Y Combinator Startup Podcast

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 showed that three minutes of daily speech recognition per user would require doubling Google’s server fleet. That one became the TPU.

At Startup School 2026, Google’s Chief Scientist talks with YC’s Diana Hu through the thought experiments behind both, why inference hardware is the next specialization, and where two or three people in a room can still win.

Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/jeff-dean-the-1-rule-for-building

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.

In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither.

Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic (YC W16), the startup building America’s first supersonic airliner, to change that. At Startup School 2026, he shares how a cardboard mockup with Office Depot seats became XB-1, the first independently developed jet to break the sound barrier, and why founders have to build for both the worst day and the best day.

He also answers founder questions about teaching yourself hard things, breaking into hardware without the right resume, and finding work-life harmony while building something ambitious.

In 2005, Sam Altman was a Stanford sophomore in YC’s first batch, building a startup in a little Cambridge office while Paul Graham cooked the founders dinner. Twenty years later, as co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, he closed Startup School 2026 in conversation with YC's Garry Tan — on agents, ambition, and why the ceiling for what a startup can take on has never been higher.

Fresh off the launch of Opus 5, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny joins Diana Hu at Startup School 2026 to talk about what the newest models can do, how Claude Code came to be, and what it means to build products when the underlying capabilities keep accelerating.