Ryan Loughlin

Eric Ries (@ericries) is the author of The Lean Startup, the NYT bestseller that became a playbook for a generation of founders. He's also the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange and has a new book out called Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. In this episode of Main Function, Eric sat down with YC's @garrytan to talk about why so many founders lose control of the companies they build, and what they can do to stop it. 00:47 — The Professor's Wake-Up Call 03:43 — A Wake, Not a Party 05:12 — Shareholder Primacy Explained 08:20 — The Jeff Lawson / Twilio Story 10:27 — When You Fire the Founder 12:01 — The Legend of Sol Price 15:38 — Costco's Secret Origin 18:33 — Mission-Controlled Companies 19:40 — Finding the Right Board 22:26 — Just Become a PBC 23:40 — Who Invented Shareholder Primacy? 27:08 — It's Not Even a Law 30:28 — The Builder's Intuition 34:47 — Novo Nordisk & the $600B Bet 39:47 — Industrial Foundations Outperform 42:08 — The Problem With VC Fund Structure 43:05 — Dual Class Isn't Enough 44:54 — Building Something That Outlives You 45:03 — Anthropic's Governance Story

"firetech" was a niche idea until Bill & @convectivecap made it an investable category. Fund I is top decile for its vintage, and the founders are proving that you can build impressive companies and work on problems that matter at the same time. Fund II is expanding into disaster resilience. Excited for what we get to do next.

Thanks for a great time, India 🇮🇳

We asked a dozen DevTool founders from companies like @RevenueCat, @greptile, @firecrawl, @infisical, @ollama, @resend, @mintlify, @UnslothAI, @porterdotrun, and @recallai, about the state of AI agents and the future of software engineering. In this episode of Founder FAQ, we covered everything from agents as customers and the end of coding, to advice for founders starting out and what they're most excited about going forward. Their answers might surprise you. 00:00 – Meet the Founders 03:00 – Building for Agents First 04:22 – Biggest Early Mistakes 07:15 – Do Founders Still Write Code? 09:22 – Most Unexpected AI Discoveries 12:09 – What's Underrated Right Now 14:38 – Predictions & What's Next

"I have goosebumps." Jaime from the Market at Edgewood grabbed the device out of our hands, scanned a barcode, and bear-hugged my co-founder in the dairy aisle. This is the moment when we knew we had something. 10 customers giving you bear hugs > 100 giving you handshakes.

Grocery stores do more volume than restaurants and hotels, and most of them still run on clipboards. In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC's @aaron_epstein sat down with @IamBrandonHill, the co-founder and CEO of @VoriHQ, a modern operating system for grocery stores. They discussed renting a refrigerated truck to save a botched dairy order, building AI agents that automatically update items on the shelf when costs change, and why Vori's $22 million Series B is a bet on the future of independent retail.

Startup School is coming to Paris! 🇫🇷 Hear from founders like @lxbrun of @amilabs, @oliveur of @datadoghq, @kiwicopple of @supabase, @james406 of @posthog, and more. And join the best builders and hackers from across France and Europe for a day of talks and sessions with YC partners.

We're entering a new era of software where a single person, working with AI agents, can build products that previously required entire teams. In this episode of the @LightconePod, they break down the rise of AI coding agents, "tokenmaxxing", and the emerging workflows behind tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw. They discuss why AI systems today feel less like productivity tools and more like collaborators, why the future of AI should be personal and user-controlled, and how founders are starting to build software in completely new ways. 00:00 — Will you control your AI? 00:47 — Coding again after 13 years 01:56 — Rebuilding a startup with Claude Code 05:50 — Software that thinks like a journalist 07:09 — The rise of “tokenmaxxing” 10:07 — The accidental creation of GStack 14:21 — The workflow behind 400x output 20:59 — Thin Harness, Fat Skills 24:35 — AI agents are like Ferraris 27:12 — The future of personal AI 38:37 — Buying back time with tokens

Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) has had one of the most extraordinary careers in tech. He started as a chess prodigy and video game designer at 17 before getting a PhD in neuroscience and going on to found DeepMind. His lab cracked Go, solved protein structure prediction with AlphaFold, and then gave it away free to every scientist on earth. That work won him the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Today he leads @GoogleDeepMind, pushing toward the same goal he set as a teenager: AGI. On this special live episode of How to Build the Future, he sat down with YC's @garrytan to talk about what still needs to happen to get us to AGI, his advice for founders on how to stay ahead of the curve, and what the next big scientific breakthroughs might be. 01:48 — What’s Missing Before We Get To AGI? 03:36 — Why Memory Is Still Unsolved 06:14 — How AlphaGo Shaped Gemini 08:06 — Why Smaller Models Are Getting So Powerful 10:46 — The 1000x Engineer 12:40 — Continual Learning and the Future of Agents 13:32 — Why AI Still Fails at Basic Reasoning 15:33 — Are Agents Overhyped or Just Getting Started? 18:31 — Can AI Become Truly Creative? 20:26 — Open Models, Gemma, and Local AI 22:26 — Why Gemini Was Built Multimodal 24:08 — What Happens When Inference Gets Cheap? 25:24 — From AlphaFold to the Virtual Cells 28:24 — AI as the Ultimate Tool for Science 30:43 — Advice for Founders 33:30 — The AlphaFold Breakthrough Pattern 35:20 — Can AI Make Real Scientific Discoveries? 37:59 — What to Build Before AGI Arrives

