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PostHog (YC W20) started as an open source product analytics tool. Today, its AI systems are already generating a portion of the company's own pull requests, and its vision is much bigger: self-driving software that identifies product problems and automatically ships fixes. At Startup School Paris, PostHog CEO James... Hawkins (james hawkins) sat down with YC's Tom Blomfield to discuss why the company made that shift, how AI is changing the way software gets built, and why founders consistently underestimate how ambitious they should be. James also shares why bigger ideas are often easier to hire for, market, and fundraise around—and how thinking bigger transformed PostHog. 00:53 — From Analytics to Self-Driving Software 02:00 — The Recursive AI Loop 03:25 — Why Products Need Intent Data 05:43 — Pull Requests Before Humans Arrive 07:05 — The Thousand Tiny Features Problem 08:33 — The Vacation That Changed Everything 10:16 — Co-CEOs Who Swapped Jobs 13:13 — Why Ambition Is a GTM Strategy 15:43 — Split-Brained Founder Mode 17:01 — European vs. American Ambition 20:22 — You're Default Screwed Anyway 22:31 — Building a Cult Brand on Purpose 25:47 — Five Pivots, One PostHogshow more

Y Combinator

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In just a few years, James Hawkins (james hawkins) took PostHog from an idea hacked together right before YC's W20 deadline to a unicorn powering product analytics for thousands of teams. He joins YC's Brad Flora to talk about surviving six months of "pivot hell," why open-source analytics was the breakthrough, and how PostHog grew from fighting for its first users to launching full product lines—plus what he's learned about momentum, staying close to customers, and using transparency and humor to build a company that stands out. 00:00 - What is PostHog? 2:04 - The initial product 3:25 - Pivot hell, getting into YC 7:20 - Keeping hope alive after so many pivots 13:00 - The fundraising experience 21:08 - Having more fun with the work now 26:19 - PostHog’s unique brand strategy and marketing

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In a recent batch talk, YC General Partner Tom Blomfield broke down how to build a self-improving, AI-native company. He walks through how to create recursive, self-improving AI loops, and why founders who get this right will run companies that improve while they sleep. 00:00 — Companies Are Roman Legions 00:54 — Copilots Are the Wrong Mental Model 01:55 — Extract the Domain Knowledge 02:24 — The Recursive Self-Improving Loop 04:12 — The Holy Shit Moment at YC 05:50 — Self-Optimizing Product and Support Loops 06:29 — Burn Tokens, Not Headcount 07:23 — Middle Management Is Over 08:05 — Make Everything Legible to AI 09:40 — Regenerating the YC User Manual 11:19 — Software Is Ephemeral, Context Is Valuable 12:18 — Where Humans Still Matter

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Warp (YC W23) recently announced a $60M Series B and now serves more than 1,000 customers, processing over $600M in payroll annually and on track to surpass $2B in the next year. In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC's Harj Taggar sits down with Warp founder and CEO Ayush Sharma (Ayush S) to talk about how the company found its way into one of enterprise software's most competitive markets and why AI is fundamentally changing how software companies should be built. 00:50 - From India to MIT 03:10 - Betting on an Unsexy Problem 05:18 - The Wedge That Started Warp 09:49 - What "AI-Native" Really Means 12:31 - Building a Different Kind of Company 14:00 - Why AI Favors Technical Founders 16:42 - The Next Generation of Enterprise Software 21:25 - Why Investors Backed Warp 25:11 - The Future of Employee Management

