You?ve probably already heard all about OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot). The viral sensation is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own device, connects with messaging apps you already use, and goes beyond chat to actually execute tasks like managing your email, calendars, files, workflows, and more. Now meet the man behind it. YC?s Raphael Schaad sat down with Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, to discuss the ?aha? moment behind the viral personal AI agent, why local-first agents could replace many of today?s apps, and how personal agents will reshape the future of software.

Chapters:

00:00 ? OpenClaw takes over the internet

00:44 ? Life after going viral

01:28 ? Why OpenClaw took off, what sets it apart

02:56 ? Bots talking to bots (and hiring humans)

04:11 ? From ?God AI? to swarm intelligence

05:07 ? Peter?s original ?aha? moment

06:38 ? Rebuilding the agent as a conversation

07:38 ? The moment it exceeded expectations

10:21 ? Are apps going to disappear?

12:31 ? Memory, data silos, and ownership

14:39 ? The privacy reality of personal agents

15:05 ? Letting the bot loose in public Discord

16:55 ? Giving an agent a personality

18:19 ? Contrarian building philosophy

20:09 ? CLIs vs MCPs

21:28 ? Building for humans first

21:46 ? The road ahead

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply

Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings? Maybe they're addicted to coding agents! In this episode of Lightcone, Calvin French-Owen ? a co-founder of Segment and former engineer on OpenAI's Codex team ? joins us to talk about why coding agents suddenly feel so powerful, the differences between Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, and what the future of work will look like.

When you're starting out, it isn?t enough to just build a minimum viable product. You also need a minimum evolvable product - one that can adapt to the needs of those critical early customers. In this episode of Main Function, YC General Partner Ankit Gupta offers an update to the classic MVP playbook. He?ll outline strategies for getting your first customers, the power of adaptability and how feedback from early users will ultimately shape the future of your product and your company.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply

Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Chapters:

00:00 ? The Minimum Evolvable Product

00:46 ? Finding the First Believers

01:29 ? Counterintuitive Rules To Get Early Users

02:10 ? Learn Fast, Don?t Fear Churn

02:52 ? How Early Users Shape the Market You Enter

04:22 ? Tesla Case Study

05:14 ? How To Build To Evolve

Stoke Space is racing to build the world's first fully reusable rockets that can launch, survive reentry, and fly again and again. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC?s Aaron Epstein sits down with Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman to find out why they chose to take on one of the hardest problems in rocket science, how an obsession with efficiency gives them an edge, and what full reusability could unlock for the future of spaceflight.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply

Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

2025 was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode, the YC partners break down the surprises of the year, from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the application layer, and why the next wave of AI startups may be just getting started.

ARC-AGI is redefining how to measure progress on the path to AGI - focusing on reasoning, generalization, and adaptability instead of memorization or scale.

During this month's NeurIPS 2025 conference, YC's Diana Hu sat down with ARC Prize Foundation President Greg Kamradt to find out why most AI benchmarks fail, how ARC-AGI reveals the limits of today?s models, and why measuring intelligence may be harder than building it.

Head of Design Ryo Lu helped transform Cursor from a feature-layer on top of VS Code into one of the world's leading AI code editors.He joins YC's Aaron Epstein on Design Review to talk about the path that brought him to Cursor, how rapid prototyping reshaped the core product and how he's breaking down the barriers that once separated designers and coders.

In just a few years, James Hawkins took PostHog from an idea hacked together right before YC's W20 deadline to a unicorn powering product analytics for thousands of teams.

He joins YC's Brad Flora to talk about surviving six months of "pivot hell," why open-source analytics was the breakthrough, and how PostHog grew from fighting for its first users to launching full product lines?plus what he's learned about momentum, staying close to customers, and using transparency and humor to build a company that stands out.

Every major shift in consumer tech has a moment when it suddenly becomes accessible to millions. Michael Mignano helped spark one of those moments with Anchor, making podcast creation something anyone could do with a tap. Now at Lightspeed, he sees AI bringing a similar leap to music, media, and everyday apps.In this conversation, he and Garry trace the arc from the early days of social audio to today's consumer AI boom?and dig into what founders should focus on as the next generation of creative tools takes shape.

Cursor Head of Design Ryo Lu has spent his career at the intersection of design and engineering?from building fan sites as a kid to designing products at Stripe, Asana, and Notion. Now he's rethinking how software itself gets made.

On this episode of Design Review, Ryo joins YC's Aaron Epstein to break down how great product websites communicate what a company does. They walk through sites from early-stage startups, calling out the small choices in structure, clarity, and brand that help users understand a product instantly ? and the ones that get in the way.

