Y Combinator

Y Combinator is increasingly bullish on crypto despite current market downturns, expecting more startups to integrate crypto infrastructure for capital raising and payments. The firm argues that bear markets attract serious builders focused on real innovation rather than speculative gains, and highlights emerging opportunities in stablecoins, trading infrastructure, and financial rails.

By 2030, one in five Americans will be over 65, creating a massive caregiver shortage with millions of unfilled jobs. AI-powered technologies like conversational voice interfaces, monitoring systems, robotics, and care coordination software present new opportunities to support aging populations and family caregivers.

Stan Houlé, CEO of Dust, discusses building a model-agnostic AI platform for enterprise work in competition with frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. He shares insights on company building, fundraising strategy, pricing models, and maintaining defensibility in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.

AI represents the biggest platform shift since mobile and web, with intelligence now becoming capable and affordable enough to power consumer products at scale. The speaker argues that the optimal time to build AI-powered consumer applications is now, as costs are falling 10x annually and whoever builds first will establish market dominance across all major consumer categories.

The speaker advocates for a new cloud platform designed specifically for small software—purpose-built tools for individuals and small teams. Current cloud providers like AWS and Azure are overly complex for these use cases, and a simpler alternative could unlock new possibilities, particularly with AI agents, while addressing security and sharing challenges.

Secretary of the Army Dan Driskill announces a major overhaul of Army acquisition processes, calling for innovative startups to develop modular, commercially-based defense solutions including low-cost interceptors, advanced sensors, drones, and logistics systems capable of operating in extreme global environments.

James Hawkins, CEO of PostHog, discusses how the company pivoted from product analytics to building AI-native self-driving software that autonomously identifies and fixes product issues. He argues that ambitious startup ideas are actually easier to sell and fund than narrow solutions, emphasizing the importance of shipping quickly, maintaining strong co-founder partnerships, and targeting remarkable rather than unremarkable products.

The video explains how world models—neural networks that predict future states of an environment given actions—could solve AI's sample efficiency problem and potentially unlock AGI. By learning to simulate environments like humans do, AI systems could train policies on synthetic data rather than requiring millions of real-world examples, as demonstrated in recent robotics and gaming applications.

E Bufar, head of design at Y Combinator, demonstrates how she uses AI tools like Claude and Aqua to design products end-to-end, eliminating traditional design workflows. She walks through three projects—Paxel, Sodazine, and Startup School—showcasing techniques like voice-to-code development, comprehensive markdown documentation, and rapid iteration through disposable design tools.

The speaker explains dot plots, a visualization tool that displays individual user behavior over time by plotting user actions on a 2D grid. Unlike aggregate metrics like DAU/MAU, dot plots reveal usage patterns, feature adoption, and retention issues that are invisible in traditional dashboards.

Eddie Kim, Gusto co-founder and head of technology, discusses Gusto Co-founder, an AI product that automates business processes for small business owners. Built in 10 weeks by a 5-person team during a missed flight layover, the product lets customers automate tasks like payroll and scheduling through SMS and Slack, while proactively suggesting optimizations and uncovering hidden opportunities like tax credits.

Y Combinator leaders and Indian venture investors discuss why India is positioned to create the world's largest AI companies, emphasizing that success now depends on technological edge rather than market knowledge, and that AI has democratized startup building for young founders with high agency and customer obsession.

Max from Y Combinator provides tactical guidance on acquiring a startup's first 10 customers, emphasizing that success comes from understanding where target customers spend time, leveraging warm networks, showing up in person, and doing unscalable manual work rather than relying on automation tools.

Bryant Chou, co-founder of Webflow and now founder of Ploy, demonstrates his new AI-powered website and marketing platform that builds and optimizes websites while running marketing on autopilot. The conversation explores how domain expertise amplifies AI capabilities, and why experienced founders have a unique edge in the current AI era. Ploy is positioned as a full marketing brain for small businesses and startups, going beyond website creation to SEO, GEO, analytics, and customer intelligence.

YC partner John argues that founders should stop overthinking startup ideas and instead commit fully to a single idea, going deep on customer understanding. He presents a rubric for validating ideas through immersive customer research and outlines three qualities of strong AI-era startup ideas. He emphasizes that even failed deep dives produce valuable data and often surface better underlying opportunities.

Lalit Keshre, co-founder of Groww, discusses the company's journey from a failed robo-advisor to India's largest investment platform, emphasizing customer obsession, radical transparency, and organic growth. He shares how Groww achieved product-market fit within 10-15 days of launching their revamped product in May 2017 by showing all investment products with full transparency. The conversation covers co-founder alignment, navigating regulation, and how AI is lowering barriers to building consumer products.

A research meetup covering five AI topics: protein language model scaling laws (ESM Cambrian), self-play for LLMs (SGS algorithm), streaming RAG for voice agents, formal verification with Lean, and agentic software engineering workflows. Presenters demonstrate how foundational AI scaling principles are transferring into biology, mathematics, and production engineering.

Vidit Aatrey, co-founder of Meesho, discusses the company's evolution from a local fashion marketplace to India's largest shopping app with 250 million annual buyers. He explains how customer obsession drove multiple pivots, including abandoning their successful WhatsApp-based social commerce model to launch a direct consumer app in 2021. He also shares how AI is now the next frontier for reaching the remaining 750 million potential Indian consumers.

Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex, discusses how his company has gone deep on AI adoption, from personal use of Claude to enterprise-wide deployment of AI agents. He argues that CEOs must personally lead AI transformation, treating it as a company-wide refounding rather than a departmental initiative. The conversation covers AI agent security, token spend management, customer world models, and the broader philosophical shift required to build companies in an AI-native way.

Former attendees of YC Startup School share testimonials about how the event inspired them to found startups and apply to Y Combinator. The event is praised for its high-caliber speakers, community of ambitious peers, and its role as a gateway into the startup ecosystem. Attendees strongly encourage others to attend, calling it one of the most impactful experiences of their lives.