Y Combinator
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Y Combinator publishes practical startup guidance on product building, fundraising, founder decision-making, and scaling high-growth technology companies.
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Included for practical education on practical startup guidance on product building, fundraising, founder decision-making, and scaling high-growth technology companies.
Showing 320 digests for Y Combinator.
AI startups, agency, and the good timeline: a YC founder retreat debrief
Y Combinator
January 24, 2025
Case studies
9
AI strategy & adoption
8
Business models
7
YC batches now average 10% week-on-week growth across the cohort.
Your eval set — not your codebase — is your most defensible asset.
Blitzscaling is dead; small teams are hitting $10–20M ARR with AI leverage.
AI strategy & adoption
YouTube
How to use AI in your startup: a practical framework from YC
Y Combinator
January 15, 2025
AI strategy & adoption
9
Pivoting
6
Business models
5
Switching to an AI idea without better customer insight changes nothing.
Healthcare's $1.4T admin burden is almost entirely automatable with agents.
Being in San Francisco right now is like walking downstairs to ask Pinterest about SEO.
Founder interviews
YouTube
Parker Conrad on compound software, Zenefits, and building Rippling
Y Combinator
January 10, 2025
Founder interviews
10
Business models
7
AI strategy & adoption
5
Why narrow point-solution software is hitting a structural business model wall
Building the same company twice — and why Rippling skipped two years of sales
AI's real enterprise power is reading everything, not generating anything
Founder interviews
YouTube
Lessons from building a $2B SaaS company as a two-time founder
Y Combinator
January 8, 2025
Founder interviews
10
Unit economics
7
Niche selection
6
Low-margin businesses trap you in a negative feedback loop from day one.
Closing first customers completely cold is the only real market fit test.
Second-time founders optimise for truth, not how things look.
Founder interviews
YouTube
How David Lieb turned a failing startup into Google Photos
Y Combinator
December 18, 2024
Founder interviews
10
Pivoting
7
Product-market fit
5
Raising too much money too early hid Bump's fatal retention problem
Google Photos was built covertly after bosses said no — twice
A leukemia diagnosis forced a reckoning with how to spend a bonus life
AI strategy & adoption
YouTube
How 2024 proved the GPT wrapper myth wrong and broke in favour of startups
Y Combinator
December 13, 2024
AI strategy & adoption
9
Business models
7
Case studies
5
Application-layer startups — not OpenAI — built 2024's breakout AI products.
Open-source Llama ended monopoly pricing; product execution now beats model access.
YC batches hit 10% weekly growth on average for the first time ever.
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
How to start a dev tools company: team, product, and go-to-market
Y Combinator
November 26, 2024
MVP & prototyping
8
Growth hacking
7
B2B sales
6
Runtime tools are must-haves; build-time tools are usually skippable.
74% of YC dev tools companies had only technical co-founders.
Founders should sell and market themselves until at least $1M ARR.
AI strategy & adoption
YouTube
Vertical AI agents could be 10x bigger than SaaS
Y Combinator
November 22, 2024
AI strategy & adoption
9
Business models
7
Niche selection
6
AI agents eat SaaS costs and headcount — the far larger line item.
Selling to the team being replaced guarantees internal sabotage.
Find a boring, repetitive admin job — that is your billion-dollar idea.
Product-market fit
YouTube
What Twitter's decline teaches founders about product metrics
Y Combinator
November 21, 2024
Product-market fit
9
Vision & mission
6
Optimising for one engagement metric turns your product into an engagement farm.
Every major social network follows the same decay arc — Twitter is no exception.
Founder CEOs have unique authority to hold a product vision against metric pressure.
AI strategy & adoption
YouTube
How o1's reasoning capabilities unlock real-world startup applications
Y Combinator
November 14, 2024
AI strategy & adoption
9
AI tools & automation
7
Business models
6
Same prompts that failed on GPT-4o worked immediately on o1.
Proprietary eval sets — not the model — are the defensible startup moat.
o1 moved GigaML's complex case accuracy from 0% to 85%.
Founder interviews
YouTube
Sam Altman on building OpenAI, conviction under pressure, and the path to AGI
Y Combinator
November 8, 2024
Founder interviews
9
AI strategy & adoption
7
Vision & mission
5
Why extreme concentration on one bet beats spreading across many
The five levels of AGI — and which ones are closer than people think
Startups have a speed edge over incumbents still sleeping on AI
AI strategy & adoption
YouTube
What 10 trillion parameter AI models mean for founders
Y Combinator
November 1, 2024
AI strategy & adoption
9
Business models
7
Product-market fit
5
O1's accuracy jump lets founders skip prompt engineering entirely
Claude took 5% to 25% developer share in one YC batch
Voice AI hit a real inflection point — call centres are next
How Astranis built a satellite company without billionaire backing
Y Combinator
October 31, 2024
Case studies
9
MVP & prototyping
8
Fundraising & VC
7
A working satellite prototype built in a San Francisco apartment in three months.
Demo day proof-of-concept unlocked one of YC's largest seed rounds at the time.
Domain expertise plus scrappy execution beats waiting for billionaire-scale capital.
Key startup terminology every founder needs to know
Y Combinator
October 23, 2024
Fundraising & VC
9
Product-market fit
7
Unit economics
6
MVP must be useful — a broken product is not viable
SAFEs have fewer strings than convertible notes; read both carefully
TAM is a thought experiment, not a ceiling — great products grow it
AI tools & automation
YouTube
How AI agents are democratising software creation
Y Combinator
October 18, 2024
AI tools & automation
9
No-code & low-code
7
Automation & tools
5
Go from plain-text prompt to deployed web app in minutes
Vanilla RAG fails for code — custom retrieval is the real unlock
Coding knowledge compounds faster now than at any prior moment