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I sat down with Nicolas Sharp, founder of Attio, to talk in depth about how his company is disrupting the $80 billion CRM market. Attio has raised $116m, is 4x'ing ARR and is one of the fastest growing companies in Europe. We talk about: - Why Attio went against all conventional wisdom and spent years 3 years building the product before launching - Why Attio doesn’t hire ‘Software Engineers’ and who they hire instead. - How Attio chose investors who would back a long-term bet against multi-billion $ incumbents - How Attio is building CRM from first principles for the AI era - Who should you avoid hiring at all costs, and who should you hire for your startup And so much more. If you’re interested in learning about the story of how Nick built Attio into the incredible company it is today and is disrupting one of the most important software categories, you’re going to want to see this. Enjoy // Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:39 Why Attio spent 3 years building their product before launch 5:05 The Power of Building Systems, Not a Box of Features 9:05 How to know when it’s time to launch 13:30 Nick’s Playbook For a Killer Product Launch 18:09 How To Go From an Investor to a Founder 23:05 How Failure Led to Attio's Big Break 28:07 Why startups need to hire "Hidden Gems," 34:05 Fundraising 49:36 Why Attio Invests In Inexperienced Talent 55:07 The Case For Not Hiring Software Engineers (& Who You Should Hire Instead) 1:02:46 The 8 Persona Hiring Framework 1:09:05 How Attio doesn’t use OKR's 1:27:11 Where does Nick's Ambition and Grit come from? 1:36:59 How Attio is Building CRM from First Principles for the AI era 1:45:29 How to Successfully Market In A Crowded Industry 1:51:10 Breaking Down Attio’s Viral Marketing Strategies 2:02:15 The Change That Had The Biggest Impact on Customer Conversion 2:05:04 Why Attio created A “Reverse Trial” 2:10:16 Why Nick is building from London, not Silicon Valley 2:22:48 The 10-Year Vision for Attio

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Y Combinator

236,530 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад

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Y Combinator

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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. 00:07 — From 3 Engineers to $100M ARR 03:15 — How Legora Got Started 05:09 — Learning the Legal Industry From Scratch 07:22 — Getting Rejected by YC 09:36 — Moving Into a Customer's Office 11:11 — Going From Zero to $1M ARR During YC 13:26 — Why We Froze Sales for Six Months 15:18 — Rebuilding the Product From Scratch 17:26 — Building a Company Is About People 21:51 — Creating a Culture That Wants to Win 25:26 — You Have to Love the Hustle 27:55 — Do Founders Need Domain Expertise? 29:14 — Betting on Models Getting Better 36:29 — When Should You Start a Company? 45:04 — How to Become More Ambitious 48:18 — The Skills Founders Need Today

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. 00:07 — From 3 Engineers to $100M ARR 03:15 — How Legora Got Started 05:09 — Learning the Legal Industry From Scratch 07:22 — Getting Rejected by YC 09:36 — Moving Into a Customer's Office 11:11 — Going From Zero to $1M ARR During YC 13:26 — Why We Froze Sales for Six Months 15:18 — Rebuilding the Product From Scratch 17:26 — Building a Company Is About People 21:51 — Creating a Culture That Wants to Win 25:26 — You Have to Love the Hustle 27:55 — Do Founders Need Domain Expertise? 29:14 — Betting on Models Getting Better 36:29 — When Should You Start a Company? 45:04 — How to Become More Ambitious 48:18 — The Skills Founders Need Today

Y Combinator

74,031 просмотров • 5 дней назад

Michael Truell (Michael Truell), co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joined Garry Tan to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting everything on a world beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led him and his co-founders to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From the hard years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it really takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters, and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere. 01:00 - A new way to build software 04:50 - Two ways to view LLMs 05:50 - Bottlenecks to superhuman agents 08:30 - New approaches to coding UI 09:40 - Why taste still matters 12:15 - Niche software opportunities 13:30 - Cursor origin story 16:00 - The first problem they tried solving 17:20 - Why they abandoned the CAD idea 21:00 - Pivoting to Cursor 23:00 - Following the scaling laws 27:00 - Getting to PMF 30:00 - “Dogfooding” 31:00 - First 10 hires 32:50 - How to evaluate great engineers 33:45 - Maintaining the hacker mindset 35:00 - What are the moats for AI coding tools? 37:00 - Looking ahead

Michael Truell (Michael Truell), co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joined Garry Tan to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting everything on a world beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led him and his co-founders to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From the hard years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it really takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters, and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere. 01:00 - A new way to build software 04:50 - Two ways to view LLMs 05:50 - Bottlenecks to superhuman agents 08:30 - New approaches to coding UI 09:40 - Why taste still matters 12:15 - Niche software opportunities 13:30 - Cursor origin story 16:00 - The first problem they tried solving 17:20 - Why they abandoned the CAD idea 21:00 - Pivoting to Cursor 23:00 - Following the scaling laws 27:00 - Getting to PMF 30:00 - “Dogfooding” 31:00 - First 10 hires 32:50 - How to evaluate great engineers 33:45 - Maintaining the hacker mindset 35:00 - What are the moats for AI coding tools? 37:00 - Looking ahead

