the skills you need to learn now and how to set yourself up for success after graduating school.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Inside The Most Powerful Startup Community In The World Apr 21, 2023

Y Combinator is well-known for producing companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase and more. But what's the real story behind the success of YC and the companies they fund? This is everything you need to know about the program.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/MainFunction-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/MainFunction-jobs

How Startup Fundraising Works with Brad Flora | Startup School Apr 18, 2023

YC Group Partner Brad Flora has seen startup fundraising from every angle: as a founder, as one of the most prolific angel investors in Silicon Valley, and now as a YC Group Partner. Brad has coached hundreds of companies on fundraising. In this talk, he shares stories and advice on how modern startup fundraising works.

Paul Graham Fundraising Essays:

http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/convince.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/herd.html

Geoff Ralston's Fundraising Guides:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4A-a-guide-to-seed-fundraising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcevHkNGrWQ

YC Fundraising Resources:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/2u-how-to-build-your-seed-round-pitch-deck

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6q-how-to-pitch-your-startup

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/71-how-to-get-meetings-with-investors-and-raise-money

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4O-raising-money-online-advice-for-startups

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3u-different-types-of-investors-and-their-incentives

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

How to Build An MVP with Michael Seibel | Startup School Apr 14, 2023

YC Group Partner, Michael Seibel, explains how to build a minimum viable product (MVP) for your startup idea. Using examples from real YC companies, Michael walks through how to determine your MVP feature set, build prototypes and demos for user testing, and present your MVP to early customers or investors.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

How To Earn Customers For Life Mar 14, 2023

In this first in-person episode, Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell reveal how startups can gain a competitive advantage by doing something deceptively simple. They share compelling stories of companies that built loyal relationships and achieved success by making personal connections with users. In contrast, they discuss the traps early-stage founders make by trying to emulate big tech. If you want to build a business that customers love and that thrives in the long run, this advice on why caring deeply about your customers is key.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

The REAL Potential of Generative AI Mar 06, 2023

What is a large language model? How can it be used to enhance your business? In this conversation, Ali Rowghani, Managing Director of YC Continuity, talks with Raza Habib, CEO of Humanloop, about the cutting-edge AI powering innovations today—and what the future may hold. They discuss how large language models like Open AI's GPT-3 work, why fine-tuning is important for customizing models to specific use cases, and the challenges involved with building apps using these models. If you're curious about the ethical implications of AI, Raza shares his predictions about the impact of this quickly developing technology on the industry and the world at large.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

The Hard Conversations Founders Don't Want to Have Mar 01, 2023

Y Combinator group partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss the importance of having honest and difficult conversations with startup founders. While having hard conversations can be uncomfortable, Michael and Dalton argue that this transparency is essential for founders to grow and ultimately, these experiences help founders have their own hard conversations that they've been avoiding with the people around them.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

The Best Way To Launch Your Startup with Kat Mañalac | Startup School Feb 24, 2023

YC's Kat Mañalac wants to change the way you think about launching. In her talk, she shares the multitude of ways to launch and get attention for your product, with tangible strategies and examples from companies like Airbnb.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Advantages Of A First-Time Founder Feb 17, 2023

Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the advantages of being a first-time founder and the instances when it pays to have experience founding a startup in the past.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a Startup: https://www.workatastartup.com/

The Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley Feb 10, 2023

What happens when the unconventional becomes conventional? Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how the startup world has changed from being dominated by outsiders and nonconformists to now attracting more mainstream conformists looking for status and money. They share stories of what the tech scene was like when they were in school - and how radically different it is today, while offering their advice around navigating a world that doesn't always reward nonconformists embarking on risky entrepreneurial journeys. Don't just think different, act different.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Don't Make These Hiring Mistakes Jan 26, 2023

Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the many different mistakes founders make when they approach hiring for their startup and how to grow your team the correct way.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Keys To Successful Co-Founder Relationships with Cat Li & Divya Bhat | Startup School Jan 24, 2023

How do you find a co-founder and build a great partnership? YC's Catheryn Li (who also built our Co-Founder Matching tool) and Visiting Partner Divya Bhat cover the importance of having co-founders, how to get & vet one, and the ways to build a successful working relationship with them.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs
Looking for a co-founder? Sign up for Co-Founder Matching: https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching

How To Compete With Amazon and Google Jan 18, 2023

Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the traps founders often fall into when looking at the competition. They identify the particular types of companies you should watch out for and many more you are wasting your time worrying about.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

The Secrets To Setting Smarter Goals Jan 16, 2023

If you're looking to maximize your startup's potential, start by setting the right goals. Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell provide tips and strategies for setting goals that will help keep you and your new business focused on success—plus provide examples of bad goals to avoid.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Investors Said No, Now What? Jan 12, 2023

Step inside the Group Partner Lounge to hear Y Combinator Group Partners Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss how you should handle rejection from investors and why you should "believe the no, not the why."
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

When to Launch Your Startup and When to Wait Jan 11, 2023

Step inside the group partners' lounge to hear Y Combinator Partners Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss how startups should approach launching and the exceptions to the rules.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

How to Get Your First Customers with Gustaf Alströmer | Startup School Jan 03, 2023

How do you get your first customers? YC Group Partner & former Head of Growth at Airbnb, Gustaf Alströmer, gives tactical advice to answer this question for all kinds of companies — whether you're B2B or B2C — and discusses why it's important for founders to do sales early on.
Apply to Y Combinator: ⁠https://yc.link/SUS-apply⁠

Work at a Startup: ⁠https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

Startup Business Models and Pricing with Aaron Epstein | Startup School Dec 27, 2022

One of the most common topics that founders ask us about is pricing and monetization. In this talk, YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein outlines 9 different business models, and highlights lessons from top YC companies on how to best monetize and price your product.
Business Model Guide: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Gh-business-model-guide
Apply to Y Combinator: ⁠⁠https://yc.link/SUS-apply⁠⁠

Work at a Startup: ⁠⁠https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

How to Talk to Users with Gustaf Alströmer | Startup School Dec 20, 2022

YC often says "talk to your users", but actually doing that is surprisingly tricky. YC Group Partner Gustaf Alströmer gives non-obvious advice on how to talk to both current and potential users, how to run a great user interview, and how to interpret the feedback in these conversations.
Apply to Y Combinator: ⁠⁠https://yc.link/SUS-apply⁠⁠

Work at a Startup: ⁠⁠https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas with Jared Friedman | Startup School Dec 15, 2022

YC's Jared Friedman shares a framework for how to get and evaluate startup ideas. He delves into examples of YC companies and the inside stories of how they came up with the ideas that turned into billion-dollar companies. Even if you have an existing idea, this talk helps founders confirm that their idea is good and/or provides a framework for a future pivot.
Apply to Y Combinator: ⁠⁠https://yc.link/SUS-apply⁠⁠

Work at a Startup: ⁠⁠https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

Should You Start a Startup? with Harj Taggar | Startup School Dec 13, 2022

In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Harj Taggar shares his advice on the types of people best suited to be startup founders and how to prepare to start a company in the future.
Apply to Y Combinator: ⁠⁠https://yc.link/SUS-apply⁠⁠

Work at a Startup: ⁠⁠https://yc.link/SUS-jobs

Avoid These Tempting Startup Ideas Dec 01, 2022

Thinking of a new startup idea? Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the types of ideas to stay away from—what we commonly refer to as "tarpit ideas."
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

The Truth About Y Combinator Nov 29, 2022

With the YC S22 batch coming to a close, Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel reflect on the recent batch and their experience fundraising. The two group partners also clear up some misconceptions about Y Combinator based on feedback from founders.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

The Two Mindsets That Can Kill Your Startup Nov 24, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the qualities that make a founder overly optimistic or far too pessimistic about their startup. Where is the right middle ground?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

What Basic Game Theory Teaches Us About Startups Nov 17, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the problems with zero sum games within tech culture. Is your startup making a positive impact on the world or are your business practices a net negative in society?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Most Important Lifestyle Habits Of Successful Founders Nov 10, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best approaches to developing a healthy lifestyle that ultimately helps you run and grow a successful startup. Funders, take care of yourselves out there.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Elon Musk & The Midwit Meme Nov 03, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on the midwit meme, how it applies to startups, and the best example: Elon Musk.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Things That Don't Scale, The Software Edition Oct 27, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on software hacks that don't scale. Companies discussed include Google, Facebook, Twitch, and imeem. Watch the first video on doing things that don't scale here: https://youtu.be/4RMjQal_c4U
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Why Investors (including YC) Can’t Fix Your Company Oct 20, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on common pitfalls in the advice from different types of investors and why you, the founder, are ultimately responsible for the success of your company.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

What Does It REALLY Mean To Do Things That Don't Scale? Oct 13, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about Paul Graham's essay "Do Things That Don't Scale" and what it really means for founders. Read the essay here: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

How To Change The World? Get The Small Things Right Oct 06, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about the importance of understanding incentives and doing research when it comes to building a world-changing startup.
To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Simple Products That Became Big Companies Sep 29, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about OpenSea, Gusto, and the importance of building simple products that solve a real problem.
To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Where Do Great Startup Ideas Come From? Sep 12, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about where the ideas for Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe came from. Then they discuss what you can learn from these founders.
To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Successful Founders Are OK With Rejection Sep 05, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on the importance of talking to your users, why successful founders are ok with rejection from potential customers, and how protecting your ego by not talking to your users can kill your startup.
To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Should You Follow Your Passion? Aug 29, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about solutions in search of a problem, whether or not to follow your passion, how to figure out what to work on, and how to motivate yourself.
To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Understanding Investor Terms & Incentives Aug 25, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about investor terms and incentives.
To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back?
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

YC Founders Made These Fundraising Mistakes Aug 18, 2022

Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell are back for episode 2 of Rookie Mistakes to discuss common mistakes founders make when fundraising, and how to avoid them.

Apply to Y Combinator:https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup:https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

YC Founder Firesides: Gusto on building for new verticals Aug 15, 2022

Gusto (YC W12) provides growing businesses with everything to take care of their team. Today, more than 200,000 businesses use Gusto for payroll, employee benefits, talent management, and more. And with the recent addition of Gusto Embedded, developers now use Gusto’s APIs and pre-build UI flows to embed payroll, tax filing, and payments infrastructure into products.
YC’s Anu Hariharan sat down with Gusto co-founder and CPO Tomer London to talk about building for new customer segments and the future of embedded finance — sharing advice for startup founders and CEOs along the way.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Co-Founder Mistakes That Kill Companies & How To Avoid Them Aug 09, 2022

In the first episode of Rookie Mistakes, Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss co-founder mistakes. To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back?
Apply to Y Combinator:https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup:https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Dealing With Setbacks And The Startup Gut Punch Jul 27, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best approaches to managing the many setbacks startup founders can face over the lifetime of starting and running a business.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Saving Your Startup During an Economic Downturn Jul 21, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss Paul Graham's essay "Default Alive or Default Dead." They share strategies to cut your company's burn rate and keep your startup alive to see another day.
Paul Graham's essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html
Trevor Blackwell's startup growth calculator: http://growth.tlb.org
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Why You Should Leave Your FAANG Job Jun 22, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the struggles of working at FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and how to strategize leaving a big tech job to become a founder at a startup.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

How Future Billionaires Get Sh*t Done Jun 22, 2022

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel take a look at Paul Graham's essay "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" and share tips on how to be more effective and productive on the journey to creating a billion dollar business.

Read PG's essay here: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

#157 - Diego Saez Gil Jan 28, 2020

Diego Saez Gil is the founder of Pachama. Pachama is building a marketplace where companies can support carbon offset projects.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***

Topics

00:00 - Welcome Gustaf and Diego
01:19 - Diego's background
06:50 - What is Pachama?
09:25 - Using remote sensing to track carbon
11:37 - Connecting disparate groups
13:04 - How much carbon does a typical company offset?
15:28 - How big is the reforesting opportunity?
17:09 - What are the incentives to offset carbon?
18:40 - Why don't people trust carbon offsets?
20:33 - What are the different forest conservation methods?
25:20 - How does Pachama use technology?
29:00 - Growth challenges
30:20 - Who are the customers?
32:12 - The future of the carbon market
32:48 - Fundraising for a climate startup
37:50 - Advice for people that want to start working in the climate change space.
41:38 - Climate policy
43:23 - What are the most important things happening in the space?
45:10 - The benefits of agroforestry and permaculture

#156 - Amber Atherton and Iba Masood Dec 18, 2019

Amber Atherton is the founder and CEO of Zyper (YC W18).
Iba Masood is the cofounder and CEO of TARA (YC W15).
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
1:16 - Seed fundraising for Zyper and Tara
3:26 - Tara's pivot
4:31 - Series A fundraising for Zyper and Tara
18:11 - Evaluating investors
23:46 - Meeting with associates and partners
30:35 - Raising a Series A as a female founder
39:31 - Fundraising psychology
41:46 - What not to do when fundraising
45:01 - Talking to portfolio companies about investors
46:21 - What it's like to run a Series A stage company
1:00:41 - The most important piece of advice for fundraising

#155 - Laks Srini Dec 11, 2019

Laks Srini is the cofounder and CTO of ZeroDown. Before that he was the cofounder and CTO of Zenefits.
You can find him on Twitter at @laks_srini.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:30 - What is ZeroDown?
1:50 - How did they test the idea?
3:50 - What did they learn from companies that failed in the space?
8:00 - Breaking down the product
11:25 - ZeroDown's customers
13:35 - Expanding to other markets
15:50 - What if a downturn happens?
17:10 - ZeroDown's hiring strategy
20:10 - What are their hardest technical challenges?
22:05 - ZeroDown's breadth and product strategy
26:40 - Customer interviews
28:35 - Should everyone own a house?
29:50 - Home ownership in the future
32:45 - Build something you really want to see in the world
34:40 - Working with his cofounders was the most important consideration

#154 - Matt Cutts Dec 04, 2019

Matt Cutts is the Administrator of the US Digital Service and previously he was the head of the webspam team at Google.
You can find him on Twitter at @mattcutts.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:36 - Working at Google in 2000
2:48 - Did Google's success feel certain?
3:53 - Building self-service ads
7:23 - The evil unicorn problem
8:23 - Lawsuits around search
10:48 - Content moderation and spam
14:38 - Matt's progression over 17 years at Google
17:18 - Deepfakes
18:43 - Joining the USDS
21:03 - What the USDS does
23:43 - Working at the USDS
26:43 - Educating people in government about tech
28:58 - Creating a rapid feedback loop within government
31:48 - Michael Wang asks - How does USDS decide whether to outsource something to a private company, or build the software in house?
32:58 - Spencer Clark asks - It would seem that the government is so far behind the private industry’s technology. To what extent is this true and what can be done about it? How should we gauge the progress of institutions like the USDS?
36:03 - Stephan Sturges asks - With GANs getting more and more powerful is the USDS thinking about the future of data authenticity?
38:23 - John Doherty asks - How difficult was it to communicate Google’s algorithm changes and evolving SEO best practices without leaking new spam tactics?
40:18 - Vanman0254 asks - How can smart tech folks better contribute to regulatory and policy discussions in government?
42:38 - Ronak Shah asks - What's your best pitch to high-performing startups in the Bay Area to adopt more of human centered design (something that the government has been moving towards surprisingly well, but that some fast moving startups have neglected resulting in controversy)
49:58 - Adam Hoffman asks - What are legislators, the government, and the general populace most “getting wrong” in how they conceptualize the internet?
51:33 - Raphael Ferreira asks - Is it possible to live without google? How do you think google affected people in searching for answers and content, now that’s we find everything in just one click?
55:23 - Tim Woods asks - Which job was more fun and why?
57:13 - Working in government vs private industry
1:00:48 - Snehan Kekre asks - What is Matt's view of the ongoing debate about backdooring encryption for so called lawful interception?

