Video•Nov 12, 2025
Biggest Lessons From Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel’s genius, according to insiders, lies more in how he structures his firms than in his individual investments. At Founders Fund, staff who lead deals are required to co‑invest alongside the firm, turning a perk into a test of conviction; if a partner balks at matching the firm’s stake, Thiel can question their belief in the opportunity versus a safe S&P 500 allocation. This and dozens of other implicit mechanisms compel team members to back their own theses with personal capital, reinforcing alignment with limited partners and the fund’s long‑term vision. The model creates a culture where confidence is continuously validated rather than merely proclaimed.
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Nov 11, 2025
Founder Stories: Cathy Di
Cathy Di, a Princeton senior, left her computer‑science studies to co‑found Daedalus Labs, a platform that simplifies building and deploying AI agents. After a last‑minute application, her team was accepted into Y Combinator’s summer batch, turning an idea with no...
By YCombinator
Video•Nov 10, 2025
Founder Stories: Saurav Kumar
Saurav Kumar, a recent UIUC computer science and statistics graduate, founded Fleetline, a Silicon Valley startup that uses graph algorithms to better position trucks for future demand, promising up to a 20% revenue lift for logistics firms. The company has...
By YCombinator
Video•Nov 9, 2025
SaaStr's Jason AI: Revolutionizing Founder Advice #shorts
SaaStr launched an AI platform called Delphi, a digital clone of its founder‑advice persona Jason, that ingests roughly 20 million words of the company’s 12‑year content library—including YouTube videos, tweets and LinkedIn posts. The tool lets entrepreneurs ask real‑time questions about...
By Jason Lemkin
Video•Nov 7, 2025
Founder Stories: Priya Khandelwal
Priya Khandelwal, co‑founder and CEO of Nixo, leads a startup that helps AI companies achieve SaaS‑level margins from custom deployments and services. Transitioning from Stanford AI research to entrepreneurship, she credits Y Combinator’s network for accelerating Nixo’s growth and simplifying...
By YCombinator
Video•Nov 6, 2025
Navan's IPO: Who Wins? & Harvey Raises $150M at $8BN Price & Why Google Is a Buy, Amazon Is a...
The panel dissected Navan’s recent IPO, noting the company priced near the top of its range at a $5 billion valuation only to trade down to roughly $4.8‑4.9 billion, challenging Bill Gurley’s notion that IPO allocations are always free money. They explained...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Nov 6, 2025
From Early Failures to ‘Clash of Clans’ and ‘Brawl Stars’ - Supercell Ft Ilkka Paananen
Supercell was founded on a reverse‑hierarchy model that puts game‑development teams, dubbed "cells," in charge of vision, a philosophy born from co‑founder Ilkka Paananen’s belief that developers should be the company’s superstars. After an early Facebook MMO, Gunshine, showed promise...
By Sequoia Capital
Video•Nov 5, 2025
The AI Revolution in B2B: Insights From SaaStr CEO's and Qualified's CEO
SaaStr and Qualified CEOs discussed their rapid adoption of AI agents to automate sales and support functions, starting with a generalist agent that handled 20% of qualification tasks and scaling to 12 verticalized agents across SDR, BDR, marketing, and customer...
By Jason Lemkin
Video•Nov 5, 2025
OpenAI Sora 2 Team: How Generative Video Will Unlock Creativity and World Models
OpenAI’s Sora team unveiled Sora 2, a next‑generation generative video model that uses diffusion transformers and space‑time tokens to simulate entire video sequences with physics‑consistent behavior. By treating video as a world simulator, Sora 2 can maintain object permanence and produce realistic...
By Sequoia Capital
Video•Nov 3, 2025
Cohere's Chief Scientist, Joelle Pineau: Why Scaling Laws Will Continue & Future of Synthetic Data
Cohere’s chief scientist Joelle Pineau, a former Meta researcher, discussed the durability of scaling laws, the current limits of reinforcement learning (RL) and the shift toward enterprise‑focused, on‑premise AI models. She emphasized that while compute and data yield roughly linear...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Nov 2, 2025
Why I Picked Angel Investing Over MBAs
A Princeton graduate who had long coveted a Stanford MBA decided to skip the program, treating the $120,000 tuition as a sunk cost and instead investing that money in early‑stage startups alongside angel investor Mike Maples. He framed the decision...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Oct 31, 2025
100M Views… Zero Impact?
The speaker notes that viral video clips—even those surpassing 100 million views—often generate negligible traffic to the underlying long‑form podcast, with download numbers remaining flat. He attributes this to platform operators who, backed by well‑funded data teams, promote engagement metrics that...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Oct 30, 2025
Good News For Startups: Enterprise Is Bad At AI
A viral reading of an MIT study that claimed most AI projects fail is misleading, say podcast hosts who dug into the report and enterprise reality. The true takeaway: large organizations routinely botch AI deployments because internal IT, entrenched consultants...
