Y Combinator Startup Podcast

One of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software. In a recent essay, MIT professor Philip Isola argued that we may be entering the era of robot-use agents: general-purpose models that can control different robots, write policies, and learn new physical tasks with little or no robot-specific training.In this episode of Decoded, we're joined by the founders of Waddle Labs and RoboCurve, two of the startups whose work helped drive this realization. They're working at the frontier of using general-purpose models to control robots, and their recent demos helped inspire the growing conversation around robot-use agents.
Together, we dig into the research behind that idea, from code-as-policies and vision-language-action models to the harnesses and evals needed to make these systems work in the real world.

YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than ever.In this episode of The Lightcone, Garry, Jared, Diana, and Harj dig into what’s driving these changes and what they mean for founders. They discuss how AI is making it possible for smaller teams to take on more ambitious problems, why experienced founders are having a resurgence, and why knowing what to build is becoming more important than simply knowing how to build it.

The best outbound starts before you automate anything. Founders need to learn who actually has the problem, what gets their attention, and what makes them reply. YC Visiting Partner Christina Gilbert recommends doing at least your first 100 outreaches by hand so you can learn those things yourself.

Drawing from her experience generating and closing millions of dollars through founder-led sales at OneSchema, Christina shares eight ways founders can improve their outbound, from targeting the right people and writing emails worth reading to following up, debugging low reply rates, and using customer language to sharpen your message.

Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing.Right now, the biggest shift he sees is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and capabilities that are rapidly catching up to the frontier labs. On Ollama Cloud, that shift has driven a 150x increase in token usage since the start of the year.In this episode of the Lightcone, Jeff joins us to talk about the future of open models and the story behind Ollama, from two years of searching for the right idea to building one of the most widely used AI developer tools in the world.

YC Visiting Partner Vivian Shen sits down with Paul Graham at the original YC office in Mountain View to talk about startups, AI, ambition, and what makes great founders.