Starcloud recently made history by launching a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 into orbit ? the first time a GPU that powerful has ever operated in space. It's the first step toward building AI data centers in orbit, powered by continuous sunlight and cooled by radiating heat into deep space.Their approach could one day rival the world's biggest data centers while using less energy, zero fresh water, and far lower emissions.In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Aaron Epstein visits Starcloud's HQ, where co-founders Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, and Adi Oltean explain how they built a working prototype in just 15 months ? and why big tech is racing to space for AI compute.

Most founders think hiring is about interviewing. But it's actually about selling.For Startup School, Juicebox co-founder & CEO David Paffenholz joins YC's Harj Taggar to share how early-stage founders can find, pitch, and close top engineering and sales talent? from crafting better outreach to winning great hires from Big Tech? even when you're an unknown startup.

Jake Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million.In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he shared how his team did it?from picking the right idea to building AI products that actually work?and how founders can turn a cool demo into a reliable tool used by real customers.

Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the Transformer.In this video, YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language ? from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need ? the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era.

Every founder faces moments where they?re not sure what to do next ? such as how to go to market with AI products, when to pivot, and who/when to hire.

In this episode of Office Hours, YC partners Pete Koomen, Brad Flora, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Gustaf Alströmer answer real questions from founders and share stories about how great teams build conviction, learn faster, and make better decisions as they grow.

For years, we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work, the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced, and more hopeful.From radiology to software engineering, the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster, demand for human creativity and judgment grows.YC's Garry Tan explores what history, economics, and real companies show us? that technology doesn't replace people, it redefines what we can do.

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the issue tracking tool used by thousands of high-growth companies. Before Linear, he was the first designer at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb.On Design Review with YC's Aaron Epstein, Karri shares how his design background shaped Linear?s product philosophy, why quality and craft matter from day one, what founders should look for when hiring, and how AI is changing the way teams build. It?s a deep dive into building products that truly stand out.

Paul Gross and his team at Remora are trying to do something that?s never been done before.

They're building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains?capturing CO2 from moving vehicles before it enters the atmosphere, then turning those emissions into revenue by selling it to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products.

In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Gustaf Alströmer visits Remora's headquarters outside Detroit to see how a recent college grad with no engineering background is helping transform the $2 trillion transportation industry.

Jordan Fisher is the co-founder & CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answers?asking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away.He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right now? What happens when software becomes commoditized? How do you build trust as teams shrink and AI takes on more responsibility?

Ever wonder what it actually takes to train a frontier AI model?YC General Partner Ankit Gupta sits down with Nick Joseph, Anthropic's Head of Pre-training, to explore the engineering challenges behind training Claude?from managing thousands of GPUs and debugging cursed bugs to balancing compute between pre-training and RL. We cover scaling laws, data strategies, team composition, and why the hardest problems in AI are often infrastructure problems, not ML problems.

We are entering the era of Fintech 3.0. Regulatory clarity, growing consumer adoption, and low-cost chains have paved the way for a golden age of building in crypto ? and at YC, Base, and Coinbase we want to fund builders to seize this moment. In this episode of Main Function, YC's Harj Taggar and Base's Jesse Pollak sat down to discuss what kinds of companies they're most excited to see, why this is such an exciting time in crypto, and what the future could look like onchain.More on our latest RFS: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/build-onchain

For nearly two decades, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes work?guiding the company through the rise of mobile, the cloud, and now the age of AI.In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School, Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term, the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves, and why he believes AI represents the most transformative shift yet.

Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit, now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He's spent nearly a decade making programming accessible to all?and with the rise of AI, that vision is closer than ever.In this talk from AI Startup School on June 17, 2025, Amjad traces the arc of computing from mainframes to personal computers to a future where AI agents can create software on demand. He predicts that the value of traditional software will approach zero, fundamentally reshaping how companies are built and how work gets done.

Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir, and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model.

During his time at Palantir, he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today.

On this episode of The Lightcone, he explains how FDEs became central to today's startups, why "doing things that don't scale at scale" works, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for founders working in AI.

Michael Truell on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.At 25, Michael Truell has already built Cursor into one of the fastest-growing companies in AI coding, hitting $100M ARR in just a year. In this fireside chat with YC General Partner Diana Hu, he shares the lessons that came from years of failed projects with his co-founders, why he believes programming is still essential even as AI changes how we code, and how Cursor is taking on GitHub Copilot with the conviction that all of software development will flow through models.

OpenAI recently released its first open-weights model since GPT-2, entering a field led by DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen.YC's Ankit Gupta breaks down everything you need to know about these top OSS models, including what sets them apart under the hood. He?ll compare their approaches to mixture-of-experts, long-context training, and post-training techniques that shape reasoning and alignment?and explore how different design choices lead to surprisingly similar performance.

In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC General Partner Gustaf Alströmer is joined by Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups in the world. In just 13 months, Max and his team scaled from 10 to 100 people, raised $80M, and cracked the challenge of selling to one of the most skeptical industries. Max shares insights on building a successful vertical AI company, selling to conservative markets, and sheds light on what the future of legal tech looks like.

