HeyJaredY Combinator Startup Podcast
We help founders make something people want. The Y Combinator Podcast is where builders talk about building. From the earliest days of an idea to scaling a company that changes the world, YC partners and founders share real stories, lessons, and tactics from the frontlines.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 24
- Latest publication
- Sep 26, 2026
- Audience
- Apple #55 · US
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest episodes
Robot-Use Agents: Why General-Purpose Models May Win in Robotics (opens the original)
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One of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software. In a recent essay, MIT professor Philip Isola argued that we may be entering the era of robot-use agents: general-purpose models that can control different robots, write policies, and learn new physical tasks with little or no robot-specific training.In this episode of Decoded, we're joined by the founders of Waddle Labs and RoboCurve, two of the startups whose work helped drive
The State of Startups in 2026 (opens the original)
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YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than ever.In this episode of The Lightcone, Garry, Jared, Diana, and Harj dig into what’s driving these changes and what they mean for founders. They discuss how AI is making it possible for smaller teams to take o
8 Ways To Improve Your Outbound Sales (opens the original)
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The best outbound starts before you automate anything. Founders need to learn who actually has the problem, what gets their attention, and what makes them reply. YC Visiting Partner Christina Gilbert recommends doing at least your first 100 outreaches by hand so you can learn those things yourself. Drawing from her experience generating and closing millions of dollars through founder-led sales at OneSchema, Christina shares eight ways founders can improve their outbound, from targeting the right
Open Models Change The Economics of AI (opens the original)
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Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing.Right now, the biggest shift he sees is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and capabilities that are rapidly catching up to the frontier labs. On Ollama Cloud, that shift has driven a 150x increase in token usage since the start of the year.In this episode of the Lightcone
Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders (opens the original)
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YC Visiting Partner Vivian Shen sits down with Paul Graham at the original YC office in Mountain View to talk about startups, AI, ambition, and what makes great founders.
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Audience
Apple #55 · US
Measured Sep 19, 2026
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