Y Combinator

337,015 просмотров • 1 год назад

Coding agents are no longer a distant idea—they're already starting to reshape how we work. YC's Tom Blomfield (Tom Blomfield) and David Lieb (David Lieb) discuss how AI coding tools are transforming software development, why small, high-agency teams will be able to do what once took armies of engineers, and why there's never been a better time to start something new. They explore the bigger picture too: a future where there's more abundance, knowledge work becomes more accessible, and founders have more leverage than ever before. If you're thinking about building, there's no better moment than right now. 0:00 - Intro 0:46 - The combine harvester argument for AI 02:23 - Building with no-code tools 5:37 - The arguments against AI coding 7:01 - Jevons Paradox 9:26 - What happens to the software jobs of today? 12:16 - How will these tools affect knowledge work? 15:08 - An abundant future 16:21 - Advice for future founders

Coding agents are no longer a distant idea—they're already starting to reshape how we work. YC's Tom Blomfield (Tom Blomfield) and David Lieb (David Lieb) discuss how AI coding tools are transforming software development, why small, high-agency teams will be able to do what once took armies of engineers, and why there's never been a better time to start something new. They explore the bigger picture too: a future where there's more abundance, knowledge work becomes more accessible, and founders have more leverage than ever before. If you're thinking about building, there's no better moment than right now. 0:00 - Intro 0:46 - The combine harvester argument for AI 02:23 - Building with no-code tools 5:37 - The arguments against AI coding 7:01 - Jevons Paradox 9:26 - What happens to the software jobs of today? 12:16 - How will these tools affect knowledge work? 15:08 - An abundant future 16:21 - Advice for future founders

Y Combinator

212,424 просмотров • 1 год назад

Today on MCG: Orynth w/Giannis Grigoriadis | $ORYNTH Giannis built a launchpad where every listing is tied to a live product and verified through authorized X and GitHub links, so founders can't fake who they are or what they shipped. He breaks down the pivot from a failed AI website builder to one of the hottest launchpads on Solana, and why they are building on Meteora Here's the breakdown: 00:04 - Intro 01:28 - Meet Giannis 05:26 - Why Product Hunt 😸 was the inspiration 06:14 - Curated vs democratized launches 10:07 - How verification works 10:13 - Mitigating rugs and keeping quality high 15:36 - The $ORYNTH token question and buybacks 19:12 - The social contract between founders and traders 22:40 - The Virtuals Protocol 60-day PMF mechanism 24:33 - Traction 25:29 - Founder pipeline and GTM 31:57 - The launch that went viral 33:48 - Why Solana, why Meteora

Today on MCG: Orynth w/Giannis Grigoriadis | $ORYNTH Giannis built a launchpad where every listing is tied to a live product and verified through authorized X and GitHub links, so founders can't fake who they are or what they shipped. He breaks down the pivot from a failed AI website builder to one of the hottest launchpads on Solana, and why they are building on Meteora Here's the breakdown: 00:04 - Intro 01:28 - Meet Giannis 05:26 - Why Product Hunt 😸 was the inspiration 06:14 - Curated vs democratized launches 10:07 - How verification works 10:13 - Mitigating rugs and keeping quality high 15:36 - The $ORYNTH token question and buybacks 19:12 - The social contract between founders and traders 22:40 - The Virtuals Protocol 60-day PMF mechanism 24:33 - Traction 25:29 - Founder pipeline and GTM 31:57 - The launch that went viral 33:48 - Why Solana, why Meteora

