Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Feb 21 2025 238 ep. 40 mins 840
Y Combinator Startup Podcast artwork

We help founders make something people want.

  Technology
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How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas

Feb 21 2025 34 mins  
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 13 mins  
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

The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup

Feb 12 2025 29 mins  
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 mistak

How To Build The AGI Future: Bob McGrew

Jan 31 2025 30 mins  
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

How To Use AI In Your Startup

Jan 15 2025 14 mins  
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 43 mins  
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

Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder

Jan 08 2025 24 mins  
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 Dalt

How David Lieb Turned A Failed Startup Into Google Photos | Backstory

Dec 18 2024 19 mins  
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 acquire

How To Start A Dev Tools Company with Nicolas Dessaigne | Startup School

Nov 26 2024 32 mins  
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�

Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders | The Breakdown

Nov 21 2024 22 mins  
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