#153 - Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-LaCroix Nov 27, 2019

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and science fiction author. He’s also the co-editor of Boing Boing.
Joe Betts-Lacroix is the CTO of VIUM and an Expert at YC.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:32 - Adversarial interoperability
7:55 - So what should founders do?
13:55 - Copyright
19:55 - Remixing
27:00 - AT&T
29:50 - Firms and state-like duties
31:25 - Medium-term suggestions for founders
39:25 - Conspiracy theories
51:50 - Science fiction and predictions
56:55 - Peak indifference model

#151 - Startup School Week 10 Recap - Ali Rowghani on How to Lead and Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung on Startup School 2019 by the Numbers Nov 06, 2019

We've cut down the tenth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First, a lecture from Ali Rowghani. Ali is a partner at YC. His lecture covers how to lead.
Then a lecture from Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung. Kevin and Adora are both partners at YC. Their lecture breaks down this year’s Startup School by the numbers and they share tips on what helped companies most.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:36 - Ali Rowghani - How to Lead
1:36 - Ali's background
2:56 - There's no single archetype for a great leader so be yourself
5:16 - Great leaders think and communicate clearly
9:56 - Great leaders have good judgement about people
12:56 - Great leaders have strong personal integrity and commitment
13:46 - The transparency test
14:41 - The best way to measure great leaders is in terms of the amount of trust they engender in the people that work with them
15:21 - The science of trust
16:08 - The art of trust
16:36 - Optimize for trust
17:40 - Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung - Startup School 2019 by the Numbers
19:24 - Startup School grew during the course
20:24 - Did SUS make a difference?
21:14 - 106 SUS companies were accepted into YC
23:17 - How can you replicate their success?
23:44 - Be clear and concise
26:59 - Edit your company description
28:04 - Weekly updates submitted
28:39 - Top 7 biggest obstacles for SUS companies
29:04 - Top 7 KPI movers
29:59 - Top 7 user insights
31:04 - Average startup weeks to launch
31:54 - Average hard tech or biotech startup weeks to launch
32:54 - % of weekly updates from launched startups
33:34 - Group sessions
33:59 - Companies got better at explaining their ideas, selling themselves, and getting others excited
35:09 - Founders like qualitative feedback
36:09 - No shows
37:19 - Morale
37:49 - Technical, launched, full-time, revenue generating, non-flaky, non-solo founder startups that talk to users are happier
41:14 - Summary

#150 - Startup School Week 9 Recap - Carolynn Levy on Modern Startup Financing and Jared Friedman’s Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders Oct 30, 2019

We've cut down the ninth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First, a lecture from Carolynn Levy. Carolynn is a partner at YC. Her lecture covers modern startup financing.
Then a lecture from Jared Friedman. Jared is also a partner at YC. His lecture focuses on advice for hard-tech and biotech founders.
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:33 - Carolynn Levy - Modern Startup Financing
1:33 - The basics: form a corporation, need money to grow?, sell a part of the company
2:58 - Fundraising terms
3:58 - What has changed: structure, access, focus
5:10 - What hasn't changed: preferred stock financing, valuation and dilution, communication
6:42 - Old way of raising early money: Series A preferred stock financing
8:33 - What was broken?
9:33 - The transition: bridge loan financings
10:46 - Realization: convertible promissory notes are a better way to fund early stage startups
12:01 - Modernization of the convertible - SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity)
14:03 - When do priced rounds happen?
15:12 - Is modern early stage financing perfected?
18:01 - Takeaways
19:30 - Jared Friedman - Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders
20:25 - What is a hard-tech company?
21:35 - Why start a hard-tech company?
25:06 - YC is the largest bio and hard-tech seed investor in the world
25:49 - How much of YC's advice applies to hard-tech founders?
26:33 - How do you make progress when you have a "heavy MVP"?
31:49 - How do you prove people will want your product, if you haven't built it yet?
32:57 - Letter of Intent
34:10 - Fundraising for hard-tech and biotech companies
36:15 - Final thought

#149 - Startup School Week 8 Recap - Adora Cheung on Prioritizing Your Time and Kevin Hale on Evaluating Startup Ideas Oct 23, 2019

We've cut down the eighth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First a lecture from Adora Cheung. Adora’s a partner at YC. Her lecture covers how to prioritize your time.
Then a lecture from Kevin Hale. Kevin is also a partner at YC. His lecture is the second part of his talk on how to evaluate startup ideas.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:32 - Adora Cheung - How to Prioritize Your Time
2:12 - Real vs fake progress
4:10 - How to determine if you're prioritizing the right tasks
4:42 - Keep a spreadsheet of ideas related to moving your primary KPI
7:32 - Grade the new and old ideas once a week based on potential impact
9:52 - Consider the complexity of each task
11:32 - Don't try to do everything at once
11:52 - How do I know I'm prioritizing my time well?
13:42 - What if I can't complete my tasks in time?
14:02 - Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
15:32 - Moving fast
16:47 - Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 2
18:52 - How to apply to Y Combinator
20:17 - As a YC partner, you don't need to sell me
21:12 - Can I understand the idea? Am I excited by it? Do I like the team and want to work with them?
21:47 - How do I describe my company in a very efficient manner?
22:52 - Making your idea legible
25:12 - Things to avoid when describing your company
27:34 - Be conversational
28:02 - Avoid jargon, no preamble, and be reproducible
28:47 - Nouns: what are you making, what is the problem, and who is the customer
32:47 - Using the X for Y formula of explaining your startup
36:57 - Be concise without leaving out the key nouns
40:47 - How to adjust a description

#148 - Startup School Week 7 Recap - Kevin Hale on Conversion Rates and Pricing Oct 16, 2019

We've cut down the seventh week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
Kevin Hale gave both lectures this week. Kevin’s a partner at YC and cofounded Wufoo. His first lecture is on how to improve conversion rates and his second lecture is on pricing for startups.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:27 - Kevin Hale - How to Improve Conversion Rates
1:02 - Why we care about conversion rates
2:02 - Shareware conversion rate is .5%
2:22 - Casual download games is 2%
2:32 - Freemium SaaS range from 1.5 to 5%
3:57 - Knowledge spectrum
5:52 - The one button interface
6:37 - What is the call to action? And the magic moment.
8:02 - What is it?
8:38 - Is it right for me?
9:02 - Is it legit?
9:22 - Who else is using it?
9:52 - How much? What's the catch?
10:39 - Where can I get help?
11:30 - Kevin Hale - Startup Pricing 101
13:15 - Monetization gives you the biggest bang for your buck
14:35 - Price thermometer
16:35 - Mistake 1 - Prices are too low
16:55 - Mistake 2 - Underestimate costs
17:08 - Mistake 3 - Don't understand your value
17:27 - Mistake 4 - Focus on wrong customers
18:05 - Sales and profit over a product's life
19:20 - Why is pricing innovation hard?
21:27 - How to optimize prices
22:32 - $1B formula
24:05 - Price and complexity
26:55 - 10 - 5 - 20 rule
28:20 - Summary

#147 - Startup School Week 6 Recap - Tim Brady on Culture and Dalton Caldwell on Pivoting Oct 09, 2019

We've cut down the sixth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First a lecture from Tim Brady. Tim’s a partner at YC. His lecture covers the importance of building a good culture early and shares six things that you can do now to help create a solid foundation for your startup.
Then a lecture from Dalton Caldwell. Dalton is a partner at YC and he’s also the head of admissions. His lecture covers pivoting and his advice on how founders should think about it.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:38 - Tim Brady on Building Culture
1:13 - Culture is behavior and the right behaviors support a good business
4:38 - Six things new startups can do now
5:00 - 1. Be proud of the problem you are solving
7:31 - 2. Create a long term vision that others will follow
9:36 - 3. List your values then model the behavior
12:34 - 4. Align your culture with your customer
14:49 - 5. Discuss the importance of diversity to your company
16:43 - 6. Put a hiring process into practice. Plan to evolve it.
18:24 - Dalton Caldwell on Pivoting
18:53 - The term "pivot"
20:20 - Why pivot?
21:33 - Good reasons to pivot
22:35 - Good reasons not to pivot
23:13 - Why people take too long to pivot
26:01 - Anecdotes
27:22 - Product market fit
28:34 - How to find a better idea
30:40 - It's ok to not work on an idea that requires venture capital
31:34 - Venture vs. non-venture scale ideas
32:52 - When is the best time to pivot
33:48 - More pivoting thoughts
35:07 - Idea quality scores
37:11 - Brex
39:51 - Retool
41:37 - Magic
43:22 - Segment
45:16 - Dalton's summary

#146 - Startup School Week 5 Recap - Kirsty Nathoo and Kevin Hale Oct 02, 2019

We've cut down the fifth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First a lecture from Kirsty Nathoo. Kirsty is a partner and CFO of YC. Her lecture focuses on the most common mistakes startups make with their finances and how they can avoid making them.
Then a lecture from Kevin Hale. Kevin is also a partner at YC and he’ll talk about the importance of building a successful working relationship with your cofounders and processes you can use to do so.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:38 - Kirsty Nathoo - Startup Finance Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
2:08 - #1 - Not knowing what to look at: bank balance, money coming in, and money going out
2:56 - Burn
3:41 - Runway
4:59 - Growth rate
5:48 - Default alive - http://growth.tlb.org and http://paulgraham.com/aord.html
8:09 - #2 - Not looking often enough: every week
9:04 - #3 - Under-Representing Expenses
12:27 - #4 - Out-sourcing responsibility
15:11 - #5 - Scaling too quickly
20:08 - #6 - Letting runway get too low before fundraising - https://blog.ycombinator.com/advice-startups-running-out-of-money/
23:21 - Kevin Hale - How to Work Together
24:49 - Everyone fights
25:43 - Four things to avoid: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling
27:40 - Make a plan before you fight: divide and conquer
31:11 - Know thyself - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s9ACDMcpjA
34:12 - Document a process
36:20 - Use nonviolent communication
37:19 - Observation vs evaluation
39:16 - Emotions vs thoughts - https://www.slideshare.net/nonviolent/evaluative-words-list-nonviolent-communication
41:50 - Universal needs
43:38 - Requests vs demands
45:46 - How to Deliver Constructive Feedback in Difficult Situations - https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf
46:01 - Pay down your emotional debt
47:18 - Practice having level 3 conversations

#145 - Startup School Week 4 Recap - Kat Mañalac and Gustaf Alströmer Sep 25, 2019

We've cut down the fourth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First a lecture from Kat Manalac. Kat is a partner at YC. Her lecture focuses on how startups should think about launching and why you should do it repeatedly.
Then a lecture from Gustaf Alströmer. Gustaf is also a partner at YC and in his lecture he covers how to measure product market fit and growth channels.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:35 - Kat Mañalac - How to Launch (Again and Again)
1:51 - Ways to launch
2:14 - Why launch continuously?
3:15 - Silent launch
4:25 - Friends & Family
5:40 - Strangers
7:03 - Online communities
12:08 - Request access
13:29 - Social media
15:13 - Pre-order
16:13 - New Product or Feature
17:42 - Build your own community
19:20 - Launching isn't one moment in time
19:48 - Gustaf Alströmer - Growth for Startups
21:06 - Most startups have nothing
22:13 - Do things that don't scale
27:13 - Startups take off because founders make them take off
28:23 - Measuring product market fit
31:20 - Retention
34:33 - Worse ways to measure product market fit
35:23 - Bad metrics to measure as product market fit
36:18 - Growth channels and tactics
38:17 - Conversion rate optimization
41:26 - Growth channels to explore
45:33 - Referrals and vitality
48:05 - Paid growth
50:09 - Search Engine Optimization
53:00 - Making decisions using A/B testing
55:02 - Summary

#144 - Startup School Week 3 Recap - Anu Hariharan and Adora Cheung Sep 18, 2019

We've cut down the third week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First, a lecture from Anu Hariharan. Anu is a partner at YC. Her lecture covers nine common startup business models and the metrics investors want to see for each.
Then, a Q&A with Anu and Adora Cheung. Adora is also at partner at YC. During their Q&A they’ll answer questions from Startup School Founders on how investors evaluate startups.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:39 - Anu Hariharan on Nine Business Models and the Metrics Investors Want
1:44 - Enterprise
4:09 - SAAS
8:55 - Subscription
11:33 - Transactional
14:44 - Marketplace
19:04 - E-commerce
21:14 - Advertising
23:12 - Hardware
23:44 - Common mistakes
25:35 - Anu Hariharan and Adora Cheung on How Investors Measure Startups Q&A
26:07 - Team, product market fit, and market opportunity
27:10 - What if the founder doesn't have experience in the are in which they're building a product?
28:19 - How do investors know you're moving fast?
29:40 - Local vs remote
30:40 - Evaluating solo founders
31:45 - Clarity of thought
33:35 - International founders
35:17 - Solo founders
36:21 - Should I fundraise?
38:33 - How does an investor evaluate a company with a heavy MVP?
39:36 - How do you avoid investors who say "it's too early for us"?
40:06 - Is it sensible to engage with investors before product market fit?
40:26 - How do you find the perfect investor?
41:21 - What are the best approaches for minority female founders to gain visibility within VC?
42:36 - How do investors come up with valuations?

#143 - Startup School Week 2 Recap: Michael Seibel, Adora Cheung, and Ilya Volodarsky Sep 11, 2019

We've cut down the second week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First, a lecture from Michael Seibel. Michael is CEO and a partner at YC. His lecture is about How to Plan an MVP.
Then, a lecture from Adora Cheung. Adora is a YC partner and a cofounder of Homejoy. Her lecture is about How to Set KPIs and Goals.
Last, a lecture from Ilya Volodarsky. Ilya is a cofounder of Segment. His lecture is about Analytics for Startups.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:43 - Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP
1:25 - The goal of a pre-launch startup
3:10 - Iterating vs pivoting
3:59 - Lean MVP
5:06 - Heavy MVP
6:19 - Launching
7:35 - Learning is easier with an MVP
8:07 - How to build an MVP quickly
10:17 - Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals
11:51 - What are the right KPIs to set?
15:50 - Revenue or active users
16:28 - Why choose active users?
18:55 - Biotech or hardtech KPIs
20:25 - Secondary metric
21:25 - What if you haven't launched?
22:20 - Setting goals
23:47 - How fast should you grow?
25:13 - Defining your own goals
28:40 - Tracking progress
30:27 - Ilya Volodarsky - Analytics for Startups
30:46 - Why analytics?
31:36 - Funnel
32:51 - Collecting data, analytics, and data flow
34:16 - Metric - Signups per week
35:28 - Metric - Retention cohorts
36:30 - Which metric to pick?
36:57 - Have I reached product market fit?
37:27 - Metric - Revenue
37:51 - Dashboards
38:35 - Advisor updates
39:01 - The startup stack
42:13 - Recommendations for the MVP process

#142 - Startup School Week 1 Recap: Kevin Hale and Eric Migicovsky Sep 04, 2019

We've cut down the first week of Startup School lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First, a lecture from Kevin Hale. Kevin is a YC partner and a cofounder of Wufoo. His lecture is about How to Evaluate Startup Ideas.
Then, a lecture from Eric Migicovsky. Eric is a YC partner and the founder of Pebble. His lecture is about How to Talk to Users.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:43 - Kevin Hale on How to Evaluate Startup Ideas
2:04 - How can I predict if an investor will like my idea?
2:50 - A startup idea is a hypothesis
5:44 - Problem
6:59 - Solution
8:16 - Insight
8:57 - Unfair advantages
13:45 - Two beliefs about startups
15:19 - Eric Migicovsky on How to Talk to Users
17:36 - Three common errors people make when talking to users
20:20 - Five questions to ask in a user interview
20:28 - What's the hardest part about doing the thing you're trying to solve?
21:02 - Tell me about the last time that you encountered this problem
21:22 - Why was this hard?
23:08 - What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?
24:10 - What don't you love about the solutions you've already tried?
25:21 - Three stages in which talking to users is extremely beneficial
26:07 - Idea stage
30:40 - Prototype stage
33:41 - Iterating towards product market fit

#141 - Diana Hu Aug 28, 2019

Diana Hu cofounded Escher Reality, which went through the Summer 2017 batch of YC. They were acquired by Niantic and she is now the head of their AR platform.
She's on Twitter @sdianahu.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:40 - Getting into AR
2:55 - Her first exposure to AR
4:40 - AR's future role in media
7:45 - Deciding where to go with the product
9:55 - Innovations that enabled AR
14:25 - Building a product in a new market
17:25 - Raising money for a new market
21:40 - Advice for founders after an acquisition
26:40 - Immigrating to the US
31:10 - Advice for Immigrant founders
33:49 - Advice for founders in/after YC