Navigating B2B sales for the first time can feel slow and overwhelming.Drawing from his experience founding Monzo and GoCardless, YC's Tom Blomfield shares his playbook for running a tight sales process that lands real, recurring revenue. He walks through each step?free and paid pilots, opt-out contracts, long-term deals?and shows how to prove value and close customers.

Dylan Field on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Dylan Field co-founded Figma to bring the design process online and make it multiplayer. From a meme maker built on WebGL to a design platform powering millions, Figma?s journey hit a major milestone with its IPO last week.In this conversation, Dylan shares the early challenges of building in the browser, the early risks and pivotal choices that shaped Figma?s growth, the principles that guided its product and community, and how he thinks about building tools that empower creativity at scale.

Brothers Chaz and Arnie Englander started Model ML after building and selling two YC companies.

What began as a tool to help them analyze deals has grown into a full AI-powered workspace purpose-built for financial services, empowering firms to create automations and workflows that reflect exactly how their teams operate. And it's already being used by 10% of the world's top investment banks and private equity firms to automate everything from client-ready PowerPoint decks to deep-dive research and due diligence?by orchestrating AI agents that work like expert team members.

In this conversation with YC Partner Gustaf Alstromer, they discuss going from internal tool to production platform, the power of perseverance, and their ambition to build a billion-dollar company with just ten people.

Jared Kaplan on June 16th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Jared Kaplan started out as a theoretical physicist chasing questions about the universe. Then he helped uncover one of AI?s most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable, almost physical way.That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language models?and led him to co-found Anthropic.In this talk, he walks through how that discovery reshaped the path to human-level AI, what it means for future models like Claude, and why even the dumbest questions can lead to the biggest breakthroughs. He reflects on memory, oversight, and what?s left to solve as models grow smarter?and longer-horizon tasks come within reach.

For this episode of Design Review, YC?s Aaron Epstein is joined by Karri Saarinen, co-founder & CEO of Linear, one of the top designer-founders working today. Together, they'll review several sites from the YC community with an eye for how to build and maintain a high-quality brand.

Thank you to these companies for volunteering to have their sites reviewed*:Sprites AI (https://www.sprites.ai)GigaML (https://gigaml.com)UnReal Milk (https://www.unrealmilk.com)Confident AI (https://www.confident-ai.com)Dropback (https://www.dropback.com)*Some of the featured websites may be updated between the time we film and publish

Chelsea Finn on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley, where she pioneered meta?learning methods, and Google Brain, Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and co?founder of Physical Intelligence, she?s using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy, real-world environments rather than confined lab setups.In this talk, Chelsea traces the evolution of her team?s work?from early experiments on robotic grasping and vision to today?s ambitious efforts at folding laundry, tidying kitchens, and generalizing across tasks?all without hand-crafted code. Instead, they used scalable foundation models and massive datasets, teaching robots physical common sense as they learn by doing. She shares stories of the rocky setbacks, the surprises hidden in data, and the moment it all clicked: robots equipped with generalizable physical intelligence can indeed adapt and assist in the unpredictable world around us.

Amjad Masad started Replit to make programming accessible to anyone, anywhere. What began as a tool for learning to code has grown into a platform pushing the limits of AI-assisted software creation and recently surpassed $100M in ARR.On The Breakdown with Tom and Dave, Amjad shares the journey from his early days in Jordan, working on open-source projects, to leading Replit through major pivots from "teach a billion people to code" to "let anyone build software." He discusses the evolving nature of programming, the future of work, and the next generation of human-computer collaboration.

John Jumper on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

John Jumper is a physicist-turned-computational biologist who led DeepMind?s AlphaFold team?and earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving protein folding, a decades-old scientific challenge.

In this talk, he shares how a deep learning breakthrough at CASP14 turned into AlphaFold 1 and then AlphaFold 2, delivering atomic accuracy predictions and revolutionizing biology. He explains the scientific puzzle behind protein folding, the key algorithmic breakthroughs, and the impact of making millions of protein structures accessible to researchers worldwide.

Aravind Srinivas on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Aravind Srinivas started Perplexity with one goal: to rethink how we search, browse, and interact with information online. In this conversation, he shares the journey from hacking together a natural-language-to-SQL search tool to building a product used by millions around the world.He talks about the big bet on the AI-powered browser, why agents?not just chatbots?are the next step, and how speed, accuracy, and focus help a startup compete against giants. Along the way, he reflects on co-founder dynamics, early technical challenges, and what it takes to keep building when the biggest players in the world are racing alongside you.

