Why The Harness Matters More Than The Model | YC Paper Club

Harnesses get dismissed as just scaffolding, just prompt engineering, and not real research. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. The same model weights that score 30% on ARC-AGI score 95% wit

Paul Graham on what motivates founders

Paul Graham on what drives founders through the hard parts: “Being dutiful is not enough. The obstacles are too fearsome for mere dutifulness.” “You know what actually motivates founders day to day? T

Hard Tech Startups Are Built One Milestone at a Time

At Heart Aerospace, Anders Forslund built the company one material milestone at a time, using each one to earn the credibility and capital to build the next. “We really had no technology. I came to YC

Open Models Change The Economics of AI

Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changin

Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders

YC Visiting Partner Vivian Shen sits down with Paul Graham at the original YC office in Mountain View to talk about startups, AI, ambition, and what makes great founders. Apply to Y Combinator: https:

The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew

Heart Aerospace (YC W19) just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown — a 100-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and $5 of electricity to get it off the ground. In this episode of

Going In Deep On Data | YC Paper Club

This week's YC Paper Club is focused on data. Three domain experts give talks to break down the challenges and frontiers of training data, benchmarks, and multilingual pre-training. Apply to Y Combina

Michael Kratsios: Inside the White House's AI Strategy

Michael Kratsios has seen the AI boom from both sides: as COO of Scale AI and inside the White House. Today, as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, he helps shape

Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac

Susan Kare joined Apple as an art history PhD who barely knew anything about computers. She went on to design many of the icons, typefaces, and symbols that helped make the original Macintosh feel und

Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics

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 babysittin

Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"

Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few months later, OpenClaw had exploded into one of the

Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough

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 tha

How To Design In The Agent Era

AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing how they build, ship, and stand out. In this episode of Design Review, Stephen Haney, founder of AI-native design tool Paper, joins YC Gen

Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence

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 tha

The Case For Data Centers In Space

Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space. In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large langu

Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work

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

Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?

In 2009, Patrick and John Collison went to Startup School in Berkeley, got sushi in Potrero Hill afterward, and decided on the walk home to start Stripe. The reasoning, as Patrick remembers it, was th

Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI

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