#140 - Aaron Harris on Fundraising and Meeting with Investors Aug 21, 2019

Aaron Harris is a Partner at YC and before that he cofounded Tutorspree.
He’s on Twitter @harris.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:42 - Seed fundraising process
3:32 - Emailing investors
9:32 - Parallelized fundraising process
12:17 - Meeting with investors
14:17 - Overcapitalization
17:07 - Communicating your plan to investors
19:02 - Evaluating investors
22:57 - Fundraising process for a Series A company
27:02 - Meeting Series A investors
28:57 - Post-Demo Day psychology

#139 - Jay Reno Aug 14, 2019

Jay Reno is the CEO and founder of Feather. Feather is a furniture subscription service. They were in the Summer 2017 batch of YC.
You can check out their furniture at LiveFeather.com and if you live in LA, SF, or New York you can try out the service.
Jay is on Twitter @jayjreno.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:49 - Opting out of owning furniture
6:29 - Feather's prototype
9:19 - How much did he make from his MVP?
9:59 - How many products did they have?
12:14 - Legacy competitors
14:04 - Changing branding from RentFeather.com to LiveFeather.com
15:59 - Customer interviews and learnings
18:29 - Scaling a company with physical products
21:29 - Why expand to other markets vs focus on one?
23:59 - Who to hire and when in a logistics-heavy business
26:09 - Unexpected learnings from scaling Feather
27:54 - Feeling his role change over time
29:44 - Counterintuitive advice
35:19 - Advice for YC founders after Demo Day

#138 - Russ Roberts Aug 07, 2019

Russ Roberts is the host of the podcast EconTalk (iTunes, RSS, and YouTube), a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and the author of several books, including How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.
You can find Russ on Twitter @econtalker.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:29 - What are his thoughts on “meaning, spirituality, or sense of belonging” in regards to creating your own company?
3:34 - Capitalism bearing the burden of human nature
4:04 - Why Russ started EconTalk
7:44 - Key economic concepts for founders after 700 EconTalk episodes
13:49 - Helpful methods for teaching economic concepts
18:09 - "Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely" - Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments
19:39 - Why Russ wrote How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life
24:14 - How EconTalk has changed since the beginning
26:14 - Steve Adema asks - Russ Roberts has emphasized the limits of "only looking where the light is" when it comes to studying well-being. How
can economists incorporate the aspects of well-being that aren't easily quantified?
34:34 - Warren Buffett's gift to his son
36:09 - Founders and unintended consequences
39:44 - The emotional aspect of giving your company away
44:19 - Anthony Y. asks - Has a guest on his show ever made him change his mind on a topic?
50:54 - Has Nassim Taleb convinced him to deadlift?
52:59 - Russ often quotes David Foster Wallace's speech, “This is Water”. Specifically, he quotes the phrase, “everyone worships.” What does Russ worship?

#137 - Startup School Podcast Preview with Kevin Hale Jul 31, 2019

Today’s episode is a preview of the Startup School podcast.
We’re putting all the Startup School lectures on their own podcast feed. You can subscribe here:
iTunes
RSS
This is the first lecture from Startup School 2019. It’s Kevin Hale on How to Evaluate Startup Ideas.
It’s also not too late to sign up for Startup School.
The course just started and the deadline to sign up is August 4th. Select companies who complete the course will also receive 15,000 dollars in equity-free funding.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:42 - Why we're starting with evaluating ideas
2:07 - YC doesn't just fund companies with traction
3:31 - How can I predict if an investor will like my idea?
5:57 - A startup idea is a hypothesis
7:37 - The problem
11:37 - The solution
13:07 - The insight
14:42 - Founder's unfair advantage
15:42 - Market growing 20% a year
16:22 - Product 10x better
17:12- Acquisition model
18:37 - Monopoly
19:32 - Threshold belief
19:52- Miracle belief
20:42 - Example: YC
24:02 - Example: Wufoo

#136 - Anu Hariharan on Managing a Board Jul 24, 2019

Anu Hariharan is a partner at YC. Today’s episode is about her recent post, How To Manage a Board.
You can find her on Twitter @anuhariharan.
If you’re interested in doing Startup School this year, signups are open at StartupSchool.org. The course just started and the deadline to sign up is August 4th. Select companies who complete the course will also receive 15,000 dollars in equity-free funding.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:57 - Why Anu wrote How to Manage a Board
2:27 - Board composition
4:27 - Adding independent board members
6:27 - The responsibilities of a board member
9:12 - Productive board meetings
12:52 - Sharing materials before the meeting
13:42 - Bringing executives into the meeting
16:57 - Dealing with board conflict
18:22 - Following up after a board meeting
21:12 - Dealing with difficult board members
23:57 - Reality distortion
24:52 - Agustin Feuerhake asks - What does it take to be a great board member?
27:22 - Dave Bailey asks - To what extent should the board culture reflect the company culture?
29:42 - Connor Abene asks - How do you think about adding board members who haven't worked in your industry but you think are good?
33:22 - Rhina asks - Could you address managing a board during product market fit time/ pivot times?

#135 - Camille Fournier Jul 17, 2019

Camille Fournier is a Managing Director at Two Sigma and the former CTO of Rent The Runway. She’s also the author of The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change.
You can find her on Twitter @skamille.
If you’re interested in doing Startup School this year, signups are open at StartupSchool.org. The course begins on July 22nd and goes for 10 weeks. Select companies who complete the course will also receive 15,000 dollars in equity-free funding.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:47 - Why do many individual contributors (ICs) never experience a good manager?
3:27 - How did the ideology of management being bad become pervasive in startups?
5:27 - What should a new manager do in their first 90 days?
8:57 - Getting better at 1:1s
11:17 - More tips for the first 90 days
13:17 - Remote management
15:12 - Mistakes rookie managers make
19:27 - Letting people go
23:37 - Being a manager and still wanting to write code
27:57 - Feeling overwhelmed as a manager
31:27 - Getting a team to gel
38:42 - Giving people kudos
39:57 - Non-engineers running engineering teams
42:07 - Staying legit technically as a manager
43:27 - Management vs leadership

#134 - Sarah Nahm and Holly Liu Jul 10, 2019

Sarah Nahm is the CEO and cofounder of Lever. Lever builds modern recruiting software for teams to source, interview, and hire top talent. They were in the Summer 2012 batch of YC. You can try Lever out at Lever.co.
Holly Liu is a Visiting Partner at YC. Before that she cofounded the gaming company Kabam.
You can find Sarah on Twitter @srhnhm and Holly is @hollyhliu.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:41 - Did Sarah grow up thinking she'd be a founder?
8:01 - Why did she decide to leave Google and start Lever?
13:56 - Thinking about product in the early days of Lever
15:51 - Fundraising and figuring out the team
24:06 - How do you figure out someone's career motivations?
27:26 - Getting concrete when interviewing
29:31 - Hiring remote employees
32:11 - Writing job descriptions around impact
37:41 - Eva Zhang asks - What's the biggest roadblock you faced in trying to make hiring more inclusive to diverse candidates?
42:06 - What does thinking about inclusion mean at a small company?
47:21 - Not buying into technical and nontechnical people
50:26 - Setting up a culture that allows for conversations about diversity and inclusion

#133 - Updates for Startup School 2019 and Office Hours with Kevin Hale Jul 03, 2019

Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC. Before working at YC he cofounded Wufoo.
Kevin’s on the podcast today to do some Office Hours and talk about this year’s edition of Startup School.
If you’d like to sign up or learn more, check out https://StartupSchool.org.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:51 - Stats from Startup School 2018
2:11 - Updates for Startup School 2019
8:41 - Sign up at StartupSchool.org
9:16 - Sean Maina asks - In the early days of Wufoo, how did you give a great customer experience?
11:56 - Design affordances
14:11 - Sunil Tej asks - How was Wufoo 10x better than the market when they just got started?
18:11 - Building an audience before a product
20:41 - Wufoo's growth
23:56 - Coming up with the idea for Wufoo
27:56 - Companies pivoting during YC
29:26 - Building a product in an unsexy space
32:56 - Sivaraj Ghanesh asks - How do you know if you've achieved product market fit? Or if your product just isn't noticed yet?
43:56 - Sivaraj Ghanesh asks - How do you gauge the size of a market?
46:26 - Tips for Startup School success
50:41 - Advice on vetting cofounders
54:11 - Sign up at StartupSchool.org

#132 - Dan Hockenmaier and Gustaf Alströmer Jun 26, 2019

Dan Hockenmaier is the founder of the growth strategy firm Basis One. Prior to Basis One he was the Director of Growth Marketing at Thumbtack. You can learn more at BasisOne.com.
Gustaf Alströmer is a Partner at YC. Prior to YC he was the Product Lead for Growth at Airbnb.
You can find Dan on Twitter @danhockenmaier and Gustaf is @gustaf.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:50 - Dan's most unpopular advice
1:45 - What growth strategies do people jump on too soon?
2:20 - Questions Dan asks a company he's advising
3:50 - Traits Dan looks for in early growth hires
6:30 - How product and growth are tied together
11:30 - Good/bad learnings from Facebook's growth team
14:00 - A/B testing
17:00 - Retention and other metrics
20:45 - The importance of experimentation
23:45 - Getting ideas for A/B tests then choosing which to do
25:00 - Advice for employees who want to get a growth program going
29:00 - B2B vs consumer growth tactics
34:00 - Pricing experiments
35:30 - Paid marketing
39:30 - Launching in new markets
40:15 - Hiring for marketing
43:45 - Metrics for marketing hires
45:45 - Toni asks - Why did Airbnb grow so fast?
48:45 - Step function growth changes for companies that already had scale
49:55 - Michael Savage asks - It would be great to discuss growth into new regions for example Africa and UAE. What would their approach be, how does it differ from region to region, culture to culture?
52:30 - Justin LaRosa asks - What are some of the most common drivers of viral growth?
55:20 - Hiring a growth agency vs building your own team
58:20 - How do you think about growth in the context of improving humanity?

#131 - Jeremy Rossmann Jun 19, 2019

Jeremy Rossmann is the cofounder of Make School. Make School is a college for computer science headquartered in San Francisco. Make School students don't pay until they have a job after graduation. They were part of YC’s Winter 2012 batch.

You can find MakeScool on Twitter @MakeSchool.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:32 - What is Make School?
01:12 - How is their intensive track different than a traditional college course load?
2:22 - How are their students differentiated from students educated in a traditional CS program?
3:12 - Interacting with the parents of Make School students
8:12 - William Triska asks - What are some ways to encourage greater independence and autodidactic behavior in students pursuing technical skills and knowledge?
10:02 - The autodidact myth
15:57 - Two stakeholders making purchasing decisions: potential students and parents
20:07 - The education landscape 20 years from now
23:57 - Education stacking
25:02 - Vikram Malhotra asks - When are we going to do away with degrees?
32:42 - Evan Ward asks - Should liberal arts colleges consider adopting ISA's?
35:17 - Are there instances of predatory ISAs?
37:27 - Make School students who want to be entrepreneurs
40:27 - Advice for people in YC

#130 - Tracy Young and Kat Manalac Jun 12, 2019

Tracy Young is a cofounder and the CEO of PlanGrid. PlanGrid makes mobile construction productivity software. They were acquired by Autodesk in 2018 and were part of YC’s Winter 2012 batch.
Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC.
You can find Tracy on Twitter @Tracy_Young and Kat is @KatManalac.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:46 - How Tracy got into the construction industry
2:51 - What convinced Tracy and her cofounders to build PlanGrid?
3:31 - Finding a technical cofounder
6:26 - Tracy still sees herself as an engineer
7:16 - PlanGrid's MVP and their first customers
11:56 - Their sales process
13:46 - Product breakthroughs
17:21 - Not firing fast enough
20:31 - What does she look for when hiring someone?
26:01 - Tim Cook's closing statement at WWDC
28:46 - Fredi Fernández asks - Does Tracy track wellness levels of the team?
29:26 - At what point did Tracy hire an office manager?
30:16 - How does Tracy take care of herself?
31:46 - Founding a company with a partner
33:31 - Managing a company as a new parent
35:46 - Seyed Rasoul Jabari asks - What's your big plan to go from 1.5 to 10 million projects?
36:46 - Holly asks - What has been your single largest influence in helping you scale?
38:06 - Why do some executives not work out?
38:56 - What skills did Tracy have to work on when scaling?
42:41 - What do a lot of startups get wrong?
46:21 - Tracy's recommended books
48:01 - What Tracy wishes she knew when she started out

#129 - Simone Giertz Jun 05, 2019

Simone Giertz describes herself as a maker/robotics enthusiast/non-engineer. She’s also known as the Queen of Shitty Robots. She runs a YouTube channel about those robots and is a cohost on Tested with Adam Savage from MythBusters.
You can find her on YouTube and on Twitter @SimoneGiertz.
She also has a Patreon.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics

00:00 - Intro
1:41 - "Whatever feeds the ego kills the soul."
4:21 - Maintaining passion for your work
7:16 - Building a sustainable business as a creator
9:01 - Shipping a real product - The Every Day Calendar - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simonegiertz/the-every-day-calendar
18:01 - Being scared to step away
19:31 - Generating ideas
20:46 - Finding out she had a brain tumor, having surgery, and sharing it
26:01 - Returning to work after brain surgery
28:01 - Learnings from taking time off
29:01 - Asking for help
30:31 - Evaluating how she's spending her time
32:16 - Giving herself permission to try other things
34:21 - Challenges as a creator and entrepreneur
36:01 - Not feeling guilty about play and pursuing the things you enjoy
41:01 - Becoming less disciplined in certain areas over time
42:46 - Ali asks - How to get started when dealing with imposters syndrome?
43:06 - beep boop asks - What's your favorite robot?
43:46 - Beste asks - Are there any moments where she is bored and feels like giving up on creating new things?
44:56 - Khawar Shehzad asks - What thing do you wish you knew when you started your career?
46:06 - Olaf Doschke asks - What would have happened if Simone's toothbrush helmet wouldn't have gone viral?
48:36 - Johnathan Nader asks - What is the best version of yourself?

#128 - Michael Babineau and Kevin Hale May 29, 2019

Michael Babineau is cofounder and CEO of Second Measure. Second Measure analyzes billions of credit card transactions to answer real-time questions on consumer behavior. They were in the Summer 2015 batch of YC and you can check them out at SecondMeasure.com.
Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC. Before working at YC he cofounded Wufoo.
You can find Michael on Twitter @mikebabineau and Kevin is @ilikevests.
The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro

00:35 - What idea did Mike apply to YC with?
01:20 - Where did the idea come from?
4:35 - From project to company
10:20 - What info did investors want to know that Second Measure could provide?
12:05 - Their first customers
14:35 - The primary use case of Second Measure for VCs
15:20 - What questions are they trying to answer?
19:35 - Data examples from their blog
21:05 - Post: Fashion retailers have nothing to fear (yet) from the rise of Stitch Fix
23:35 - Post: Holiday sales rocket Peloton memberships ahead of SoulCycle active riders
25:05 - Post: Prime members deliver for Amazon every day
27:35 - Second Measure's product development process
29:35 - Finding good data scientists who work from first principles
37:05 - Why is credit card data so messy?
42:05 - Cleaning data
44:20 - Using their product for competitive analysis
47:35 - Their sales process
49:05 - Raising money from Goldman Sachs and Citi
52:05 - Focusing on a specific problem
54:05 - Keeping the product compelling when it's table stakes

#127 - Vidit Aatrey and Adora Cheung May 22, 2019

Vidit Aatrey is cofounder and CEO of Meesho. Meesho is a platform in India that allows people to resell products using their social networks. They were in the Summer 2016 batch of YC and you can check them out at Meesho.com.
Adora Cheung is a Partner at YC. Before working at YC she cofounded Homejoy.
You can find Vidit on Twitter @viditaatrey and Adora is @nolimits.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
01:20 - What is Meesho?
3:20 - Why not just sell directly to consumers?
5:05 - What are the macro trends in Meesho's favor in India?
7:30 - A trust deficit market
8:55 - How does Meesho help users get online and start selling?
11:45 - Most impactful user stories
13:50 - Growth drivers
15:50 - Balancing growth and quality
17:25 - What if Facebook copies Meesho?
18:50 - When did Vidit and his cofounder know they wanted to start a startup?
21:20 - Their first startup idea and the inspiration for Meesho
25:40 - When did they know Meesho was working?
27:20 - How hard was it to pivot the business and how did they manage it?
30:05 - As a CEO how does he stay in touch with users?
34:50 - How has Vidit's role changed over time?
36:55 - How has he learned to be a CEO?
38:30 - What mistakes have they made?
39:35 - What was his best decision?
40:15 - What's a strong opinion he had about running a startup that he's changed since running Meesho?
41:45 - How has the Indian startup ecosystem evolved?
43:20 - Big problems worth solving in India
43:05 - Can foreigners come to India and start a startup?
45:10 - Best advice for aspiring Indian founders
46:20 - After Meesho, what's the most exciting startup in India?
47:20 - Why is Delhi the best IIT?
48:15 - What's a must read book and why?
49:10 - What's a startup idea he'd be working on if Meesho didn't happen?
49:25 - In 100 years, what does he hope Meesho is?

