We help founders make something people want.
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Srinivas Y Podcasts
This is all about respect to children. They also deserve respect as we adults. So lets be the change in this movement of respecting children
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What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs
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8:00For 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 wha…
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How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out
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35:49Karri 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 ma…
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The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device
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12:46
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12:46Paul 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 …
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Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions
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Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI
1:04:04
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1:04:04Ever 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, d…
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Fintech 3.0: Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto
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42:00We 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 …
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Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era
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40:27For 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 har…
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The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad
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42:01Amjad 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 fu…
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The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew
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50:42Bob 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 De…
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Michael Truell: Building Cursor at 23, Taking on GitHub Copilot, and Advice to Engineering Students
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27:55
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27:55Michael 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, w…
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GPT-OSS vs. Qwen vs. Deepseek: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures
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12:31
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12:31OpenAI 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 tech…
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How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)
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45:25In 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. M…
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The Sales Playbook for Founders | Startup School
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18:38Navigating 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 valu…
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Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design
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40:36Dylan 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…
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The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street
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46:15
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46:15Brothers 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 use…
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Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan
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40:47Jared 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…
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Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen
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43:41For 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 …
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Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything
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44:52
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44:52Chelsea 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 …
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Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Coding Agents, Autonomy, and the Future of Work
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35:50
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35:50Amjad 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 …
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John Jumper: AlphaFold and the Future of Science
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27:12John 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 A…
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Aravind Srinivas: The Race to Build the AI Browser of the Future
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43:12Aravind 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 w…
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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 ca…
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François Chollet: The ARC Prize & How We Get to AGI
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34:47François 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 …
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Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI
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44:21A 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 b…
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Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products
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35:46Kirsten 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 t…
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Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs
40:29
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40:29A 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…
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Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware
42:44
42:44
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42:44A 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 …
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Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful
49:40
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49:40A 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 guid…
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Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
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39:31Andrej 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, …
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Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents And Why Taste Still Matters
37:28
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37:28Michael 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 h…
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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…
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AI Apps Are Broken — Here's How To Fix Them
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30:07In 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 colla…
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How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job
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19:11Coding 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 exp…
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How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School
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16:39AI 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 becom…
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How Zepto Became India’s Fastest Growing Startup
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38:23Imagine 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 goi…
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Why America Stopped Innovating - And How We Can Start Again
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34:12Not 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…
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What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game
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20:43In 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.…
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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…
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Customer Obsession Made Gusto A $9.6 Billion Company
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24:58Gusto (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.
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The Future Of Design With Figma's Dylan Field
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37:41Design 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…
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How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas
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34:38YC 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
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Building A Supersonic Plane Company From The Ground Up
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13:45Imagine 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 …
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The Right (And Wrong) Way To Spend Money At Your Startup
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29:06Many 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 ma…
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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 …
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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.
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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, t…
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Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder
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24:31Two-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 t…
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How David Lieb Turned A Failed Startup Into Google Photos | Backstory
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19:32YC 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 pivote…
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How To Start A Dev Tools Company with Nicolas Dessaigne | Startup School
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32:56YC'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 t…
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Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders | The Breakdown
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22:42Since 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 lo…
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