Even the most successful websites eventually need a redesign. Take @Stripe for example. After six years with the same homepage, Stripe recently unveiled a brand new site that reflects how the company has evolved over the past few years. So when is the time right for a new landing page? And what should you prioritize in the redesign? In this episode of Design Review, YC’s @aaron_epstein sat down Stripe’s Head of Design Katie Dill (@lil_dill) to pull the curtain back on their high profile redesign and to discuss how their team is evolving in a world dominated by new AI design tools. 00:30 - The Old Site 05:30 - “What is the point of a website?” 06:00 - Breaking down the new homepage 07:10 - The GDP counter (and how Stripe builds trust) 08:45 - The Bento Box that fixed the homepage 11:37 - Why great design feels effortless 15:40 - Craft, iteration, and getting it right 19:11 - Inside Stripe’s design process 27:10 - How AI is changing design 35:00 - The fight against mediocrity 40:00 - Walking the Store: Stripe’s Secret to Better Product Design

Congrats to @Starcloud_ on their $170M Series A at a $1.1B valuation! They're building data centers in space—just 17 months from YC Demo Day to unicorn. They launched their first satellite with an Nvidia H100 GPU last year and are now developing Starcloud-3, a spacecraft designed to launch from Starship that aims to be cost-competitive with Earth-based data centers for AI inference. techcrunch.com/2026/03/30/sta…

François Chollet (@fchollet) has spent years asking a different question than most of the AI world. Instead of scaling what already works, he’s trying to understand what intelligence actually is and how to build it from first principles. In this episode of the @LightconePod, he traces that path from his early work on deep learning to the creation of the @arcprize, and the launch of ARC V3, a new benchmark designed to measure something deeper than performance: the ability to learn, adapt, and reason efficiently in entirely new environments. He explains why today’s systems may be hitting limits, what recent breakthroughs really mean, and why reaching true general intelligence may require a fundamentally different approach. 00:00 - AGI by 2030? 00:31 - Introducing Ndea: A New Path Beyond Deep Learning 01:08 - A New ML Paradigm 01:30 - Replacing neural nets with compact symbolic programs 03:04 - Why Ndea Isn’t Competing With Coding Agents 05:20 - Why Everyone Might Be Wrong About Scaling LLMs 07:22 - Why Coding Agents Suddenly Work So Well 08:50 - The Limits of LLMs in Non-Verifiable Domains 10:48 - What AGI Actually Means (And Why Most Definitions Are Wrong) 13:30 - Why Deep Learning Hits a Wall 14:00 - ARC’s Origin Story 18:20 - ARC Benchmarks Explained: From V1 to V3 22:49 - The RL Loop Powering Coding Agents Today 27:03 - ARC-AGI V3: Measuring “Agentic Intelligence” 31:14 - Inside the ARC Game Studio 35:31 - Could AGI Fit in 10,000 Lines of Code? 44:01 - Building Ndea: From Idea to Compounding Research Stack 46:46 - The Future of ARC: Benchmarks That Evolve With AI 47:21 - Why There’s Still Huge Opportunity for New AI Paradigms 53:37 - How to Build a Breakout Open Source Project - Lessons From Keras 56:39 - Advice For How To Think About AI

We spent $15,000 on billboards targeting one person: the guy controlling all the chemical spend at a saltwater disposal company in Texas. We mapped his commute and bought every billboard between his house and the oil field. When we finally called, he said "I see your billboards everywhere." That landed us our first oil field contract. At the time our entire operation was a $10,000 reactor built from PVC pipes from Home Depot, turning corn sugar into industrial chemicals. People keep trying to throw it away. It still works. That leaking reactor started a multibillion-dollar company. @ycombinator visited our plant in Houston. The original PVC reactor is still on the floor next to the Bioforge.