#126 - Chris Best and Jonathan Gill May 15, 2019

Chris Best is the cofounder and CEO of Substack. Substack makes it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter. They were in the Winter 2018 batch of YC. You can check them out at Substack.com.
Jonathan Gill is the cofounder and CEO of Backtracks. Backtracks is a podcast analytics and hosting platform. You can check them out at Backtracks.fm.
Chris is on Twitter @cjgbest and Jonathan is @jgill333.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
1:03 - Paid vs advertising in podcasting
3:33 - Are advertisers overpaying for podcast ads?
6:13 - What percent of the market will ultimately be paid content?
8:13 - Payment mechanisms
9:48 - Price anchoring
12:28 - Individual creators vs brands
17:23 - Deplatforming
18:53 - Spotify
20:23 - Discovery and growth in newsletters
22:53 - Public and private feeds
25:23 - Apple's role
26:38 - Will education be the driver of paid content?
30:23 - Educational podcasters in China
32:23 - How are their newsletter and podcast customers growing?
36:18 - Jack Ryder asks - In 5 years time, are personal newsletters going to replace social networks like Facebook?
38:13 - Debdut Mukherjee asks - Do podcasts actually work? If so, how do startups calculate the ROI & the CAC?
43:38 - Measurement
45:23 - Best practices for new podcasters and newsletter creators

#125 - Brian Halligan and Kevin Hale May 08, 2019

Brian Halligan is the CEO and cofounder of HubSpot. HubSpot builds software for marketing, sales, and customer service. You can try it out at HubSpot.com.
Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC and cofounder of Wufoo.
Brian is on Twitter @bhalligan and Kevin is @ilikevests.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:27 - Brian's an introvert that likes to work from home. He also runs a public company. How does he do both?
2:12 - How does he manage his calendar as an introvert?
4:12 - How Brian met his cofounder Dharmesh
6:12 - The first project they worked on together
7:27 - What was their unique insight when starting HubSpot?
8:52 - Pricing in the early days
9:27 - How would he have priced HubSpot differently knowing what he knows now?
10:27 - HubSpot's first customer
12:27 - Important early features
14:47 - At what point did they shift entirely away from consulting?
15:32 - Providing advice as content vs in the product
16:27 - SEO is underrated
17:12 - Trends in B2B and marketing
21:57 - Inbound marketing and audience building advice
26:52 - How did Brian know that his cofounder was right for him?
28:12 - The internet disproportionately benefiting small businesses over big ones
29:12 - Keeping your company hungry when you're big
29:52 - Building assets for your company
30:47 - Freemium
34:27 - Structural pieces of HubSpot Brian would have changed if he did it again
37:27 - Creating the voice of your company
39:57 - Early metrics they tracked
40:32 - Having a coach and reviews
41:57 - How Brian's changed as a CEO from the beginning
42:51 - What was the hardest thing to give up as CEO?
43:57 - Humility

#124 - Jarvis Johnson May 01, 2019

Jarvis Johnson was previously a software engineer at Patreon, Yelp, and Google. He’s now a YouTuber.
You can find him on YouTube at Jarvis Johnson and on Twitter @jarvis.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:20 - Jarvis' intro
00:50 - Where his videos first got traction
1:30 - Being part of the software industry while critiquing it
4:05 - How he got into programming
6:30 - Moving to California
7:50 - Interning at Google then Yelp
9:20 - Interviewing multiple times at the same company
10:20 - Moving from Yelp to Patreon
14:30 - Switching from individual contributor to manager
18:35 - Learnings from managing that he applies to himself
21:45 - What made Jarvis want to do YouTube full time?
30:20 - Investing in yourself
31:25 - Making what you want vs talking to viewers
35:55 - When did things really start to click for his channel?
38:20 - Choosing to make multiple genres of video
44:00 - Nathan Allebach asks - Are content creators responsible in any capacity for their audiences?
51:05 - Taylor asks - In what ways do you think content creation can benefit one's career in the tech industry?
54:40 - Jarvis made a podcast when he was a teenager
56:30 - Octopus Blues asks - What lessons did improv teach you/who would you recommend it to, if anyone?
58:45 - Predictions for YouTubers and content creators

#123 - Harry Zhang and Kevin Hale Apr 24, 2019

Harry Zhang is the cofounder of Lob. Lob makes it possible for enterprises to programmatically send physical mail. They were in the Summer 2013 batch of YC.
Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC.
Harry is on Twitter @harryzhang and Kevin is @ilikevests.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:31 - Harry's intro
00:41 - What did Lob have when they applied to YC?
2:01 - Documentation as an API company
3:16 - Where did the insight to create Lob come from?
4:26 - Lob's first version and first customer
7:26 - Closing their first big customer then signing others
12:31 - Did Harry always know Lob would be an API company?
14:01 - How long did it take to work up to enterprise customers?
15:31 - Pricing
19:46 - Creating a product roadmap
21:26 - Tradeoffs when building product
22:21 - Competing for top engineers as an API company
24:31 - Options vs RSUs
28:01 - Sales mistakes
32:21 - Building out features for enterprise clients
34:16 - Why did Lob choose to not vertically integrate?
39:31 - How has Harry had to change as a founder over the life of Lob?

#122 - Max Rhodes and Anu Hariharan Apr 17, 2019

Max Rhodes is the cofounder and CEO of Faire. Faire helps retailers find and buy unique wholesale merchandise for their stores. They were in the Winter 2017 batch of YC.
Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC.
Max is on Twitter @MaxRhodesOK and Anu is @AnuHariharan.
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:32 - Max's intro
01:06 - Leaving Square and coming up with the idea for Faire
7:37 - Changes to SMBs in the past five years
9:37 - What is Faire?
11:57 - Max’s vision for Faire
15:12 - Finding product/market fit
18:12 - Switching to try before you buy
21:22 - What separates the great companies
22:32 - Scaling as a CEO
26:32 - Calming down
29:42 - Faire's first hires
33:42 - Faire's first executive hire
38:27 - Fundraising and fundraising advice
43:32 - Ryan McCarthy asks - Why did Max study history at Yale?
44:32 - Why does Max think Square Cash became a successful app?

#120 - Austen Allred Apr 03, 2019

Austen Allred is the CEO and cofounder of Lambda School.
Lambda School provides a CS education that's free until you get a job. They were in the Summer 2017 batch of YC.
You can learn more about Lambda School at lambdaschool.com.
Austen is on Twitter at @austen.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
1:01 - Encouraging people to do something that they're scared to do
5:16 - Where did the insight for Lambda School come from?
6:26 - College vs developer schools
10:26 - Building a network
12:16 - Does Austen see value in a traditional liberal arts education?
14:56 - Steven Klaiber-Noble asks - As competitors begin to copy your model what front do you believe you'll be competing on?
17:56 - Why did Austen choose to raise money?
20:06 - Fundraising falling through on Austen's first startup
21:36 - Moving back to Utah and writing a book about growth
23:26 - Why Austen wrote a book
26:26 - "Starting a company is by definition saying, I think what I can do is worth more than what other people will pay me for."
27:26 - Mispriced human capital
30:21 - Other opportunities for Lambda School
32:46 - Modeling risk
35:36 - David Kofoed Wind asks - When Lambda School is incentivized to take in people that will land high paying jobs, how do you think about the diversity of candidates? One would imagine that it quickly becomes a game of pattern matching the stereotypical SV people.
37:51 - Will Lambda School ever not be remote?
41:16 - Dave Dawson asks - You appear to be on the successful path now, was there a point early in Lambda School when you wanted to stop?
43:46 - Helping everyone become an autodidact
46:46 - Rethinking where to start on an online course
48:11 - Dave Dawson asks - What keeps you up at night at this point?
49:46 - Dayo Koleowo asks - “I have made remarks I do not agree with” - from Austen's Twitter bio. What is that one remark you wish you didn’t have to disagree with?
53:26 - Choosing remote work as a core problem to solve in your company
55:56 - Analysts aren't good at measuring product quality
57:36 - Teaching taste

#119 - Amy Buechler and Michael Seibel Mar 27, 2019

Amy Buechler is an executive coach for startup founders.
Michael Seibel is a partner and the CEO of YC.
In this episode we talk about coaching and use examples from Michael’s time working on Justin.tv and Socialcam.
You can find Amy at her site foundercoach.io and on Twitter at @amybue.
Michael is on Twitter at @mwseibel.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:41 - What is coaching?
01:11 - How is coaching different from therapy?
2:31 - What are the most common challenges founders in coaching have?
3:26 - Challenges with roles and responsibilities at Twitch
7:46 - How would Amy have coached Michael around roles and responsibilities?
9:41 - Not being disruptive as a leader
11:31 - Switching roles at Twitch
12:46 - Uneven equity splits
15:01 - Distributing and negotiating equity
21:16 - Communicating your own value
22:51 - Can there be too much communication?
24:11 - Productive arguments
28:11 - Talking about performance issues
30:16 - Setting clear goals and managing motivation
33:16 - Enjoying the work
34:01 - Conversations about runway
36:51 - Digging your company out of the grave and continuing
40:21 - Michael being against coaching initially
42:31 - How to have hard conversations
44:16 - Removing a responsibility from someone
49:51 - Returning to roles and responsibilities
50:41 - Jeanie McCallister asks - What’s the single most important piece of advice you can give a founder?

#118 - Marques Brownlee Mar 21, 2019

Marques Brownlee is a YouTuber. He has over 8 million subscribers to his channel MKBHD where he reviews electronics, drives electric vehicles, and interviews people such as Kobe Bryant and Bill Gates.
You can find Marques on YouTube and on Twitter at @MKBHD.
The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:26 - What does Marques attribute his channel's success to?
2:41 - The early days
5:11 - How does he go about evaluating a product?
7:31 - Features that Marques thought were great that didn't catch on
8:41 - Peak smartphone?
10:31 - Folding phones and new trends
11:26 - Tesla and the EV market
15:46 - Getting older and staying relevant
17:06 - New kinds of videos and podcasting
22:26 - Does Marques feel limited by gear?
26:11 - Storytelling techniques
28:16 - Tech vs Marques as the star of the show
29:56 - Marco Castro asks - What advice do you have for new creators on YouTube?
30:56 - When did Marques find his voice as a creator?
33:56 - Overcoming perfectionism
34:56 - Gut instinct vs data
37:26 - YouTube comments
39:31 - Austin Ryder asks - In the early years of his channel, Marques took a several month hiatus from YouTube, but then came back with a new video format and seemingly renewed drive. What happened during those months off that led to the channel becoming what it is today?
40:41 - Winston asks - What’s your daily schedule?
43:06 - Ultimate frisbee injuries
43:26 - Amad Khan asks - Are there any problems that you see or face that you really wish engineers/developers would solve?
44:51 - Christian Giordano asks - Any tips on how to engage/work with influencers when you are a very early stage startup with little or no money?
46:41 - The future of creators supporting themselves financially
49:31 - His biggest challenge as a creator
50:31 - Long-term goals

#117 - Craig Cannon and Adora Cheung Mar 13, 2019

Craig Cannon is the Director of Marketing at Y Combinator. He usually hosts the YC podcast but is the guest on this episode about podcasting.
Adora Cheung is a Partner at YC.
You can find Adora on Twitter at @nolimits and Craig at @craigcannon.
***
Topics
00:21 - Adora's intro
1:26 - Craig's intro
4:06 - Starting the YC podcast
5:21 - Podcast metrics
6:21 - Tips on creating a podcast
8:31 - Picking episode topics
9:21 - Order of operations for finding guests
10:51 - Preparing for interviews
14:11 - How to keep an episode engaging
16:26 - Analytics
18:51 - Gear
23:21 - Software
24:16 - Listening to your own voice
25:41 - Favorite interviews
26:41 - Most surprising things Craig's learned about startups on the podcast
29:21 - What has Craig learned from guests that he's put into practice?
32:01 - Non-consensus things about building startups
34:21 - If Craig had to start a podcast from scratch, how would he structure it?
37:01 - Clipping the show
42:21 - Monetizing podcasts
45:51 - Will podcasts become saturated?
46:21 - What's missing in the podcast world?
48:21 - Influential podcasters
52:11 - Adora's podcast picks
53:11 - Patrick Benders asks - What idea do you believe in that your social group would think is crazy?
58:11 - Zachary Canann asks - Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
1:00:11 - Being at YC, do Craig and Adora feel pressured to go start a company?
1:06:21 - When is an opportunity good enough to quit your current job?

#116 - Domonique Fines and Cadran Cowansage Mar 11, 2019

Domonique Fines is the Director of Events at YC.
Cadran Cowansage is the cofounder and CEO of Elpha. Elpha is a private online community for women in tech.
Join Elpha to read Dom's AMA.
You can find Dom on Twitter at @domoniquefines and Cadran at @cadran_c.
***

Topics
00:30 - Dom’s intro
00:50 - How Dom started in events and her background
2:25 - Deciding to not go to law school
3:55 - Choosing to work on tech events
6:00 - Outreach to underrepresented founders
9:15 - Common misconceptions about getting into tech
10:35 - University outreach
11:55 - Identifying problems to fix and not being blocked
14:35 - Reflecting on accomplishments
15:40 - Dom’s career plans
17:10 - Will Dom do a startup?
17:35 - Avoiding burnout
20:55 - The importance of just getting started

#115 - Mike Knoop and Kevin Hale Mar 06, 2019

Mike Knoop is cofounder and Chief Product Officer at Zapier, which was in the YC Summer 2012 batch. Zapier moves information between your web apps automatically.
Kevin Hale is a Visiting Partner at YC. Before YC Kevin was the cofounder of Wufoo, which was funded by YC in 2006 and acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2011.
You can find Mike on Twitter at @mikeknoop and Kevin at @ilikevests.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:43 - Kevin's intro
01:03 - Mike's intro
2:03 - How Mike and Kevin met
4:03 - Market sizing for consumer software
5:13 - Zapier's growth strategy today vs 2012
6:28 - Jumpstarting a platform like Zapier
9:03 - Building an app directory before building a product
11:03 - Applying to YC twice
13:23 - Zapier after Demo Day
14:48 - Zapier's first remote hire
16:48 - Remote companies not being perceived as legitimate
18:48 - Noticing remote was working then committing
21:28 - Qualities to look for when hiring remote employees
24:28 - Nina Mehta asks - What’s the best way to share work and knowledge across designers working on different parts of product without distracting from focused working time?
25:58 - Remote mistakes in the early days
27:33 - When to change modes of communication to allow for deep work
29:28 - When to ask for someone's full attention
31:33 - Product and design practices at Zapier
34:38 - OKRs for teams vs individuals
39:48 - Tools for remote teams
43:48 - No internal email at Zapier
46:53 - Keeping morale high in a remote team
49:28 - What happens at a Zapier retreat
51:43 - Remote design critiques
56:43 - Serendipity and over optimizing for it
58:33 - Setting up a remote company for success

#114 - Karn Saroya Feb 27, 2019

Karn Saroya is the CEO and cofounder of Cover, which was in the YC Winter 2016 batch.
Cover is a nationally licensed insurance brokerage. You can use their app to take a picture of property you want to insure and they’ll connect you with their insurance partners so that you can get the best price and coverage.
You can find Karn on Twitter at @karnsaroya.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:36 - Karn’s intro
01:01 - Using computer vision to identify and catalogue property
2:28 - How Karn ended up starting Cover
3:48 - Being a maker vs. an advisor
5:58 - Stylekick, Karn’s previous startup
9:28 - Joining Shopify
10:08 - How the idea for Cover happened
11:58 - The capital-light way to start an insurance business
16:28 - Underwriting
17:58 - Lead generation
20:18 - Product development
21:28 - Buying Cover.com for $750k
24:53 - Being engaged to a cofounder
28:43 - Managing two offices and cultures
30:58 - Being an international founder in YC
31:58 - Advice to people in the current batch of YC

#113 - Caterina Fake and Kat Manalac Feb 21, 2019

Caterina Fake hosts the podcast Should This Exist? which is about how technology is impacting our humanity. It launches today on iTunes. She also cofounded Flickr, Hunch, and Findery and is an investor at Yes VC.
Kat Manalac is a partner at YC.
You can find Caterina on Twitter at @Caterina and Kat at @KatManalac.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***

Topics
00:32 - Caterina's new podcast, Should This Exist?
2:32 - Is there a process for considering if something should exist?
4:02 - Who should be part of these conversations?
5:17 - Wait But Why and the Human Colossus
7:22 - Episode 1 of Should This Exist?
10:17 - Having conversations before things exist
11:42 - How might employees think about their role in whether or not something should exist?
14:32 - Caterina reflecting on her creations and if they should exist
19:02 - Considering whether things should exist as investors
23:32 - Cofounder charter - What you will and won't do
26:03 - Questioning the VC model
27:22 - Working on Wall St, feeling herself change, and quitting
31:22 - Caterina as a student
34:02 - Peculiarity and entrepreneurship
35:22 - "Don't fight to win prizes that aren't worth winning"
38:32 - What was once fringe is now mainstream
40:52 - Kat looking up to Lea Salonga
42:42 - Evgeny asks - How did she get her first 100 paying users?
49:27 - How does she advise founders to find investors?
54:47 - What questions should founders ask themselves while making something?

