Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator and influential startup investor and essayist, shares why ambitious founders should spend time in Silicon Valley and what they gain there. He discusses serendipitous meetings, faster investor decisions, the pay-it-forward culture, and how returning home can boost local ecosystems like Stockholm. Short stints or YC can compress those Valley benefits.

Gary Tan, YC partner turned builder who returned to coding and ships agent-driven tools like GStack and G-Brain. He describes rebuilding products quickly with AI coding agents. He talks about token-maxxing, agentic workflows like conductor/queue/QA, and why personal, user-controlled AI will reshape how one person builds powerful software.

Francois Chaubard, Alpha School founder and YC visiting partner focused on AI systems, explores why tiny recursive models can beat giants on hard reasoning tasks. He digs into HRM and TRM, transformer limits, chain of thought as a workaround, hidden-state memory, truncated backprop, and why recursion could become AI’s next scaling law.

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind co-founder and Nobel-winning AI researcher, dives into what still stands between today’s models and AGI. He explores memory, reasoning, agents, and why smaller local models are getting so powerful. The conversation also touches on AlphaGo’s influence on Gemini, virtual cells, AI for science, and what founders should build before AGI arrives.

Amjad Masad, Replit co-founder and CEO building AI-first coding tools, talks about turning natural language into real apps. He gets into why founders and domain experts may matter more than traditional developers. There is also a look at Agent 4, parallel workflows, enterprise adoption, and Replit’s shift from browser IDE to no-code platform.

A blueprint for companies built with AI at the core. It explores self-improving workflows, organizations that become fully queryable, and agents that can plan work, coordinate context, and write software. It also digs into why traditional management layers shrink, how lean teams are reshaped, and why startups can move first.

Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe and a product design leader, shares why Stripe rebuilt its homepage after years of growth. She gets into the site as a company manifesto, the GDP counter as a trust signal, bento layouts for product storytelling, and motion that feels alive. She also talks about using AI for brand imagery, design systems, and the fight against mediocre work.

Quan Vuong, co-founder of Physical Intelligence and a robotics researcher behind RT-2, explores why robotics may be hitting its GPT moment. He gets into cross-embodiment training, the data bottleneck, and zero-shot progress. They also dig into cloud-run robot models, laundry folding and warehouse packing, and why cheaper hardware could spark a wave of focused robotics startups.

David Tsao, BillionToOne co-founder and biotech researcher, joins Oguzhan Atay, the company’s co-founder and CEO in molecular diagnostics. They talk about spotting tiny DNA fragments in blood, turning messy biology into math, building a prenatal test at scale, fixing a rough go-to-market strategy, and pushing toward blood tests that could catch cancer before it spreads.

Karine Mellata, Variance co-founder and former Apple fraud engineer, talks about building AI agents that quietly help Fortune 500s fight fraud, review content, and verify identities. She gets into why secrecy matters, how messy enterprise data becomes usable, how state-backed abuse rings are uncovered, and the near-fatal accident that almost stopped the company.