Andrew Ng on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Andrew Ng has helped shape some of the most influential movements in modern AI?from online education to deep learning to AI entrepreneurship. In this talk, he shares what he?s learning now: why execution speed matters more than ever, how agentic workflows are changing what startups can build, and why concreteness beats vagueness when turning ideas into products. He reflects on the rise of AI coding assistants, the shifting bottlenecks in product development, and why, despite faster software, it?s still human judgment and responsibility that will shape what comes next.

François Chollet on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

François?Chollet is a leading voice in AI. He's the creator of the Keras library, author of Deep Learning with Python, and the founder of the ARC Prize, a global competition aimed at measuring true general intelligence.

He's spent years thinking deeply about what intelligence actually is?and why scaling up today?s AI models isn?t enough to reach it.

In this talk, he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized skills, and lays out a path toward true general intelligence?AI that can adapt on the fly, reason in new situations, and invent novel solutions. He explains why abstraction and compositionality matter, how ARC became the benchmark for progress, and what his team at a new research lab called Ndea is building next.

A fireside with Dr. Fei-Fei Li on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Dr. Fei-Fei Li is often called the godmother of AI?and for good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it, she was helping build the foundation.In this fireside, she recounts the creation of ImageNet, a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods, the shock of seeing convolutional networks outperform expectations in 2012, and how those breakthroughs led to captioning, storytelling, and ultimately, generative models.Now, she?s taking on one of AI?s hardest frontiers: spatial intelligence. Fei-Fei shares why modeling the 3D world is essential for AGI?and why it may be even more difficult than language.

Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades ? from Warby Parker to Chime to Dollar Shave Club.

In this conversation with Garry, she shares how great products (not marketing tricks) still win, why AI is unlocking a new kind of emotional relationship between consumers and technology, and what founders can learn from the messy creative stage we're in right now. She also breaks down how shifts in distribution, wellness, and digital behavior are reshaping what it means to build for real human needs.

A fireside with Satya Nadella on June 17, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Satya Nadella started at Microsoft in 1992 as an engineer. Three decades later, he?s now Chairman & CEO, navigating the company through one of the most profound technological shifts yet: the rise of AI.In this conversation, he shares how Microsoft is thinking about this moment? from the infrastructure needed to train frontier models, to the social permission required to use that compute. He draws parallels to the early PC and internet eras, breaks down what makes a great team, and reflects on what he?d build if he were starting his career today.

A fireside with Sam Altman at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Sam Altman grew up obsessed with technology, broke into the Stanford mainframe as a kid, and dropped out to start his first company before turning 20.In this conversation, he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAI?sharing what he?s learned about ambition, the weight of responsibility, and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career, the limits of personal productivity, and why, in the end, it's all still about finding people you like working with and doing something that matters.

A fireside with Elon Musk at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Before rockets and robots, Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk, he walks through the early days of Zip2, the Falcon 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the ?miracle? of Tesla surviving 2008. He shares the thinking that guided him?building from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that we?re in the middle of an intelligence big bang.

Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We?ve entered the era of ?Software 3.0,? where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest.He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itself? that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer.

Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing

Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time?and why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.

Fusion may still sound like science fiction? but it might not be for much longer. With AI pushing demand for clean power to new highs, a breakthrough may finally be close.

For Decoded, YC General Partner Gustaf Alstromer traces the history of fusion, the physics behind it, and the engineering challenges that stalled it for nearly a century.

He also looks at how Helion is approaching the problem differently, as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by 2028.

In this episode of The Breakdown, Tom and Dave are joined by fellow YC General Partner Pete Koomen to lay out a new vision for how AI should actually work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software, but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don't want to do.

From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators, they dig into what it means to build AI-native software?and why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think.

Coding agents are no longer a distant idea?they're already starting to reshape how we work.

YC's Tom Blomfield and David Lieb discuss how AI coding tools are transforming software development, why small, high-agency teams will be able to do what once took armies of engineers, and why there's never been a better time to start something new.

They explore the bigger picture too: a future where there's abundance, knowledge work becomes more accessible, and founders have more leverage than ever before.

If you're thinking about building, there's no better moment than right now.

AI can't yet one-shot an entire product?but with the rise of vibe coding, it's getting close. YC's Tom Blomfield has spent the last month building side projects with tools like Claude Code, Windsurf, and Aqua, seeing just how far you can push modern LLMs. From writing full-stack apps to debugging with a single paste of an error message, AI is becoming a legit collaborator in the dev process. This is a playbook for anyone who wants to get the most out of vibe coding and build faster.

Imagine ordering groceries and having them show up at your doorstep in just 10 minutes. That?s the promise of Zepto, the fastest-growing e-commerce company in India.

In this episode of How To Build The Future, Garry sits down with Aadit Palicha, the co-founder and CEO of Zepto, to discuss how they got started in a Whatsapp group, what it?s like going up against incumbents like Amazon and Zomato and how the future of e-commerce is changing in the age of intelligence.