#112 - Ryan Hoover and Dalton Caldwell Feb 15, 2019

Ryan Hoover is the founder of Product Hunt which was in the Summer 2014 YC batch and was acquired by AngelList. He also invests in startups through his Weekend Fund.
Dalton Caldwell is a Partner at YC where he runs admissions.
Ryan is on Twitter at @rrhoover and Dalton is at @daltonc.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

***
Topics
00:27 - Ryan's intro
00:52 - Dalton's intro
1:27 - Forming Product Hunt and applying to YC
5:17 - Product Hunt's growth rate when they applied to YC
6:27 - Raising money for the right reasons
9:42 - Maker communities
11:27 - Why raise money for Product Hunt?
13:12 - Having buzz during the batch
18:12 - Brex changing their idea during YC
20:17 - Pivoting into something you know well
21:32 - In retrospect, how would Ryan have advised himself around monetization?
28:27 - Trying to build out other verticals
34:27 - Don't act like you have infinite runway
35:57 - Creating urgency and developing products within AngelList
40:17 - Tips to launch on Product Hunt
45:07 - What Dalton looks for in applications
46:57 - Giving people the opportunity to start
48:47- What motivated Ryan to leave his job before Product Hunt

#111 - Jake Klamka and Kevin Hale Feb 06, 2019

Jake Klamka founded Insight. Insight provides intensive 7 week professional training fellowships in fields such as data science and data engineering. Insight was in the YC Winter 2011 batch.
Kevin Hale is a Visiting Partner at YC. Before YC Kevin was the cofounder of Wufoo, which was funded by YC in 2006 and acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2011.
You can find Jake on Twitter at @jakeklamka and Kevin at @ilikevests.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:37 - Kevin's intro
01:07 - Jake's intro
1:42 - Applying to YC with one product then changing it
4:07 - How Insight started
4:57 - Jake's first students and initial coursework
8:37 - Finding out what companies want from data scientists
10:37 - Picking the first class of students
12:07 - Common pitfalls for people transitioning into data science
15:07 - Types of data science roles
17:22 - What data scientists should look out for in companies
18:17 - Chuck Grimmett asks - When do you know you need to bring in seasoned data scientists?
20:37 - How Insight has scaled and changed
22:37 - What happens in the program
23:57 - Examples of a good project for a data science resume
26:27 - Will more data scientists be founders in the future?
28:37 - Teaching product
29:37 - Cleaning data
32:07 - Tools for tracking data
32:57 - Track what are you trying to optimize
35:57 - Churn and conversion
39:37 - Is there an ideal background for a data scientist?
41:37 - Which startups recruit well at Insight?
43:37 - Contracting
46:17 - Fields Jake is excited about

#110 - Avni Patel Thompson and Kat Manalac Jan 30, 2019

Avni Patel Thompson founded Poppy, which helped parents book the best caregivers. They went through the YC Winter 2016 batch and recently shut down. Avni asked to come on the podcast to talk about what the process of shutting down was like.
Kat Manalac is a partner at YC.
You can find Avni on Twitter at @APatelThompson and Kat at @KatManalac.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - @CraigCannon.
***

Topics
00:35 - Kat’s intro
01:15 - Avni’s intro
2:15 - When did it become clear that scaling Poppy wasn’t working?
5:50 - Experiments Avni tried with Poppy
9:55 - The last six months of runway
13:25 - Choosing to shut Poppy down
17:25 - Pivot or shut down?
20:10 - Who did Avni have these hard conversations with?
24:35 - Communicating with investors during the process of shutting down
31:20 - How does Avni feel since shutting down Poppy?
38:30 - Tying self-worth to your accomplishments and how it feels after shutting down
39:30 - “This is what trying looks like.”
44:00 - The effects of having raised money
46:00 - Starting to think about what’s next
49:00 - Struggling with unstructured nothing
49:45 - Kindness

#109 - Samantha Bradshaw Jan 23, 2019

Samantha Bradshaw is a researcher at the Computational Propaganda Project and a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute. She’s been tracking the phenomenon of political manipulation through social media.
You can find Samantha on Twitter at @sbradshaww.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
:53 - What is a bot?
2:53 - When computational propaganda began
3:53 - Changes in bot tactics since 2016
5:53 - Using bots for content creation
7:28 - WhatsApp and the upcoming Indian election
9:23 - Trends in computational propaganda
10:53 - How bots integrate into platforms
13:23 - Responsibilities of platforms to remove fake accounts
14:53 - The role of governments in media manipulation
18:18 - Fake news and selecting news that aligns with your beliefs
19:53 - Are platforms getting better or worse?
21:33 - Samantha's personal internet habits
23:03 - Sentiment around tracking in the UK vs the US
24:23 - The Mueller report and US midterms
29:18 - Canadian elections
30:18 - 2020 US elections
30:53 - Deepfakes
31:48 - Optimistic thoughts for the future
33:08 - How to help against computational propaganda

#108 - Cindy Mi and Qi Lu Jan 16, 2019

Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKID. VIPKID is a 1-on-1 teaching platform where children in China learn english from North American teachers.
Qi Lu is the CEO of YC China and Head of YC Research.
***
Topics
00:23 - Qi's intro
00:38 - Cindy's intro
1:38 - Moving to a new province as a teenager
4:38 - Being an educator and an entrepreneur
8:23 - Starting VIPKid in a hyper-competitive market
14:53 - Metrics for measuring product market fit
21:43 - How did she find the business model?
26:53 - What things did she try that didn't work?
30:38 - Strategy for product expansion
33:03 - Content expansion for Mandarin learning
34:53 - Building global companies
41:23 - Creating a global culture
44:13 - The future of education
48:08 - How should engineers and product managers think about edtech?
51:33 - Thoughts on AI
54:33 - Advice for entrepreneurs

#107 - Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman Jan 09, 2019

Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful new energy and technology companies. Previously he was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors.
How to Build the Future is hosted by Sam Altman.
***
Topics
00:30 - Vinod’s intro
01:20 - A zero-million-dollar company vs a zero-billion-dollar company
4:20 - What percentage of investors in Silicon Valley are good long-term company builders?
4:50 - Who has earned the right to advise an entrepreneur?
6:50 - Which risk to take when
7:20 - Helpful board members
8:15 - Who to trust for what advice
11:00 - First principles thinking and rate of change
13:00 - Evaluating a candidate in an interview
14:15 - How much should a founder have planned and how ambitious should a founder be?
16:30 - Recruiting great people
19:00 - Building a phenomenal early team
20:20 - Being generous with early employee equity
27:00 - Gene pool engineering
27:18 - The art, science, and labor of recruiting
28:20 - How founders should think about investors
31:00 - Doers vs pontificators
32:00 - What does Vinod want to do in the next ten years?
32:10 - Reinventing Societal Infrastructure with Technology

#106 - Frank Lantz Dec 20, 2018

Frank Lantz is a game designer and Director of the NYU Game Center. He cofounded Area/Code Games and most recently released a game called Universal Paperclips in which you’re an AI that makes paperclips.
Frank’s on Twitter @flantz and his site is franklantz.net.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:27 - "Games are the aesthetic form of thinking and doing"
6:57 - VR skepticism
9:42 - Universal Paperclips
14:27 - Explaining games to non-gamers
20:12 - Competitive gaming
22:57 - Building life lessons into games
31:42 - Teaching game design
36:17 - Inspiration, hard work, and taste
39:17 - Darker sides of gaming culture
43:07 - The indie game market
45:27 - Unexpected trends in gaming
49:17 - Benedict Fritz asks - Frank you seem much more interested in chess, go, poker, and other games with a long history than most game designers. Where do you think this comes from?
52:12 - Esports
55:37 - Inventing sports
57:27 - Pokemon Go
1:00:32 - Difficulty in predicting successes in entertainment
1:03:17 - Frank's game recommendations
1:05:47 - @fakebalenciaga asks - Why Tonto?

#105 - Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis Dec 14, 2018

Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis are the founders of AptDeco, where you can buy and sell used furniture. They were in the YC Winter 2014 batch and you can find them at AptDeco.com.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
0:21 - What is AptDeco?
1:06 - Why did Reham and Kalam start it?
2:51 - Were they considering other ideas?
5:06 - How did they prepare to start AptDeco after business school/the corporate world?
6:21 - Getting over the fear of starting
9:21 - Communicating that they're starting something to friends and family
14:21 - Starting a startup after business school
17:21 - Helpful learnings from a more traditional business education
27:21 - Early models of AptDeco vs today
31:51 - AptDeco's customers
34:06 - Brands and customer acquisition
38:46 - Learning how to do delivery
42:06 - Deciding not to warehouse furniture
43:51 - Ideas that didn't work and some that worked on the second attempt
48:21 - Analytics
50:51 - Being a NYC company in YC
52:11 - How to make the most of YC

#104 - Leonard Susskind Dec 06, 2018

Leonard Susskind is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and he’s regarded as one of the fathers of string theory.
He’s written several books including: The Black Hole War, The Cosmic Landscape, and the Theoretical Minimum series.
He also has over 100 lectures on YouTube.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
0:26 - Being perceived as an outsider physicist
4:26 - The perils of becoming too mainstream
6:11 - Where his ideas come from
7:26 - Claudio asks - Do you think the graviton can be experimentally found?
10:11 - The origins of String Theory
15:41 - Why should there be a grand unified theory?
16:56 - Quantum mechanics and gravity
20:16 - Large unanswered questions in physics
27:56 - Holographic principle
38:26 - Simulation hypothesis
40:41 - Richard Feynman on philosophy
42:26 - Feynman and the bomb
46:26 - Improving the world by discovering what the world is
49:26 - ER and EPR - Black holes and entanglement
56:26 - Noah Hammer asks - Could quantum teleportation be used in the future as a means of intergalactic communication?
58:26 - rokkodigi asks - How do you think quantum theory will shape technology in the future?
1:01:56 - Why teach physics for the public?

#103 - Michael Seibel Nov 28, 2018

Michael Seibel is a partner and the CEO of YC. He cofounded Justin.tv, which was in the winter 2007 batch and Socialcam, which was in the winter 2012 batch.
In this episode Michael comments on five of his essays. The essays are: Why Should I Start a Startup?, One Order of Operations for Starting a Startup, The Real Product Market Fit, Users You Don’t Want, and Why Does Your Company Deserve More Money?
Michael’s on Twitter @mwseibel.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
0:00 - Intro
0:42 - Why Should I Start a Startup?
2:00 - Three types of people: people highly motivated when working for themselves, people that could succeed starting a startup or within a big company, and people that could succeed within a big company.
6:00 - How do you decide what type of person you are?
7:30 - Identify bias in advice givers
10:30 - Peer advice becomes less valuable during college
14:40 - One Order of Operations for Starting a Startup
15:40 - People aren’t taught how to find ideas
17:20 - Find a particular problem that you’re passionate about
20:55 - Find some friends and brainstorm a solution
23:20 - Build an MVP
25:55 - Two failed orders of operations for starting a startup
29:57 - The Real Product Market Fit
30:57 - Why do many founders think they have product market fit when they don’t?
35:42 - Building a successful company is not a single variable problem
37:27 - Socialcam didn’t hit product market fit
38:37 - Justin.tv had $1M in profit before reaching product market fit
42:27 - Some companies take a long time
42:55 - Users You Don’t Want
44:25 - The spectrum of how users are using your product
45:55 - Users that take a lot of customer support time
48:50 - Don’t let the hijack users control the product roadmap
49:31 - Why Does Your Company Deserve More Money?
50:31 - A team, a product, and an office are all just a means to an end
51:31 - If you don’t really deserve money, what is an alternate path to create leverage?
53:16 - Breaking even at Justin.tv was a moment of infinite clarity
55:31 - Series A program and leverage

#102 - Andrew Kortina Nov 20, 2018

Andrew Kortina is the cofounder of Venmo and Fin. Fin is a high quality, on-demand, personal assistant and executive assistant service.
You can get a $100 credit to try Fin at https://fin.com/yc
Andrew blogs at https://kortina.nyc/
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:32 - Human dignity and work
8:07 - Creating jobs
10:07 - From The Beautiful Struggle // The Beautiful Game - You might argue that we’re already in a sort of failure mode, where our ability to assign dignity to arbitrary work and motivate people to work bullshit jobs is more efficient than our ability to allocate labor towards industry that would have greater social benefit, like education, healthcare, food, etc. If we’re already in this failure mode, it’s kind of the worst of all worlds, because not only are we assigning meaning to work that doesn’t need to be done, but, also, we could be redeploying that labor towards efforts that are actually important today.
18:32 - Travel
21:02 - Why do we want to do anything?
22:07 - Life after Fin
25:17 - From The Emperor Has No Clothes, There is No Santa Claus, and Nothing is Rocket Science - I want to preface this talk by warning you that it’s quite possible you’ll interpret much of this talk as cynicism. It is not my intention to be cynical. My goal is to treat you with respect by speaking to you honestly, without any grand illusions.
None of the companies trying to convince you to work for them will mention technological determinism. They will confirm what your parents and teachers told you, that your work and contribution will be totally unique and significant.
32:02 - From The Emperor Has No Clothes, There is No Santa Claus, and Nothing is Rocket Science - I recognize that the meditative aspect of craft is an excellent way to cope with meaninglessness
38:32 - Technological determinism
43:02 - Andrew's company Fin
48:17 - Ryan Hoover asks - When (if ever) will Fin task completion be 100% AI-driven?
49:32 - Differences between running Fin and Venmo
56:47 - Venmo's Lucas ads
58:32 - Spencer Clark asks - How did you and your co-founders decide to sell Venmo?
1:02:02 - Charlie Kaufman on Screenwriting - What I’m trying to express – what I’d like to express – is the notion that, by being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves and the world, and ourselves in the world.
1:08:30 - Get $100 credit to Fin at https://fin.com/yc

#101 - Brian Donohue Nov 14, 2018

Brian Donohue is President of Instapaper and a Product Engineering Manager at Pinterest.
You can find him on Twitter @bthdonohue.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:19 - The history of Instapaper
8:19 - Free competitors enter the market
10:19 - How Brian joined Instapaper
14:34 - Transitioning from paid to freemium
19:19 - Pinterest's acquisition of Instapaper
26:34 - Moving to California
29:04 - Working on Instapaper within Pinterest
32:19 - Spinning Instapaper out of Pinterest
42:34 - Jareau Wadé asks - What types of product integrations could Pinterest have done with Instapaper?
50:04 - Ryan Hoover asks - I’m curious how he and the team balance simplicity with new feature development/product expansion.
54:19 - Raymond Durk asks - I love the rapid reading mode but would also love a voice enabled mode where the Google Assistant or Siri reads it. Speaking of I'd use it on my Google Home to listen to news if that was a skill.
57:39 - Brian Kim asks - Any growth hacks that worked well?
1:00:04 - Gustaf Alströmer asks - How does it make time for focused time to catch up on everything he saves? What are his best productivity hacks related to this?
1:03:44 - Backpacking

