Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Supabase has become one of the default backends for the AI coding era. The open source Postgres platform now has 13 million users, spins up more than a million databases every week, and roughly 70% of its new activity is coming from agents.As coding shifts from developers writing software by hand to agents building on their behalf, Supabase has been rebuilding itself around that new user.Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone joins Garry, Harj, and Jared on the Lightcone to talk about what happens when everyone can become a builder. They dive into why personal software may become as common as personal documents, how to design products that agents actually want to use, and why knowing what to build may matter more than knowing how to build it.

Marvin Schwaibold leads the product design studio at Shopify, where his team is rethinking some of the company’s most important products for the AI era. Before Shopify, he co-founded the design studio Molly, working with companies including Apple and Google and building a reputation for highly crafted, interactive design.In this episode of Design Review, Marvin joins YC’s Aaron Epstein to show how AI has changed his process, from using Figma as a scratchpad to building working prototypes directly with tools like Codex. He explains why designers are becoming more like editors, how AI is making them more full-stack, and why taste and judgment matter even more when the tools can build almost anything.Then they review viewer-submitted websites and break down how hierarchy, motion, typography, and restraint can make a product feel more intentional.

There’s a misconception that a successful launch video needs to cost tens of thousands of dollars and feel like a high-production commercial. But Farza Majeed has a different approach.

Farza is the founder of Clicky and previously built Buildspace, one of the largest online schools for people working on their own ideas. He’s been making videos for over a decade, and today his posts regularly get millions of views. Rather than treating launches as rare, high-stakes moments, he’s made them part of the everyday process of building a company.

Farza sat down with YC’s Aaron Epstein to share his playbook for turning demos into stories people actually want to watch. He breaks down how he scripts videos that still feel off the cuff, why founders should launch constantly, and how to figure out which channels actually convert.

Magic Patterns (YC W23) is one of the fastest-growing design tools in AI, helping product teams turn ideas into interactive, code-backed prototypes in minutes. Alex Danilowicz and his co-founder, both front-end engineers, built Magic Patterns to solve a problem they had themselves: finding a better way to turn ideas into something visual. They were among the first teams building prompt-to-design tools back in 2023.In this episode of Design Review, Alex joins YC’s Aaron Epstein to demo Magic Patterns and its new MagicOS canvas, where teams can bring together prompts, images, PRDs, and other context to explore ideas visually. Then they review a handful of startup websites to break down what makes a site feel “vibe coded,” where founders go wrong, and how to make AI-generated design feel more intentional.Chapters:00:00 - What Magic Patterns is03:01 - Nine months of pivots05:59 - Using the MCP from Cursor08:21 - The end stage is compressed now11:23 - Demo: postcards for every meetup city15:35 - The RollerCoaster Tycoon chocolate theme park18:17 - Site 1: Ego21:39 - Inputs you can't type into23:59 - Site 2: Sentient OS27:57 - "Free" should be giant30:20 - Instrument Serif and the em dash32:01 - Site 3: CeraNovus36:59 - Site 4: Slashy38:36 - Nobody clicks your tabs43:08 - Getting better at design as an engineer46:07 - What's next: Magic OSApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

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 this realization. They're working at the frontier of using general-purpose models to control robots, and their recent demos helped inspire the growing conversation around robot-use agents.

Together, we dig into the research behind that idea, from code-as-policies and vision-language-action models to the harnesses and evals needed to make these systems work in the real world.

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 on more ambitious problems, why experienced founders are having a resurgence, and why knowing what to build is becoming more important than simply knowing how to build it.

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 people and writing emails worth reading to following up, debugging low reply rates, and using customer language to sharpen your message.

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, Jeff joins us to talk about the future of open models and the story behind Ollama, from two years of searching for the right idea to building one of the most widely used AI developer tools in the world.

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.

Heart Aerospace (YC W19) just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown — a 100-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and $5 of electricity to get it off the ground.

In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Gustaf Alströmer visits Heart's pilot plant in LA and sits down with co-founder and CEO Anders Forslund to find out how they went from a 3D-printed model to a full-scale electric aircraft in seven years, why the jet engine has left short flights behind, and what cheap electric flight could unlock for the future of regional air travel.

