Y Combinator Startup Podcast

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.

NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthroughs in modern computing.At Startup School 2026 at Chase Center, Garry Tan sits down with Founder and CEO Jensen Huang to talk about confronting reality, learning your way into new domains, and why resilience — getting through one day at a time — matters more than anything else.

Why do even our best AI models need tens of thousands of examples to learn skills that a human picks up in a handful of tries?Solving this problem is one of the great open challenges in modern AI. World models, which give AI an internal simulation of its environment, are one of the most promising paths forward.In this episode of Decoded, YC's Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard discuss the intuition and math behind world models, new research, and current applications in self-driving, robotics, and more.

Full Transcript: https://ycrootaccess.substack.com/p/world-models-an-intuitive-introduction