#100 - Sam Altman Nov 08, 2018

Sam Altman expands on ideas that have come up in several of his essays. Specifically: choosing projects, creating value, and finding purpose.
Sam’s the president of YC Group and co-chairman of OpenAI. You can find him on Twitter @sama.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

***
Topics

1:25 - From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short - Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it.
3:50 - Stepping back and evaluating your work
5:30 - Creating metrics for your projects
6:30 - Taking a year off
9:30 - Figuring out when to commit
11:30 - Poker
12:30 - From Productivity - Sleep seems to be the most important physical factor in productivity for me. Exercise is probably the second most important physical factor. The third area is nutrition.
15:00 - From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming - "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?"
16:30 - From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short - Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem. Most people are too risk-averse, and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.
17:30 - Perspective shifts
20:15 - From Productivity - My system has three key pillars: “Make sure to get the important shit done”, “Don’t waste time on stupid shit”, and “make a lot of lists”.
22:30 - What Happened to Innovation
24:50 - From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming - He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
26:50 - The deferred life plan doesn’t work
31:50 - From The Merge - Our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum. Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that differences between us and bonobos are barely worth discussing.
34:10 - Weight training
35:30 - The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello

#99 - Laura Deming Oct 23, 2018

Laura Deming is a partner at The Longevity Fund. They invest in companies that will allow us to live longer and healthier lives.
You can learn more about them at Longevity.vc.
Laura’s on Twitter @LauraDeming.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:22 - Why focus on longevity now?
2:12 - How did Laura get started in longevity?
3:22 - Why raise a fund?
5:52 - What does Laura do personally for longevity?
9:07 - Worm and mouse studies
10:44 - Craig's personal habits
12:37 - Human studies
15:22 - Mica asks - Do you think immortality is going to be achieved by: 1. Curing all disease and stop aging so we could live with our own bodies forever 2. OR is going to be something like porting our brain, "mind" to a computer/robot?
17:37 - Most likely strategies to increase lifespan
19:47 - Ryan Hoover asks - Ask about the ethics of longevity. Jack J. Fernandes asks - Do people actually want to live longer?
21:44 - Mica asks - How would immortality change society? Wouldn't we become more complacent? Since we have "forever" to do things wouldn't that diminish our rate of innovation? And since less new individuals are being created we would have access to less new ideas. We would just stop creating new Newtons, Einsteins, Mozarts…
24:52 - Cognitive enhancement
25:52 - Daily habits
34:12 - Tech environment changes in the past 5-10 years
39:22 - What percentage of people in labs want to start companies?
41:37 - Pioneer
43:57 - Confidence
45:52 - Podcasting
49:12 - Choosing media to consume
52:17 - Sam Betesh asks - The last thing that led to a step function change in average life span was germ theory. What new areas of research might provide the next step function change?
55:07 - Extending fertility windows
57:22 - Jason Choi asks - What % of longevity is attributable to lifestyle choices vs genetics and the progress of technology in influencing both.
58:37 - Fatih asks - is blood transfusion a thing or just a hoax
1:00:42 - Rapamycin
1:02:27 - Testosterone
1:04:37 - Chris asks - Aubrey De Grey, IIRC, mentioned a number of times that we might, in the future, replace organs and tissues with new organic ones before they fail. Is this actually a reasonable idea, or is it more likely that we'll replace them with synthetic ones, if we replace them at all?
1:06:07 - Mica asks - Laura did a "cookie diet" for one month. Why did you do it? How did you feel? Doesn't it go against all the research on longevity? ;-)
1:08:07 - Is Laura actually not doing anything strange in her diet?

#98 - Shola Akinlade Oct 16, 2018

Shola Akinlade is CEO and cofounder of Paystack. Paystack helps businesses in Africa get paid online and offline. They’re based in Lagos, Nigeria and were part of the Winter 2016 batch.
Shola’s on Twitter @shollsman.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:26 - What is Paystack?
01:06 - Shola's background and previous company
4:26 - Paystack's YC application
6:01 - Meeting his cofounder
7:26 - Interviewing at YC
10:21 - Joining YC as a Nigerian company
10:56 - Differences between startups in Nigeria and the US
13:26 - Nigeria's payments market
15:56 - Paystack's growth
19:26 - Expanding to other countries and hiring
25:26 - The best part of doing YC
29:26 - Crypto developments in Africa
30:21 - Creative Joe asks - How difficult is it to get into YC?
30:56 - Educating US investors
32:06 - Paul Israel asks - What gaps do you think still exist in the Nigerian fintech space?
33:01 - Nelson asks - Are there any conventional startup advice that did not work for Paystack as their target market is Africa?
35:21 - Nelson asks - What are some important lessons he learnt while building Paystack?
37:46 - Nelson asks - What are some applications he would love to see been built on top of Paystack?
39:56 - Building for Africa
42:16 - Nestor Ezeagu asks - Do you think something like GoFundMe could work in Nigeria?
42:46 - Car Joyy asks - Can I receive payments as an MVP ecommerce site before registering as a company?
44:06 - Achyut Shrestha asks - What’s your tech stack?
44:41 - Jordan Jackson asks - What are the biggest cultural differences that you account for in UX and product design?
48:41 - Shola's outlook
50:36 - What he misses about life before Paystack
52:51 - Paystack in five years
54:16 - Music recommendations

#97 - David Hua and Vincent Ning Oct 11, 2018

David Hua is CEO and cofounder of Meadow. Meadow makes retail and delivery software for dispensaries. They were part of the Winter 2015 batch. You can check them out at GetMeadow.com. David’s on Twitter @Hua.
Vincent Ning is CEO and cofounder of Nabis. Nabis is a cannabis services group. They offer distribution, logistics, sales, and marketing. You can check them out at GetNabis.com. Vincent's on Twitter @vcning.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

***
Topics
00:38 - What David brought with him
5:48 - Microdosing
6:48 - What are people buying?
10:38 - Customer demographics
12:00 - CBD
14:58 - Changing vocabulary around cannabis
17:13 - What is Meadow?
17:38 - What is Nabis?
17:53 - Why did they choose to not do cannabis product manufacturing?
22:38 - Fundraising as a cannabis company
26:08 - Why is there not one dominant cannabis company?
29:53 - Legalization across Canada
31:38 - Banking as a cannabis company
36:13 - Taxes
37:38 - Price sensitivity
40:14 - Brand loyalty
43:23 - What will the market look like in 5-10 years?
50:08 - Cannabis media
52:23 - Psychedelics
56:38 - Exonerations and social equity programs

#96 - Mathilde Collin Oct 03, 2018

Mathilde Collin is the cofounder and CEO of Front. Front is a shared inbox for teams and they were part of the YC Summer 2014 batch.
You can check out Front at https://frontapp.com/
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:25 - Tuomas Grannas asks - What's your favorite LEGO theme?
1:25 - What is Front?
3:50 - Google Inbox shutting down
5:25 - Prioritizing features
7:50 - Features that have increased Front usage
9:50 - What Front looked like at launch
12:45 - Early user acquisition
15:40 - Starting Front and meeting her cofounder
19:10 - The idea for Front
20:25 - When her cofounder was diagnosed with cancer
23:20 - Hardest moments running Front
25:25 - Employee retention
30:55 - Transparency
32:40 - Front's office in France
33:30 - KP asks - What is the one unique insight about the problem you didn’t have at the start but only discovered later after your launch?
36:15 - Did she consider other ideas Front?
37:40- Jordan Jackson asks - Email at least for me - has taken on a different meaning in a life of messaging apps and chat platforms. It is more serious in a way. How do you see email evolving and the ecosystem that encompasses in peoples lives?
39:55 - If she could remove any email feature
41:20 - When did they hit product market fit?
45:05 - Meditation

#95 - Eli Schwartz Sep 27, 2018

Eli Schwartz is the Director of SEO and Growth at SurveyMonkey. He came in to answer commonly asked questions about SEO.
Eli blogs about SEO and growth at elischwartz.co
You can find him on Twitter at 5le.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:23 - Does SEO matter in 2018?
2:23 - Where should a company start with SEO?
3:53 - Who’s doing SEO well?
4:48 - Why is Amazon doing SEO well?
5:48 - How should you crosslink?
7:33 - Paying for links
7:58 - SEO don’t dos
8:38 - Things that are no longer useful in SEO
9:43 - Keywords
13:08 - Reviews
13:48 - Content
17:48 - Images
23:08 - Link building
28:23 - How much time to give SEO?
28:53 - Mobile
30:58 - Ranking
32:08 - International SEO
34:18 - Translation
37:38 - International search
39:53 - GDPR
42:13 - Hiring someone to do SEO
44:08 - What to do when you organic SEO disappears
46:53 - Metrics for an SEO hire
48:53 - Tools for SEO
50:23 - Getting started in SEO

#94 - Joan Lasenby Sep 17, 2018

Joan Lasenby is a University Reader in the Signal Processing and Communications Group of the Cambridge University Engineering Department, and is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Engineering at Trinity College. Here's a list of her published work.
In this episode we talk about Joan’s research into 3D reconstruction from multiple cameras and her interest in geometric algebra.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:32 - What's a tangible example of geometric algebra?
1:52 - What is geometric algebra?
6:47 - What resparked interest in geometric algebra?
7:42 - Why is it important?
11:32 - When did Joan start working on it?
13:27 - Rotations
17:17 - Computer vision in the early 90s
19:32 - Joan's fellowship at the Royal Society
23:32 - What's changed in computer vision since the 90s to allow for Joan's drone research?
30:07 - Machine learning in computer vision
31:52 - How Joan and her students are applying machine learning
35:02 - Unifying qualities of geometric algebra
41:02 - Joan's paper ending up on Hacker News
45:32 - Where could geometric algebra take hold?
47:32 - Running and mobility
48:32 - Where to learn more

#93 - Peter Reinhardt Sep 06, 2018

Peter Reinhardt is cofounder and CEO of Segment.
Segment helps companies capture data from every customer touchpoint and send it to the tools where it can be used most effectively.
They were part of the YC Summer 2011 batch.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Topics
00:26 - What is Segment?
1:56 - Segment’s first customers
3:31 - Their YC application
4:26 - Going through YC
5:56 - Realizing their first product didn’t work
10:56 - Launching Analytics.js
12:11 - Experiencing product market fit
17:21 - Debating whether to launch or build out the product
19:41 - Evan Farrell asks - You mentioned in the SS lecture that you had to totally pivot to Analytics.js to find PMF, is it possible to purely iterate on something people kinda like to find PMF, or should it be clear from the outset if a new idea is something people want?
20:56 - The importance of having a skeptic on your team
23:56 - Customer interviews
26:56 - Benjamin Liam asks - How did they know they have the right messaging to explain their product?
28:26 - Idea generation
33:11 - Danny Prol asks - What values and standards do you have in place for your team at Segment? And how do you actively build that culture into your company?
37:26 - Ashwin Doke asks - How has GDPR impacted Segment's business model?
39:41 - Andrew Pikul asks - Any advice he has on asking for more money than you're comfortable asking for.
42:11 - Juan Carlos Garza asks - How did YC help you to where Segment is right now?
43:41 - Juan Carlos Garza asks - In an early stage, what's the thin line between ignoring a customer suggested feature or moving a customer requested feature to the core of your application?
45:11 - Biggest learnings since YC
45:16 - Important hires at Segment

#92 - Ryan Petersen Aug 30, 2018

Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport.
Flexport is a global freight forwarder powered by software and analytics. They are making international trade easier for over 10,000 companies in 70 countries. They were part of the YC Winter 2014 batch.
***
Topics
0:23 - What is a freight forwarder?
3:08 - Selling electric scooters on eBay 15 years ago
5:53 - Ryan’s business school experience
10:23 - Amazon competing with their vendors
13:23 - Matt Susk asks - What were the most important takeaways from Columbia Business School? Would you encourage entrepreneurs to pursue a MBA?
17:03 - Tyler Hogge asks - How did you get your first three clients at Flexport?
20:03 - Being a solo founder
23:08 - Varun Khurana asks - What's your strategy for rapidly hiring the best talent in so many different global hubs?
25:53 - Challenges of scaling Flexport
27:38 - Some of Ryan’s favorite books
29:43 - Scaling culture
34:23 - Jassim Ali asks - How has the Trump policy on foreign trade affected your business so far?
39:23 - PowerDecal asks - How do you poach clients from legacy providers?
46:23 - Automation in freight forwarding
49:23 - Jason Yannos asks - If you weren't operating Flexport and had to source a new idea to work on, where would you start?
53:23 - Derisking product ideas
56:53 - Biggest lessons learned at Flexport

#91 - David Zeevi Aug 22, 2018

David Zeevi is a James S. McDonnell independent fellow at the Rockefeller University Center for Studies in Physics and Biology. He focuses on developing computational methods for studying microbial ecology in the human gut and in the marine environment, and its contribution to human and environmental health.
He was one of the authors on the paper Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Responses.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Apply for $120K in funding from YC.

***
Topics
01:15 - Why did David start working on personalized nutrition?
4:45 - How did the measure the effects of food in their study?
11:55 - How was the study standardized across people?
15:55 - How they measured an individual’s gut microbiome.
17:30 - What is the gut microbiome?
22:05 - Is there an ideal gut microbiome?
23:20 - How do you manipulate your gut microbiome?
24:50 - Fecal transplants.
26:55 - Elizabeth Iorns asks - Does post prandial glucose response regulation track with weight regulation? I.e. can they use their test to determine what individual people should eat or not eat to lose weight?
28:35 - Has this research been turned into a product?
29:35 - Who else worked on this research?
30:35 - How was their predictive algorithm made?
35:15 - Did they end up with any dietary suggestions?
36:15 - David’s bread study.
38:55 - Has David changed his own diet?
39:25 - Why fat was vilified.
43:15 - David’s ocean microbiome and other research.
51:05 - Traveling and your microbiome.
56:35 - Trying this out yourself.

#90 - Jessica Brillhart Aug 16, 2018

Jessica Brillhart is the founder of Vrai Pictures. They’re an independent immersive content studio.
Before founding Vrai, Jessica was the Principal Filmmaker for VR at Google.
The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
***
Questions
00:23 - Starting VRAI
10:23 - Story in film vs. VR
12:38 - Gaming
19:53 - Conditions at Omaha - The Weather Channel in VR
22:38 - Jessica's upcoming projects
27:48 - Andrew Peterman asks - How long until we'll be able to create 3D 360° video from cell phone hardware+amazing software?
30:13 - Matt asks - Where do you see VR in 10 years?
30:28 - Michael Hodapp asks - Does VR still have long term mass adoption potential, or will the market shift to AR?
32:23 - Will people be in VR for a significant percentage of their time in the future?
40:58 - Virginia Pigato asks - How can a traditional storyteller adapt to vr?
50:13 - Can Olcer asks - What key but non-obvious thing is missing for VR to become mainstream?
52:08 - Matt MacVey asks - What are some of the most exciting or scariest parts of social VR and what is the storytelling potential of social VR?
55:38 - Tony Cassara asks - What kind of dog do you have?

#89 - Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School Aug 07, 2018

Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung are both partners at YC.
This episode is about Startup School. It’s a free, online course we’re offering that starts on August 28th.
We’re also offering equity-free grants of $10,000 to 100 companies that participate in the course.
Anyone can sign up for the course at StartupSchool.org.
Read the transcript here.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

***
Topics
0:40 - What is Startup School?
3:40 - Who are the speakers this year?
5:00 - What are the different paths in Startup School?
7:00 - Success stories from last year’s Startup School.
8:55 - Why offer $10,000 grants?
10:00 - What deals are offered to the startups in Startup School?
11:00 - When does the course start?
12:45 - What are the requirements to complete the course?
15:15 - What are the topics that will be covered?
18:00 - What happens during office hours sessions?
22:30 - Who else is working on this course at YC?