🧪@Solugen is reinventing the trillion-dollar chemical manufacturing industry by combining biology and chemistry in a new way. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Jared Friedman visits co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti (@Gaurab) and Sean Hunt (@TungstenSeanide) at their Houston HQ to see how they went from a $7,000 PVC reactor to a billion-dollar company competing with industry giants. They cover the breakthrough behind their enzymatic + catalytic production, how they found their first customers, and why starting small and staying close to customers let them win in a capital-intensive industry. 00:00 - A New Kind of Chemical Plant 01:02 - Fusing Biology & Chemistry In a New Way 02:23 - The Eureka Moment: From Pancreatic Cancer to Hydrogen Peroxide 03:30 - Using A Sugar Feedstock Over Oil and Gas 04:22 - Proving Enzymes Work at Scale In Chemical Manufacturing 05:16 - The $7K PVC Reactor 06:44 - Finding First Customers at YC 08:12 - What The Co-founders Got Out of YC 09:33 - Seed Round to Bio Forge 10:32 - Scaling to a Full-Size Plant 11:57 - The Future of American Manufacturing 12:29 - The Next Decade of Solugen

Paul Graham is back on The Social Radars with @jesslivingston and @cjoneslevy. This time, they focus on what was happening behind the scenes at Y Combinator in the early years. PG shares how YC grew through word of mouth, what it was like working closely with founders, and how much of it they figured out as they went. Along the way, he recalls stories from the early batches—the advice that stuck, and how small decisions shaped what companies became. He also reflects on how the startup world has changed since then, from becoming more visible to how AI is influencing what founders build now. 0:00 - Paul Graham Returns 0:52 - “We Never Tried to Grow YC” 3:38 - How YC Actually Got Its First Founders 7:12 - Why Press Didn’t Matter 12:06 - The Real Reason YC Worked 17:48 - What It Felt Like Behind the Scenes 24:31 - How They Helped Founders Day to Day 30:57 - Writing Demo Day Pitches 36:42 - When Everything Started Getting Harder 44:18 - The Sam Altman Transition 52:06 - What Surprised PG About AI and the Next Generation of Founders 59:21 - Final Thoughts

The biggest wildfire in Nebraska history is currently burning out of control. The governor called a State of Emergency and said “it's important that all Nebraskans pray.” In our 1st episode of Disasterproof, here's a Texas town that didn’t have to rely on luck or prayer.

Max Hodak (@maxhodak_) is the co-founder of Neuralink and founder of @ScienceCorp_, a company building brain-computer interfaces that can restore sight. Science has developed a tiny retinal implant that stimulates cells in the eye to help blind patients see again. More than 40 patients have already received the treatment in clinical trials, including one who recently read a full novel for the first time in over a decade. In this episode of How to Build the Future, Max joined @garrytan to discuss how BCIs work, what it takes to engineer the brain, and why brain-computer interfaces may become one of the most important technologies of the next decade. 00:26 — The retinal chip helping blind patients see 01:51 — What brain-computer interfaces really are 03:37 — Could BCIs enhance intelligence? 05:44 — The brain’s incredible plasticity 09:23 — What it feels like to see with an implant 13:01 — Can we restore full human vision? 17:55 — Is the brain basically a computer? 24:59 — Max Hodak’s path into brain tech 28:57 — How Neuralink actually started 33:10 — How the brain represents information 39:47 — Bio-hybrid brain interfaces 44:32 — Building the company Science 51:27 — The future of BCIs and human longevity

Tune in: youtu.be/DNSXlBmukck

Startup School is back! Hear from Jensen Huang, @sama, @alexandr_wang, @JeffDean, and more. Join a hand-selected group of top CS students, researchers, and engineers for two days of talks, sessions with YC partners, and hands-on robotics demos, right here in San Francisco.

.@poetiq_ai is a new startup that recently achieved a major jump on the ARC-AGI benchmark by layering a recursive self-improvement system on top of existing models. In this episode of the @LightconePod, Poetiq's Founder & CEO @itfische joined us to discuss how small teams can build “reasoning harnesses” that outperform base models, what that means for startups and why automating prompt engineering may be one of the most powerful levers in AI today. 00:00 – Intro 00:40 – What Is Poetiq? 01:07 – Recursive Self-Improvement Explained 02:07 – The Fine-Tuning Trap 02:59 – “Stilts” for LLMs 03:14 – Recursive Self-Improvement vs. Fine-Tuning 05:05 – Taking the Top Spot on ARC-AGI 06:37 – Beating Claude on Humanity’s Last Exam 08:40 – How the Meta-System Works 10:26 – Beyond RL: A New S-Curve 11:32 – Automating Prompt Engineering 13:37 – From 5% to 95% Performance 14:50 – Early Access & Putting Your Agent on Stilts 16:17 – From YC Founder to DeepMind Researcher 18:29 – Advice for Engineers in the AI Era