MCG

11,137 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

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 Corporation 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. 01:02 - Science’s Retinal Implant 02:41 - The Hidden Infrastructure of a Startup 03:25 - How Your 17th Employee Buys Things 06:15 - How Infrastructure Creates Speed 07:03 - What Does an Experiment Actually Cost? 09:27 - How the Best Startups Hire 10:18 - Building a Rigorous Hiring Process 13:26 - Judgment, Horsepower, and Agency 16:17 - Rethinking Performance Reviews 18:53 - Rate of Iteration Separates Success From Failure 20:43 - You Can’t Delegate Your Judgment 22:47 - Action Produces Information 24:31 - The Operating System of a Company 25:10 - Q&A

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 Corporation 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. 01:02 - Science’s Retinal Implant 02:41 - The Hidden Infrastructure of a Startup 03:25 - How Your 17th Employee Buys Things 06:15 - How Infrastructure Creates Speed 07:03 - What Does an Experiment Actually Cost? 09:27 - How the Best Startups Hire 10:18 - Building a Rigorous Hiring Process 13:26 - Judgment, Horsepower, and Agency 16:17 - Rethinking Performance Reviews 18:53 - Rate of Iteration Separates Success From Failure 20:43 - You Can’t Delegate Your Judgment 22:47 - Action Produces Information 24:31 - The Operating System of a Company 25:10 - Q&A

Y Combinator

58,751 просмотров • 23 дней назад

Today, a16z is announcing the Machine Age Fund, a new $1.1 billion fund for founders rebuilding what intelligence runs on: chips, memory, networking, systems software, power, and the machines that bring AI into the physical world. Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, and Raghu Raghuram see a new economic law. A thousand engineers cannot erase a two-year software lead, but a massive GPU cluster can turn capital directly into capability. Models are improving faster than the memory, interconnect, power, and cooling beneath them. The founder map is changing with it. Some of the strongest teams are moving from pure software into complex hardware because every constraint in the stack is now a company-building opportunity. In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, they explain what founders can build, why the opportunity reaches all the way down to the physical stack, and why a16z created a fund for it. 00:00 Intro 01:08 Why AI needs an entirely new infrastructure 02:02 The bottleneck is no longer the model 02:40 Founders saw it before investors did 06:07 Sold out through 2028 07:14 Why this time is different from 1999 08:57 The company whose idle hardware gained value 10:51 "Why didn't this fund exist five years ago?" 13:51 "Nobody likes to use AI more than AI" 17:06 The startup law that capital just broke 21:05 What Grok Bot got right 26:43 The case for a custom chip per model 28:23 Why AC power isn't good enough 32:07 Lots of new electricians 34:14 What one gigawatt can power 35:03 Why utilities can't just build faster 37:22 The data centers that give power back 38:01 Why we should never have called it AI 39:43 Why Nvidia will willingly leave money on the table 48:08 Hardware founders are older 52:36 Why America has to lead YouTube: benahorowitz.eth Raghu Raghuram martin_casado Erik Torenberg

Today, a16z is announcing the Machine Age Fund, a new $1.1 billion fund for founders rebuilding what intelligence runs on: chips, memory, networking, systems software, power, and the machines that bring AI into the physical world. Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, and Raghu Raghuram see a new economic law. A thousand engineers cannot erase a two-year software lead, but a massive GPU cluster can turn capital directly into capability. Models are improving faster than the memory, interconnect, power, and cooling beneath them. The founder map is changing with it. Some of the strongest teams are moving from pure software into complex hardware because every constraint in the stack is now a company-building opportunity. In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, they explain what founders can build, why the opportunity reaches all the way down to the physical stack, and why a16z created a fund for it. 00:00 Intro 01:08 Why AI needs an entirely new infrastructure 02:02 The bottleneck is no longer the model 02:40 Founders saw it before investors did 06:07 Sold out through 2028 07:14 Why this time is different from 1999 08:57 The company whose idle hardware gained value 10:51 "Why didn't this fund exist five years ago?" 13:51 "Nobody likes to use AI more than AI" 17:06 The startup law that capital just broke 21:05 What Grok Bot got right 26:43 The case for a custom chip per model 28:23 Why AC power isn't good enough 32:07 Lots of new electricians 34:14 What one gigawatt can power 35:03 Why utilities can't just build faster 37:22 The data centers that give power back 38:01 Why we should never have called it AI 39:43 Why Nvidia will willingly leave money on the table 48:08 Hardware founders are older 52:36 Why America has to lead YouTube: benahorowitz.eth Raghu Raghuram martin_casado Erik Torenberg