By YCombinator
Video•Oct 28, 2025
Why AI Salaries Are Outrageous
Compensation for top AI talent has ballooned to eye-popping levels, with recent graduates from elite schools reportedly receiving $50–$100 million packages and marquee names being offered deals worth up to $1 billion. That surge reflects a frenzy in tech and...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Oct 28, 2025
From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups
A founder recounts building an AI legal assistant—launched after pivoting to GPT‑4-era models—that scaled rapidly and was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million. He outlines three idea categories for AI startups: assist professionals with tasks, replace human labor, or...
By YCombinator
Video•Oct 28, 2025
Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan: Scaling Beyond Moore's Law to Million-GPU Clusters
NVIDIA CTO Michael Kagan said the AI compute frontier has shifted from squeezing transistors on a chip to stitching thousands—ultimately millions—of GPUs into single, rack‑scale machines connected by high‑performance networks. He credited Mellanox’s interconnect technology (now part of NVIDIA) with...
By Sequoia Capital
Video•Oct 25, 2025
Most Common Growth Mistake (And How to Avoid It)
The video warns that the most common growth mistake is reflexively copying competitors’ tactics without grounding decisions in customer context or data. The speaker recounts a Pinterest case where teams replicated Facebook’s seven-part onboarding and product flow, spent weeks implementing...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Oct 23, 2025
Transformers Explained: The Discovery That Changed AI Forever
The video traces the evolution of modern AI architecture from early recurrent networks to the transformer, explaining how key innovations — LSTMs that solved vanishing gradients, sequence-to-sequence models with attention that aligned inputs and outputs, and finally the 2017 transformer...
By YCombinator
Video•Oct 23, 2025
Zipline Ft Keller Cliffton - Reinventing Delivery with Instant Drone Transport
Zipline co-founder and CEO Keller R. Clifton recounts the startup’s risky pivot from consumer robotics to autonomous medical logistics after early investor skepticism and near-collapse. The team shut down their toy business, studied global health logistics, and chose Rwanda for...
By Sequoia Capital
Video•Oct 22, 2025
The State of AI + Software: Where It’s Going - Fast
Speakers argue that AI-native B2B products do not work out of the box and require intensive, hands-on onboarding — often via "forward deployed engineers" who sit with customers to ingest data, train models, and iterate until agents perform reliably. This...
By Jason Lemkin
Video•Oct 21, 2025
Securing the AI Frontier: Irregular Founder Dan Lahav
Dan Lahav, founder of Irregular, argues that as AI models evolve into autonomous agents that interact with each other and perform economic tasks, security must be reinvented from first principles. He warns emergent, non-deterministic behaviors—such as one agent socially engineering...
By Sequoia Capital
Video•Oct 20, 2025
Everything You Need To Know About Venture
Harry Stebbings recounts founding his venture firm from a London bedroom with no contacts or capital and growing it into an $850 million manager that has backed $12 billion in companies, including four valued at $10 billion. He frames fundraising...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Oct 20, 2025
Deel CEO, Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation
Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz said the company has raised just over $300 million at a valuation above $17 billion in a round co-led by Ribbit Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Coatue. He highlighted that Deel has been profitable for three years,...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Oct 14, 2025
What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs
Fears that AI will either annihilate jobs or amount to another overhyped technology are both overstated; historical and economic evidence suggests AI will reconfigure labor rather than replace it wholesale. The video uses radiology, containerization, and cloud computing as examples...
By YCombinator
Video•Oct 12, 2025
The 2 Biggest Mistakes We Made
Snowflake's leadership admits to two strategic mistakes: dismissing the need to build a world-class data science notebook and underestimating competitors like Databricks, and deprioritizing new-customer acquisition while optimizing for an IPO. Engineering resisted expanding beyond a cloud data warehouse into...
By Harry Stebbings
Video•Oct 9, 2025
This Startup Is Deleting 29% Of All CO2 Emissions
Remora has developed the first commercial carbon-capture systems for heavy vehicles, retrofitting semi-trucks and locomotives to extract and purify CO2 from exhaust into beverage-grade product. The startup says its technology can cut a vehicle’s emissions by at least 80% and...
By YCombinator
Video•Oct 9, 2025
SaaStr AI Day Live: The State of AI + Software with Jason Lemkin
At SaaStr AI Day, Jason Lemkin outlined how AI is rapidly reshaping B2B SaaS go-to-market teams, describing his own small team’s jump from zero to nearly 20 AI agents across support, SDR/BDR and Salesforce integrations in a matter of months....
By Jason Lemkin