Y Combinator Startup Podcast

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Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

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.

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

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  Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"

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  Max Hodak: How Startups Build Speed

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  How To Design In The Agent Era

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  Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence

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  Building the First Data Centers in Space

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  Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: "Move Fast And Ship Safely"

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  Patrick Collison: "What If You Succeed?"

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  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI

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  Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity”

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  Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban

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  Boris Cherny: Building Claude Code

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  Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

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  World Models, Explained

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  How To Better Understand Your Users