Today, more than 3% of the world’s lawyers use Legora, and the company has grown from $1 million to $100 million in ARR since launching in October 2024.At Startup School 2026, Legora co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand shares how they built one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the world, from cold emailing lawyers and moving into a customer’s office to freezing sales for six months to rebuild the product. He explains why building a company is ultimately about people, how to create a culture that wants to win, and why founders have to learn to love the hustle.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/max-junestrand-you-need-the-willingness

Susan Kare joined Apple as an art history PhD who barely knew anything about computers. She went on to design many of the icons, typefaces, and symbols that helped make the original Macintosh feel understandable and human, defining a visual language for personal computing that still influences software today.At Startup School 2026, Susan shares the stories behind the Happy Mac, Command key, Chicago font, and more, along with the design lessons she learned from Steve Jobs, Paul Rand, and the original Mac team: make things meaningful and memorable, embrace constraints, iterate constantly, and use just enough detail to make an idea instantly clear.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/susan-kare-on-designing-the-original

Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, for long periods of time, without a human babysitting them.

At Startup School 2026, Physical Intelligence cofounder Chelsea Finn explains what it takes to build general-purpose robots that work in the real world. She shares how reinforcement learning pushed robot throughput up 2x, how their systems can run autonomously for hours, and why she believes robotics is entering its GPT era: moving from specialized models toward general-purpose systems that can work across tasks, robots, and environments.

Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/chelsea-finn-on-the-next-decade-in

Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few months later, OpenClaw had exploded into one of the biggest open source AI projects in the world, with nearly 3,000 contributors and a peak of 4.7 million weekly downloads.At Startup School 2026, Peter tells the story of what happened when OpenClaw took off, what he got wrong as it grew, and how he eventually stopped using the product he had built for himself.He shares why the best products often start with something that annoys you, why focus matters more as building gets easier, and why, in his words, “fun is velocity.”Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/peter-steinberger-what-happens-when

Science is building a retinal implant that restores vision to people who have gone blind. One patient has already used it to read a 300-page novel.Building a company like that requires a lot more than getting the technology right. At Startup School 2026, Science CEO Max Hodak explains how the company buys things and hires people, and why those systems determine how fast it can move.He also gets into why founders can’t delegate their judgment, and why there’s no set of five bullet points that makes a startup work.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/max-hodak-there-are-no-blanket-rules

AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing how they build, ship, and stand out.

In this episode of Design Review, Stephen Haney, founder of AI-native design tool Paper, joins YC General Partner Aaron Epstein to demo the agent-first workflow that's making Paper one of the fastest-growing design tools since Figma.

Using live redesigns of user-submitted websites as examples, they break down the most common AI design tells, show how to fix them in seconds, and explain why the biggest risk for founders isn't moving too slow, it's shipping something that looks like everyone else.

The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before.

At Startup School 2026, YC President & CEO Garry Tan explains why we're entering the era of personal AGI: AI agents that run on your own infrastructure, compound your knowledge over time, and dramatically increase your ability to build. He shares the tools and workflows he uses every day, why every founder should own their intelligence instead of renting it, and what it means to build under your own power.

Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/garry-tan-own-your-intelligence

Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space.

In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space. They've since raised $200 million, hit a billion-dollar valuation just 17 months after YC demo day, and filed with the FCC to deploy 88,000 more satellites.

In this episode, Philip walks us through their wild origin story, the engineering challenges behind the Starcloud-1, why they booked a SpaceX launch before they even knew what they were building, and how data centers in space make sense both economically and politically.

Waymo’s first autonomous demo took eighteen months. The product took fifteen years. Today, the Waymo Driver runs 500,000 trips a week — four million fully autonomous miles across fifteen cities, with 17 times fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers.

At Startup School 2026, Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov shares the seven lessons behind that journey, from bridging the gap between a demo and a real product to building systems that can safely operate in the physical world.

Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/dmitri-dolgov-seven-lessons-from

In 2009, Patrick and John Collison went to Startup School in Berkeley, got sushi in Potrero Hill afterward, and decided on the walk home to start Stripe. The reasoning, as Patrick remembers it, was that “we might as well because it probably won't be that hard.”

It took two years to launch.

Seventeen years later, at Startup School 2026, he talks with YC's Harj Taggar about dropping out of MIT twice, why founders should ask what happens if they succeed, and what Stripe's own data says about the best time to start a company.