#88 - Office Hours with Michael Seibel Aug 03, 2018

Michael Seibel is a Partner and the CEO of YC.
He cofounded Justin.tv, which was in the Winter 2007 batch and Socialcam, which was in the Winter 2012 batch.
For this episode we took questions from the internet. If you have questions for a future office hours episode, just tweet them our way.
Read the transcript here.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
We're accepting applications from startups for the Winter 2019 funding cycle. Apply here.
Questions
00:25 - Why is YC worth 7% of your company?
6:25 - Generating leverage when fundraising
12:07 - Youssef asks - How did you validate your product market fit?
15:00 - LC Carrier asks - How does YC feel about companies who don't want to raise VC after the program?
17:05 - Edmilson Rodrigues asks - Do companies need to be incorporated already to participate in YC?
18:50 - Alex Rodriguez asks - What do you look for in startups that haven't had good growth but continue to push through (e.g. AirBnB) that makes you accept them?
26:50 - Fedor Paretsky asks - Do you have techniques you encourage to make pitches sound more exciting?
35:05 - David Chen asks - How to find mentors and advisors?
39:25 - building EatNeat asks - What if anything are you specifically looking for in a startup that wants to be a part of the Startup School 2018?
40:00 - Ryan Carl Mercer asks - What's your preferred way organizing your time?
41:05 - John Rigler asks - Can intrapreneurship be effective? I recently returned to IBM, have a patent, and yet have only vague ideas about how to signal and organize other like-minded folks. Could this path sabotage my dreams?
41:55 - Horacio Chávez asks - How would you approach an investor who says "I won't invest unless you have a patent"?
42:35 - Yahya Elamrani asks - Why does it feel like entrepreneurs aren’t marriage material? Should an entrepreneur look for an entrepreneurial spouse?
44:15 - Yahya Elamrani asks - How intense do you really have to be to found a startup?
48:50 - Is there a particular stage of company that's best served by Startup School?
50:35 - How do you get the most out of Startup School?

#87 - Elad Gil Jul 27, 2018

Elad Gil is an entrepreneur, operator, and investor. He cofounded Color Genomics and Mixer Labs. Worked at Google and Twitter. And has invested in companies including Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe.
He just released the High Growth Handbook, which is a guide to scaling startups published by Stripe Press.
It contains tactical advice on key issues for post product-market fit companies such as the role of the CEO, hiring executives, late stage fundraising, M&A, and other topics. It also includes interviews with people in tech, including Sam Altman, President of YC Group.
You can find the High Growth Handbook on Amazon.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
We're accepting applications from startups for the Winter 2019 funding cycle. Apply here.
***
Topics
01:04 - Why should an entrepreneur read the High Growth Handbook?
5:35 - On Marc Andreessen's comment, "The companies that charge more tend to grow faster."
6:50 - Myths about startups
7:50 - Leon Coe asks - What types of businesses do you avoid investing in?
9:20 - Things to just say 'no' to
12:40 - Companies that may be too early
14:52 - On Naval Ravikant's comment, "The most successful class of people in silicon valley on a consistent basis are either the venture capitalists, or people who are very good at identifying companies that have just hit product/market fit. They have the background, expertise, and references that those companies really want to help them scale."
17:41 - On Claire Hughes Johnson's "Guide to Working with Claire"
19:40 - Masud Hossain asks - How did most of the companies you interviewed get their first 10 customers?
20:55 - Masud Hossain asks - Is content really king?
22:50 - Narayan Mallapur asks - Where do founders make the most mistakes? Is it on hiring? What steps should they take to avoid these pitfalls
24:55 - Brianne Kimmel asks - What are some lessons learned in highly regulated sectors? When should you hire a General Counsel? How do you prioritize public policy and lobbying efforts?
29:05 - Media cycles
30:55 - Marius Chawa asks - What are the top three things a startup "must" achieve before VC firms would line up to fund them?
34:45 - Taylor Caforio asks - My company is at our early MVP stage. What is he best way to find a balance between giving our earliest customers the 6 star treatment while also having swift and exponential growth in the back of our minds.
36:54 - Tanmay Khandelwal asks - When you are sprinting in growth stage, how do you predict engineers required and hire accordingly?
38:41 - TD Bryant II asks - When your organization is experiencing exponential growth, how do you choose which functions to outsource vs build/hire?
41:50 - Andrew Pikul asks - Who is your favorite Dragon Ball (Z/GT/Super) villain?

#86 - Jocko Willink and Mike Sarraille Jul 20, 2018

Jocko Willink and Mike Sarraille served together as Navy SEALs and now work together at Echelon Front, a company Jocko cofounded.
We met up to talk about a new initiative they’ve set up called Overwatch. Overwatch is a talent acquisition firm that matches employers with veterans from special operations forces and combat aviation. You can learn more about Overwatch at EFOverwatch.com.
They’re also hosting an event called the Muster in San Francisco on October 17th and 18th. You can sign up at ExtremeOwnership.com.
If you’d like to hear more from Mike and Jocko, check out Jocko Podcast Episode 134.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
We're accepting applications from startups for the Winter 2019 funding cycle. Apply here.

***
Topics
01:04 - Intros
5:07 - Mike and Jocko on how they transitioned out
9:37 - How the military prepares people for the private sector
13:47 - What is Overwatch?
23:32 - Preconceptions about veterans
28:24 - Advice for companies looking to hire veterans
31:03 - Jocko's next book, The Dichotomy of Leadership
33:58 - Mike and Jocko's working relationship
45:20 - How to set up your team so everyone can contribute
55:02 - What Mike and Jocko are trying to improve about themselves
58:45 - Alex Badalyan asks - What are some military tactics startups could adopt to increase team effectiveness and throughput?
1:00:47 - Allen asks - From your experience as a SEAL and in the business world, do two or more co-founders/leaders have a higher success rate? What are your thoughts on a solo leader/founder with a strong team and culture?
1:06:56 - Armando Neves asks - I liked Jocko's episode on strategy and the way of the Samurai (The Book of Five Rings), how much of the warrior mindset is he implementing on a day to day basis?
1:11:17 - Ryan Carl Mercer asks - Favorite MRE and thank you for your service sir.
1:14:59 - Spencer Clark asks - Is culture more decided by micro or macro policies & interactions?

#85 - YC Partner AMA at the Female Founders Conference Jul 11, 2018

Recorded live at our Female Founders Conference in New York, an AMA with Kat Manalac, Kirsty Nathoo, Adora Cheung, Holly Liu, Jessica Livingston, and Carolynn Levy.
This panel was hosted by Sharon Pope, Head of Marketing Programs at YC.
We’re also posting the other talks from the Female Founders Conference today. You can see all of them and read the transcripts at blog.ycombinator.com
If you’d like to learn more about the Female Founders Conference, head over to femalefoundersconference.org

#84 - João Batalha and Luís Batalha Jul 06, 2018

João Batalha and Luís Batalha are cofounders of Fermat’s Library.
Fermat’s Library is a platform for annotating papers. Each week they send out a paper annotated by their community. Some recent papers were Birds and Frogs by Freeman Dyson and Von Neumann's First Computer Program by Donald Knuth.
They’ve also built a Chrome Extension call Librarian for the arXiv which allows you to get direct links to references, do BibTeX extraction and make comments on papers.
You can find them at FermatsLibrary.com.
Read the transcript on our blog.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#83 - Scott Aaronson Jun 29, 2018

Scott Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. Before teaching at UT, he taught Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.
If you’ve listened to our other episodes about quantum computers and are curious to learn more, check out Scott’s book Quantum Computing Since Democritus.
And if you want to read Scott’s blog you can find that at scottaaronson.com/blog/.
Read the transcript on our blog.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#82 - Henrique Dubugras of Brex and Anu Hariharan Jun 27, 2018

Henrique Dubugras is the cofounder of Brex, which provides corporate cards for startups.
Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC.
Brex went through YC in the Winter 2017 batch and just closed their Series B, which was led by YC Continuity.
In addition to discussing how the Brex team built out their service, Anu and Henrique also cover the specifics of what it takes to build a fintech startup in 2018. And Henrique shares advice for young founders, as he started his first company at 16.
Read the transcript on our blog.

#81 - Announcing Work at a Startup Jun 22, 2018

Jared Friedman is a partner at YC and before that cofounded Scribd (YC S06).
Matt Long a software engineer at YC and before that cofounded Crocodoc (YC W10).
Today we’re talking about a project Jared, Matt, and several other people at YC have been working on. It’s called Work at a Startup and it’s like a common application for engineers to apply to many YC companies simultaneously.
We’re also hosting a Work at a Startup Expo on July 28th in Mountain View where you’ll be able to meet 35 rapidly growing YC companies. You can learn more and apply to attend at workatastartup.com/expo.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#80 - Office Hours with Adora Cheung Jun 13, 2018

Adora Cheung is a partner at YC and she also cofounded Homejoy, which went through YC in the Summer 2010 batch.
For this episode we took questions from the internet. If you have questions for a future office hours episode, just tweet them our way.
Questions
0:41 - topherPedersen asks - How many users did you have when you applied to YC? Also, how much revenue had you generated?
2:55 - Hatlii asks - How do you keep going if you can’t raise any money?
4:54 - Alejandro Ruperti asks - When/how do you decide to walk away from something you started?
10:41 - Chris Melnick-MacDonald asks - What advice and lessons did you learn in entering the #Canadian market?
13:16 - Yahya Elamrani asks - Do I have to work on culture in the very early stage?
15:39 - Adam Sanders asks - What was the best decision you made for Homejoy?
16:53 - Ujjawal Chauhan asks - Would love to know what’s the one thing she’d do differently in hindsight if she were to start over again?
20:35 - Nikita Butakov asks - What are some unique data science / machine learning challenges faced by Homejoy?
22:07 - Alejandro Ruperti asks - From @tferriss : how has a failure or apparent failure set you up for a later success?
32:37 - Siamak Freydoonnejad asks - What are the best practices when doing a cold reach out to an investor?
33:14 - 😎rliesaurus @ ✈️ 🇪🇺asks - Is Uber for X still a thing people would invest in, in the US?
36:21 - Fedor Paretsky asks - How have YC's views on cryptocurrency/blockchain-related startups changed since Coinbase?
42:56 - Manav asks - What type of companies is YC seeing more of this time around?
46:45 - Yahya Elamrani - What are the best marketing strategies for year one for a b2c startup?
53:55 - Yahya Elamrani asks - What would you say to a founder from a third world country where there is a big lack in tech talents (and you can't compete with big corps due to lack of resources) in term of hiring?
55:50 - Aspiring Angel asks - What’s the best way for investors interested in startup seed/angel funding get started? How does location affect the process?

#79 - Liz Wessel May 31, 2018

Liz Wessel is the cofounder and CEO of WayUp. WayUp is a job and internship platform for college students and recent graduates. They were part of the Winter 2015 YC batch.
Read the transcript here.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#78 - Simon Benjamin May 25, 2018

Simon Benjamin is a Professor of Quantum Technologies at Oxford. He is also the Principle Investigator for Oxford’s project on Quantum Optimisation and Machine Learning.
This episode is more technical than last week’s episode with John Preskill. We start by covering some fundamentals then go into different approaches for constructing and scaling a quantum computer.
Read the transcript here.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#77 - John Preskill May 16, 2018

John Preskill is a theoretical physicist and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech.
He once won a bet with Steven Hawking, which as he writes made him “briefly almost famous.” John and Kip Thorne bet that singularities could exist outside of black holes and after six years Hawking conceded that they were possible in very special, “nongeneric” conditions.
In this episode we cover what John’s been focusing on for years: quantum information, quantum computing, and quantum error correction.
Read the transcript here.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#76 - Carola Schönlieb May 09, 2018

Carola Schönlieb is an applied mathematician at the University of Cambridge.
She’s also a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and the head of the Image Analysis group at Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
In this episode we cover mathematical approaches to image processing.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#75 - Sean Mitchell May 04, 2018

Sean Mitchell is the cofounder and CEO of Rezi. REZI helps landlords find high quality, long-term tenants in 48 hours. They were part of the Winter 2017 batch.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#74 - Linda Xie and Avichal Garg May 02, 2018

Linda Xie is the cofounder of Scalar Capital, a cryptoasset fund. Before that she was a Product Manager at Coinbase (YC S12).
Avichal Garg is a Managing Partner at Electric Capital, a value fund for digital assets. He’s also an Expert at YC. Prior to that he was the Director of Product Management at Facebook.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#73 - Patrick Moberg and Holly Liu Apr 27, 2018

Patrick Moberg is the cofounder of Playdots, which is a mobile game studio in New York. They make Dots, Two Dots, and Dots and Co.
Holly Liu is is a Visiting Partner at YC. Before that she cofounded the gaming company Kabam.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#72 - Miles Brundage and Tim Hwang Apr 25, 2018

Miles Brundage is an AI Policy Research Fellow with the Strategic AI Research Center at the Future of Humanity Institute. He is also a PhD candidate in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University.
Miles recently co-authored The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation.
Tim Hwang is the Director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative. He is also a Visiting Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Fellow at the Knight-Stanford Project on Democracy and the Internet. This is Tim's second time on the podcast; he was also on episode 11.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#71 - Claire McDonnell and Jennifer Kim on Building an Inclusive Company Culture Apr 20, 2018

Claire McDonnell is cofounder and COO of True Link Financial (YC S13). True Link is a financial services firm that offers money management, investment, and insurance products, primarily for retirees.
Jennifer Kim is currently advising startups. Prior to that she was the Head of Employee Experience and Development at Lever. Lever makes recruiting software and they were part of the Summer 2012 batch.
Kat Manalac is a partner here at YC.

#70 - CoinList Cofounder Andy Bromberg and Ramon Recuero Apr 18, 2018

Andy Bromberg is the cofounder and CEO of CoinList. Coinlist provides financial infrastructure for token creators and investors.
Ramon Recuero is an engineer at YC. He's the author of the Decentralized Future Series, which you can read here.
If you'd like to listen to more podcasts about crypto, here are episodes with Juan Benet (IPFS) and Dalton Caldwell (YC) and Olaf Carlson-Wee (Polychain Capital) and Aaron Harris (YC).
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#69 - Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe and Sam Altman Apr 13, 2018

Anne Wojcicki is the cofounder and CEO of 23andMe, which provides direct-to-consumer genetic testing.
Sam Altman is the president of YC Group. He interviewed Anne for a series called How To Build The Future, which you can check out on our YouTube channel.

#68 - Cost vs Quality in Edtech - Keith Schacht, Avichal Garg, and Geoff Ralston Apr 06, 2018

Keith Schacht is the cofounder of Mystery Science, which makes lessons that inspire kids to love science. They were part of the Summer 2017 YC batch.
Avichal Garg is an Expert at YC and prior to that he was the Director of Product Management at Facebook.
Geoff Ralston is a Partner at YC and before that he cofounded Imagine K12, an edtech accelerator that’s now makes up YC’s edtech vertical.

#67 - 3D Home Printing for the Developing World - Alexandria Lafci and Brett Hagler of New Story Charity Apr 04, 2018

Alexandria Lafci and Brett Hagler are cofounders of New Story Charity.
New Story Charity builds homes and communities in the developing world. They were part of the Summer 2015 YC batch.
They just 3d printed their first home in Austin, Texas. You can check it out at 3DHome.org.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#66 - Breaking Down HackerRank's Survey of 40,000 Developers with Vivek Ravisankar Mar 30, 2018

Vivek Ravisankar is the CEO and cofounder of HackerRank, which was in the Summer 2011 batch.
They surveyed 40,000 developers on things including their favorite frameworks, what they want in a job, and how they learned to code. You can read the report here.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#65 - Funding Is an Outcome of Building a Good Business - Porter Braswell of Jopwell Mar 21, 2018

Porter Braswell is the CEO and cofounder of Jopwell (YC S15).
Jopwell is a career advancement platform for Black, Latinx, and Native American students and professionals.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#64 - Researching Psilocybin's Effects on Depression - Dr. Rosalind Watts Mar 15, 2018

Dr. Rosalind Watts is a clinical psychologist at the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London.
The Psychedelic Research Group focuses on two main areas: first, the action of psychedelic drugs in the brain and second, their clinical utility, e.g. as aides to psychotherapy, with a particular focus on depression.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#63 - The Number One Goal is Getting Started - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy Mar 02, 2018

Avni Patel Thompson is the founder and CEO of Poppy (YC W16). Poppy lets parents book the best caregivers with just a text.
We recorded this episode at our Female Founders Conference in Seattle. We’re also hosting female founder events in New York and SF this year. You can sign up to our newsletter to get updates about those events.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#62 - Dan Lewis, CEO of Convoy, on the Future of Freight Feb 28, 2018

Dan Lewis is the CEO and Cofounder of Convoy.
Convoy matches shippers with freight carriers, which helps the trucking industry run more efficiently because currently, over 40% of the trucks on the road are empty.
Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC Continuity.
Read the transcript here.