a16z

593,551 просмотров • 3 дней назад

.Alexandr Wang's advice to his 18-year-old self: develop your own internal compass for how the future will unfold, and hold conviction in it against the noise. At Startup School 2026, the Scale AI (YC S16) founder — now leading Meta’s Superintelligence Labs — talks with Garry Tan about rebuilding a frontier lab from scratch, why talent density compounds, and how to spot the exponential worth betting your twenties on. 00:07 — How Alexandr Wang Started Scale AI 03:25 — Pivoting to the Right Idea 06:23 — Conviction Before Consensus 09:06 — Why This Is the Best Time to Start a Company 11:27 — What Personal Superintelligence Looks Like 13:10 — Building a Frontier AI Lab 16:36 — Why AI Models Need to Be Cheap 20:01 — Vision Will Matter More Than Intelligence 24:06 — Systems Thinking in the AI Era 26:51 — The Biggest Opportunity in AI Today 29:25 — Advice to My 18-Year-Old Self

.Alexandr Wang's advice to his 18-year-old self: develop your own internal compass for how the future will unfold, and hold conviction in it against the noise. At Startup School 2026, the Scale AI (YC S16) founder — now leading Meta’s Superintelligence Labs — talks with Garry Tan about rebuilding a frontier lab from scratch, why talent density compounds, and how to spot the exponential worth betting your twenties on. 00:07 — How Alexandr Wang Started Scale AI 03:25 — Pivoting to the Right Idea 06:23 — Conviction Before Consensus 09:06 — Why This Is the Best Time to Start a Company 11:27 — What Personal Superintelligence Looks Like 13:10 — Building a Frontier AI Lab 16:36 — Why AI Models Need to Be Cheap 20:01 — Vision Will Matter More Than Intelligence 24:06 — Systems Thinking in the AI Era 26:51 — The Biggest Opportunity in AI Today 29:25 — Advice to My 18-Year-Old Self

Y Combinator

70,457 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field (Dylan Field) on how AI will transform design and why craft and attention to detail will be the ultimate differentiators. At AI Startup School in San Francisco. 01:38 – How Dylan and Evan Started Figma 02:58 – WebGL: From Games to Tools 04:10 – Buying Time to Build 05:48 – Staying Motivated Through Early Exploration 06:10 – Cold Emails, Early Feedback & First Users 08:24 – Launch Timing and Lessons on Shipping Early 10:08 – Culture of Constraints & Creative Problem-Solving 10:50 – Recognizing Product-Market Pull 13:32 – Why Design is the Differentiator in the AI Era 16:34 – Figma’s AI Product Launches & Expanding Beyond Design 18:56 – The Blurring of Design, Development, and Product 21:00 – The “MS-DOS Era” of AI Interfaces & Future Surfaces 23:26 – The Role of Design in AI Research & the Future of Designers 27:36 – Audience Q&A: AI Tools, Open Source, Principles, and Advice

Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field (Dylan Field) on how AI will transform design and why craft and attention to detail will be the ultimate differentiators. At AI Startup School in San Francisco. 01:38 – How Dylan and Evan Started Figma 02:58 – WebGL: From Games to Tools 04:10 – Buying Time to Build 05:48 – Staying Motivated Through Early Exploration 06:10 – Cold Emails, Early Feedback & First Users 08:24 – Launch Timing and Lessons on Shipping Early 10:08 – Culture of Constraints & Creative Problem-Solving 10:50 – Recognizing Product-Market Pull 13:32 – Why Design is the Differentiator in the AI Era 16:34 – Figma’s AI Product Launches & Expanding Beyond Design 18:56 – The Blurring of Design, Development, and Product 21:00 – The “MS-DOS Era” of AI Interfaces & Future Surfaces 23:26 – The Role of Design in AI Research & the Future of Designers 27:36 – Audience Q&A: AI Tools, Open Source, Principles, and Advice

Y Combinator

178,646 просмотров • 1 год назад