Y Combinator Startup Podcast

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

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

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

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

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 2001, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat did the math and realized Google’s entire search index would fit in RAM — then shipped it in a few days, and search got fast. In 2013, another napkin calculation showed that three minutes of daily speech recognition per user would require doubling Google’s server fleet. That one became the TPU. At Startup School 2026, Google’s Chief Scientist talks with YC’s Diana Hu through the thought experiments behind both, why inference hardware is the next specialization, and where two or three people in a room can still win.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/jeff-dean-the-1-rule-for-building

In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither.Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic (YC W16), the startup building America’s first supersonic airliner, to change that. At Startup School 2026, he shares how a cardboard mockup with Office Depot seats became XB-1, the first independently developed jet to break the sound barrier, and why founders have to build for both the worst day and the best day.He also answers founder questions about teaching yourself hard things, breaking into hardware without the right resume, and finding work-life harmony while building something ambitious.

Fresh off the launch of Opus 5, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny joins Diana Hu at Startup School 2026 to talk about what the newest models can do, how Claude Code came to be, and what it means to build products when the underlying capabilities keep accelerating.