#61 - Sam Altman on Masters of Scale Feb 22, 2018

Reid Hoffman interviews Sam Altman on this uncut interview from the Masters of Scale podcast.

#60 - Startup Investor School Preview with Geoff Ralston Feb 07, 2018

Geoff Ralston is a Partner at YC and before that he cofounded Imagine K12.
This episode covers Startup Investor School. Startup Investor School is a free, 4-day course designed to educate early stage investors interested in investing in startups. You can sign up at investor.startupschool.org.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#59 - Providing Fair Financial Products for the 56% of the US Without Access to Them - Jake Rosenberg of LendUp Jan 31, 2018

Jake Rosenberg is the cofounder and CTO of LendUp (W12). They provide access to quality credit cards and loans without hidden fees or debt traps. Their customers are the 56% of Americans that have what is described as a “subprime” credit score, meaning they can’t be approved for credit by most banks.
Ali Rowghani is the CEO of YC Continuity.
Read the transcript on our blog.

#58 - It's Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done - Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo Jan 24, 2018

Sam Chaudhary is the cofounder and CEO of ClassDojo. They've raised $30M and have 30 employees.
Karen Lien is an Edtech Principal here at YC.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#57 - Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media Jan 17, 2018

Alex Blumberg is the cofounder of Gimlet Media. Gimlet makes several podcasts you’ve probably heard of–StartUp, The Pitch, and Reply All are a few.
Before Gimlet Alex worked on This American Life and Planet Money.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#56 - Leah Culver of Breaker and Tom Sparks of YC Answer Your Questions About Security and Podcasting Jan 05, 2018

Leah Culver is cofounder and CTO of Breaker, which is a social podcast listening and discovery app. They went through YC in the Winter 2017 batch. Leah’s also an author of both the OAuth and oEmbed API specifications.
Tom Sparks is an engineer on the YC Software team. He also cofounded Cryptoseal which went through YC in the Summer 2011 batch and was acquired by CloudFlare in 2014.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#55 - Tim Urban of Wait But Why Jan 03, 2018

Tim Urban cofounded the blog Wait But Why with Andrew Finn in 2013.
His posts about Artificial Intelligence, Elon Musk, and the Fermi Paradox have been read millions of times.
We discussed Tim's research strategy, the purpose of Wait But Why, and his thoughts on technologies including cryptocurrencies, A.I., and AR/VR.

#54 - Growth Office Hours: Round 2 Dec 15, 2017

Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer are partners at YC.
This episode is a follow-up to Anu's Growth Guide and the first Growth Office Hours.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#53 - Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem - Des Traynor of Intercom Dec 13, 2017

Des Traynor is the cofounder of Intercom.
Here's his talk Product Strategy Means Saying No and the blog post.

#52 - Making Physical Retail as Easy as Opening an Online Store - Ali Kriegsman and Alana Branston of Bulletin Dec 08, 2017

Ali Kriegsman and Alana Branston are the founders of Bulletin.
Bulletin is a platform that allows brands to share the cost of a physical store.
They currently have two locations, one in SoHo and one in Williamsburg and there are more to come.
Ali and Alana went through YC Fellowship and then the winter 2017 batch.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#51 - There's an Art to Getting Brilliant People to Surprise Themselves - Kevin Slavin of The Shed Dec 06, 2017

Kevin Slavin is the Chief Science and Technology Officer of The Shed, which is an art center in New York that’s opening in 2019.
Before The Shed, Kevin founded the Playful Systems group at MIT's Media Lab.
He also gave a TED talk in 2011 called How Algorithms Shape Our World.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#50 - Growth Office Hours with Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer Dec 01, 2017

Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer are Partners at YC.
This episode is a follow-up to Anu's Growth Guide.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#49 - Microbes, Robots, and Ambition - Robin Sloan on His Novel Sourdough Nov 29, 2017

Robin Sloan is a writer and media inventor based in Oakland.

He just released his second novel, Sourdough.
Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

#48 - The Future of Bike Sharing with Ofo Cofounder Yanqi Zhang and Anu Hariharan Nov 17, 2017

Yanqi Zhang is a cofounder and COO of Ofo.
Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC.

#47 - Baidu's COO, Qi Lu Discusses AI with Daniel Gross Nov 15, 2017

Qi Lu is the COO of Baidu.
Daniel Gross is a Partner at YC.

#46 - Tencent's Chief eXploration Officer, David Wallerstein on WeChat, QQ, and Gaming Nov 10, 2017

David Wallerstein is Tencent's Chief eXploration Officer.
Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC.

#45 - Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman Nov 08, 2017

Greg Brockman is the CTO and cofounder of OpenAI.
Szymon Sidor is a Research Scientist at OpenAI.
Sam Altman is the President of Y Combinator and Co-Chairman of OpenAI.
Watch their bot compete at The International.

#44 - Cindy Mi on Building VIPKID, the World's Largest English Learning Platform for Children Nov 03, 2017

Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKID. VIPKID is a 1-on-1 teaching platform where children in China learn english from North American teachers.
Anu Hariharan is a Partner here at YC.

#43 - Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett on Live Video's Struggle for Interestingness Nov 01, 2017

Matt Hackett and Casey Neistat are the cofounders of Beme, which was acquired by CNN last year.
You might already know Casey from his YouTube channel which now has over 8M subscribers.
And before Beme, Matt was a Hacker-in-Residence betaworks and the VP of Engineering at Tumblr.

#42 - Robotics and 3D Printing with Voodoo Manufacturing Oct 26, 2017

Oliver Ortlieb and Max Friefeld are two of Voodoo Manufacturing's four cofounders.
Voodoo went through YC in the W17 batch. They bridge the gap between prototype and mass production with 3D printing.
We're also joined by Daniel Gross, a Partner at YC.

#41 - Experiments in Art and Technology with Artforum Editor Michelle Kuo Oct 18, 2017

Michelle Kuo is Editor in Chief of Artforum.
Kat Mañalac is a Partner at YC.
Michelle came in to chat with us about art and technology and, in particular, a group called Experiments in Art and Technology.

#40 - Content Marketing Tips from Experts at First Round Capital and Andreessen Horowitz Oct 13, 2017

Camille Ricketts is the Head of Content and Marketing at First Round Capital.
Sonal Chokshi is an Editorial Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

#39 - Mr. Robot's Technical Producer and Writer - Kor Adana Oct 11, 2017

Kor Adana is a writer and technical producer on Mr. Robot.
Mr. Robot season three premieres tonight.

#38 - The More You Communicate with Users, the Higher Chance You'll Build Something They Want - Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt Oct 04, 2017

Ryan Hoover is the founder of Product Hunt.

Get a 10% discount on Ship pro plans by using this link.

#37 - Don't Start a Blog, Start a Cult - Mr. Money Mustache Sep 27, 2017

Pete Adeney, more commonly known as Mr. Money Mustache, retired at 30 after working as a software engineer for about ten years.
He blogs at MrMoneyMustache.com about how he saved money, where he invested it, and how he achieved "financial freedom through badassity".
You can apply to the W18 batch of YC here - ycombinator.com/apply

#36 - Your Whole Goal Is to Not Quit - Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers Sep 22, 2017

Courtland Allen is the founder of Indie Hackers, a place where the founders of profitable businesses and side projects can share their stories transparently, and where entrepreneurs can come to read and learn from those examples.

Check out the Indie Hackers podcast here.

#35 - The Technical Challenges of Measuring Gravitational Waves - Rana Adhikari of LIGO Sep 15, 2017

Rana Adhikari is a Professor of Physics at Caltech and a member of the LIGO team, who were the first to measure gravitational waves.
Their detection papers are available here.

#34 - Elizabeth Iorns on Biotech Companies in YC Sep 13, 2017

Elizabeth Iorns is cofounder and CEO of Science Exchange.
Here's info on the YC Fall Tour.
Apply to the Winter 2018 batch.

#33 - The Challenges a Repeat Founder Faces Sep 08, 2017

Tikhon Bernstam cofounded Scribd (YC S06) and Parse (YC S11).

Read the transcript here.

#32 - Hosain Rahman on The "Defibrillator Experiences" of Jawbone Sep 06, 2017

Hosain Rahman is the CEO and Founder of Jawbone. Jessica Livingston is a cofounder of YC.

Jessica interviewed Hosain during our 2014 Startup School and this is the recording of their conversation. If you'd like to check out our 2016 Startup School videos they're in a playlist here.

#31 - Spotting Ecommerce Trends in Shipping Data – Laura Behrens Wu Sep 01, 2017

Laura Behrens Wu is the CEO and cofounder of Shippo.

Read the transcript here.

#30 - Artist Lauren McCarthy Will Be Your Home's Brain Aug 29, 2017

Lauren McCarthy is an artist and assistant professor at UCLA.
Her latest project LAUREN, is a human intelligent smart home. Lauren will visit your home, deploy a series of smart devices, and watch over you remotely 24/7. Learn more here - http://get-lauren.com

#29 - Jack Dorsey On The Books That Helped Him Succeed Aug 25, 2017

Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter and Square. This is his talk from Startup School 2013.

Read the transcript here.

#28 - Prerequisites for Starting a Company - Phil Libin Aug 23, 2017

Phil Libin is the cofounder and CEO of All Turtles. Prior to that he was the CEO of Evernote. This is his 2013 Startup School talk.

Watch the video here.

Read the transcript here.

#27 - The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay Aug 18, 2017

Wade Foster is the CEO of Zapier (YC S12).

Read the transcript and their de-location post here.

#26 - Founders of Science Exchange, Goldbely, and The Flex Company Discuss Fundraising Aug 16, 2017

During the Female Founders Conference Kat Manalac invited three YC founders on stage to share their experiences of fundraising. The founders are Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange, Vanessa Torrivilla of Goldbely, and Erica Jensen of The Flex Company.

#25 - Baidu's AI Lab Director on Advancing Speech Recognition and Simulation Aug 11, 2017

Adam Coates is the Director of Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab.

Read the transcript here.

#24 - Padmasree Warrior on Designing Autonomous Vehicles - With Anu Hariharan at the Female Founders Conference Aug 09, 2017

Padmasree Warrior is the CEO of NIO.
Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC Continuity.

#23 - VMware Cofounder Diane Greene with Jessica Livingston at the Female Founders Conference Aug 04, 2017

Diane Greene is SVP of Google Cloud and she was also the CEO and cofounder of VMware.

Jessica Livingston is cofounder of YC.

#22 - Morgan DeBaun on Reaching 20M Millennials - With Kat Manalac at the Female Founders Conference Aug 02, 2017

Morgan DeBaun is the founder and CEO of Blavity.
Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC.

#21 - Emily Weiss on the Insights That Grew Glossier - With Amy Buechler at the Female Founders Conference Jul 26, 2017

Emily Weiss is the founder and CEO of Glossier.

Amy Buechler is Batch Director at YC.

Video and transcript are on the YC blog.

#20 - Making Music and Art Through Machine Learning - Doug Eck of Magenta Jul 21, 2017

Doug Eck is a research scientist at Google and he’s working on Magenta, a project making music and art through machine learning.

If you want to learn more you can check out Magenta.Tensorflow.org

#19 - Blockchain Investing - Olaf Carlson-Wee and Aaron Harris Jul 19, 2017

Olaf Carlson-Wee is the founder and CEO of Polychain Capital.

Aaron Harris is a Partner at YC.

#18 - Q&A with YC Partners at the Female Founders Conference Jul 14, 2017

This Q&A was recorded at our fourth annual Female Founders Conference.

Partners: Kat Manalac, Jessica Livingston, Adora Cheung, Anu Hariharan, Carolynn Levy, and Kirsty Nathoo.

#17 - Aileen Lee and Kirsty Nathoo at the Female Founders Conference Jul 12, 2017

Aileen Lee is the founder of Cowboy Ventures.

Kirsty Nathoo is CFO and a Partner at Y Combinator.

#16 - Mark Zuckerberg on How to Build the Future Jul 07, 2017

Mark Zuckerberg is the cofounder of Facebook.

Sam Altman is the president of YC Group and he interviewed Mark for a series called How To Build The Future, which you can watch on YC’s YouTube channel.

#15 - IPFS, CoinList, and the Filecoin ICO - Juan Benet and Dalton Caldwell Jun 30, 2017

Juan Benet is the founder of Protocol Labs (YC S14). They're working on IPFS, Filecoin, and Coinlist.

Dalton Caldwell is a Partner at YC.

#14 - Ex Machina's Scientific Advisor - Murray Shanahan Jun 28, 2017

Murray Shanahan was one of the scientific advisors on Ex Machina.

He's also a Research Scientist at DeepMind and professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London.

His book Embodiment and the Inner Life served as inspiration for Alex Garland while he was writing the screenplay for Ex Machina.

#13 - Scaling Growth - Gustaf Alstromer, Ed Baker, and Josh Elman Jun 23, 2017

Gustaf Alstromer is a YC Partner and prior to YC he worked on growth at Airbnb.

Ed Baker worked on growth at Uber and Facebook.

Josh Elman is a partner at Greylock.

The conversation was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, a private event hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners in April 2017.

#12 - How Should Business Schools Prepare Students for Startups? - Jeff Bussgang and Michael Seibel Jun 21, 2017

Jeff Bussgang is a lecturer at Harvard Business School and General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners.

Michael Seibel is CEO of YC.

#11 - At The Intersection of AI, Governments, and Google - Tim Hwang Jun 16, 2017

Tim Hwang is the Global Public Policy Lead on AI and Machine Learning for Google.

Read the transcript on our blog.

#10 - Office Hours with Ali Rowghani Jun 14, 2017

Ali Rowghani is CEO of Y Combinator Continuity, where he invests in and advises growth-stage startups. Ali directly contributed to the growth of two great companies -- at Twitter, as CFO then COO, and at Pixar as CFO and SVP of Strategic Planning.

Read the transcript on our blog.

#9 - Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman - From Startup to Scaleup Jun 09, 2017

Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman discuss the key changes founders should think about as they scale their company.
The conversation was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, a private event hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners in April 2017.

#8 - Rick and Morty Writer - Ryan Ridley Jun 07, 2017

Ryan Ridley is a writer on Rick and Morty. Before that he was a writer on Community.

Read the transcript and show notes on the YC blog.

#7 - Jessica Livingston on How to Build the Future May 31, 2017

Sam Altman interviews Jessica Livingston for a series called How To Build The Future, which you can watch on YC’s YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/ycombinator.

Read the transcript here: https://blog.ycombinator.com/jessica-livingston-on-htfbt/

#6 - Office Hours with Kat Manalac May 24, 2017

Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC.
Read the transcript here - https://blog.ycombinator.com/office-hours-with-kat-manalac/

#5 - An AI Primer with Wojciech Zaremba May 15, 2017

Wojciech Zaremba is a cofounder of OpenAI (https://openai.com).

OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company, focused on discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.

Read the transcript here (http://blog.ycombinator.com/an-ai-primer-with-wojciech-zaremba).

#4 - Elon Musk on How to Build the Future May 15, 2017

Sam Altman interviews Elon Musk for a series called How To Build The Future, which you can watch on YC’s YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/ycombinator).

Read the transcript here (http://blog.ycombinator.com/elon-musk-on-how-to-build-the-future/).

#3 - The Technical Advisor for Silicon Valley on HBO - Ed McManus May 15, 2017

Ed McManus was the technical advisor for season three of Silicon Valley on HBO.

He came in to talk about what his experience working on the show.

Read the transcript here (http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silicon-valley-on-hbo-ed-mcmanus).

#2 - Network Effects with Anu Hariharan May 15, 2017

Anu Hariharan is a Partner at YC Continuity (https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity) which is an investment fund dedicated to supporting founders as they scale their companies.

Read the transcript here (http://blog.ycombinator.com/anu-hariharan-on-network-effects/).