Y Combinator Startup Podcast
Why America Stopped Innovating - And How We Can Start Again
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.
4 apr. 2025 - 34 min 12 s
What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game
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.
28 mars 2025 - 20 min 43 s
How to Build the Future: Tony Xu
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.
26 mars 2025 - 31 min 32 s
Customer Obsession Made Gusto A $9.6 Billion Company
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.
18 mars 2025 - 24 min 58 s
The Future Of Design With Figma's Dylan Field
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.
13 mars 2025 - 37 min 41 s
How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas
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
21 feb. 2025 - 34 min 38 s
Building A Supersonic Plane Company From The Ground Up
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.
14 feb. 2025 - 13 min 45 s
The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup
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
12 feb. 2025 - 29 min 06 s
How To Build The AGI Future: Bob McGrew
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.
31 jan. 2025 - 30 min 44 s
How To Use AI In Your Startup
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.
15 jan. 2025 - 14 min 02 s