Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthroughs in modern computing. At Startup School 2026

Self-Maintaining APIs

APIs change constantly, but the way providers communicate those changes is still broken. Breaking updates go unnoticed, new features get buried in changelogs, and customers often find out only after s

What Actually Makes A Startup Durable

In this session from Startup School Paris, YC partners field questions from the audience on how founders should be operating in the AI era. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Wor

AI-Native Compliance Infrastructure

Financial compliance still runs on spreadsheets, disconnected software, and growing teams of specialists. As companies expand into new markets, the cost and complexity of staying compliant can grow fa

Proving You’re Human

A finance worker recently wired $25 million after joining a video call with his CFO and colleagues. Every other person on the call was a deepfake. As voice and video become easier to fake, the interne

What Big Tech Missed And How Startups Can Still Win

In this talk from Startup School Paris, AMI CEO Alexandre LeBrun talks about his journey building Vertos, selling Wit.ai to Facebook, and why the best advice for early founders is to pick an extremely

Why Physical AI Is the Next Platform Shift

In this talk from Startup School Paris, Encord Co-CEO Eric Landau discusses leaving a lucrative quant career during the most profitable month his desk had ever seen, why PMF for Encord was a slow dail

Data for the Real World

AI has become superhuman at code, language, and images because it has enormous amounts of data to learn from. But our understanding of the physical world is still limited by sparse sensors and models

New Operating Systems for the Physical World

Most of the global workforce does not sit at a desk, but the software used to manage physical work has barely changed in decades. The next operating systems will coordinate humans, robots, and AI agen

He Built the World's #1 Open-Source Coding Agent

Jay V is the founder and CEO of Opencode, an open-source alternative to Claude Code that works with any model you want. It's one of the fastest-growing products in AI: 13 million monthly active users,

How Photoroom Trained Themselves To Dream Bigger

In this chat from Startup School Paris, the founders of Photoroom expand on why going through YC transformed their ambition from a vague dream of building a billion-dollar company into a concrete, ach

The Best Time to Build in Crypto

Crypto is in a bear market, but the underlying technology is becoming more useful than ever. Stablecoins are spreading across financial institutions, tokenized assets are reshaping trading, fintech co

AI for the Aging Population

By 2030, one in five Americans will be over 65, and there are nowhere near enough caregivers to support them. AI could help older adults live safely and independently through better voice interfaces,

Scientists Are Built for Startups

If you’re a scientist or researcher, you may be more prepared to start a company than you think. Before becoming founders, Arvind Veluvali, Ayman Saleh, and Dima Yanovsky all worked at NASA, where the

AI-Powered Consumer Products for 1 Billion People

Every major platform shift creates new consumer giants. But three years into the AI era, ChatGPT is still the only new icon on most people’s home screens. As intelligence gets better and dramatically

Compute at Sea

AI is running out of compute, and data centers are running out of electricity and land. One possible solution is to move compute offshore. The ocean offers abundant space, sunlight, and natural coolin

Multiplayer AI

The best work tools became more powerful when they became multiplayer. But AI is still mostly trapped in private chats, with agents working in sessions that teammates can’t join or influence. The next

A Cloud for Small Software

Agents make it easy to build personal tools for yourself or your team. But deploying, securing, and sharing that software is still far more complicated than creating it. A cloud built for small softwa

The Future of American Defense

Warfare is at an inflection point, and the old ways of Army acquisition simply don't keep pace with modern threats. The Army is replacing the old playbook with commercially developed, modular technolo

The Primer

The best education has always come from one-on-one tutoring, but that privilege has historically been reserved for very few people. AI could give every child a patient, adaptive tutor that grows with

Why Ambitious Startup Ideas Are Actually Easier To Sell

In this discussion from Startup School Paris, PostHog CEO James Hawkins reflects on a number of startup topics including going from one product to twenty, why European founders need to stop focusing o

World Models, JEPA And The Path To Sample-Efficient RL

In this episode of Decoded, Ankit and Francois walk through the motivation and math behind world models. They cover a number of areas including why sample efficiency is one of the biggest unsolved pro

YC's Head of Design Shows You How To Design With AI

AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing the way they think, prototype, and build. In this episode of Design Review, YC Head of Design Eve Bouffard joins General Partner Aaron Eps

Dot Plots: How to Actually See What Your Users Are Doing

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is relying on aggregate user metrics instead of understanding how any individuals use their product. In this episode of Startup School, YC General Partner Dav

Solving the Blank Canvas Problem: Gusto's AI Co-Founder

Eddie Kim is the co-founder and Head of Technology at Gusto (W12), a payroll and HR platform serving over 500,000 small businesses in the U.S. that recently crossed $1 billion in annual revenue — with

India Can Create The Largest AI Companies

In this final panel from Startup School India, the hosts reflect on why India's deep technical talent makes it uniquely positioned to produce some of the world's largest companies in this new AI wave

How to Get Your First 10 Customers

When most founders look for customers, they reach for cold email and automation tools. But your first 10 customers almost never come from a tool. They come from you, working your warm network and doin

The Age Of The 40-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Here

Bryant Chou co-founded Webflow, which today powers around 1% of all websites on the internet. Now he's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI-powered website and marketing platform that doesn't

Pick One Idea and Go Deep

Many founders get stuck trying to find the perfect startup idea before they commit. But the perfect idea doesn't exist in the abstract. The only way to find what works is to pick one, go deep, and get

How Meesho Became India’s Biggest Shopping App

Vidit Aatrey is the co-founder and CEO of Meesho (S16), an e-commerce platform built for mass-market India that has grown to about 1 millions sellers and 2.5 billion annual orders. Since launching in

The Most AI-Pilled CEO We Know

Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn't just another tool, it's a new foundation for building pr

Startup School is back!

Two days, packed with world-class speakers, hands-on demos, small group sessions with YC partners, and a room full of the most ambitious technical builders from around the world. July 25–26 in San Fra

We just launched Paxel!

Paxel is a free tool that helps you understand how you build with AI coding agents. It analyzes your Claude, Codex, and Cursor sessions and gives you a builder profile: how you plan, how you steer age

How Legora Went From YC to $100M ARR in 18 Months

Max Junestrand was a college student in Sweden with a McKinsey offer in his back pocket. Instead, he and two co-founders went all in on legal AI — and built Legora (YC W24) into one of the fastest-gro