5 episodes
Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, and Y Combinator's Garry Tan discuss why this is the best time to start a startup, drawing on Altman's journey from YC's first batch in 2005 to building OpenAI. Altman argues that AI's rapid progress—models improving six months like two years—makes ambitious startups more viable than ever, as agents and cost reductions enable projects that were impossible a year ago. He recounts the early days of OpenAI when 'everybody was calling us an idiot,' advising founders to develop conviction in ideas others dismiss, and shares how helping people (like meeting Greg Brockman through Stripe) creates long-term serendipity. The conversation addresses the Hugging Face incident as a real alignment and security failure, and Altman emphasizes the importance of distributing power through startups to avoid concentration. He closes with advice to his younger self: 'It's all going to work out.'Jul 28, 2026 · 39:01 · 243.6K views
Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, joins Diana Hu at Y Combinator's Startup School 2026 to discuss how Opus 5 eliminates prompt injection, why Claude Code deleted 80% of its system prompt for the new model, and how builders can 'unhobble' AI by giving Claude harder problems. He reveals that Opus 5 is not prompt-injectable thanks to three safety layers, and that deleting most instructions actually makes the model smarter. Cherny explains the concept of product overhang—the gap between model capability and existing products—and shows how a single prompt using dynamic workflows rewrote Bun's entire codebase from Zig to Rust in 11 days. He also describes a two-week prompt that spawned thousands of agents to rewrite Claude's Electron app in Swift, and shares how Claude now maintains its own codebases with daily routines removing dead code and unifying abstractions. Cherny argues coding is solved for most tasks but advises CS students to learn practical application and build things people want.Jul 27, 2026 · 35:52 · 304.3K views
Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, tells Garry Tan that the company started with the wrong algorithm and saved itself by buying three textbooks from Fry's to learn computer graphics properly. He recounts how a $5 million payment from Sega after revealing the flawed technology kept NVIDIA alive, leading to a $300 million IPO in 1999. Huang explains that seeing AlexNet as a universal function approximator drove NVIDIA to reinvent the entire computing stack for AI, including agents and physical AI. He argues that systems thinking is the new coding, that agents will allow fine-grained control, and that open source platforms like OpenClaw and Hermes enable anyone to build their own AI. For founders, Huang emphasizes resilience—getting through one day at a time—and the attitude of "how hard can it be?" while noting that NVIDIA's physical AI business is already nearly $10 billion.Jul 26, 2026 · 49:00 · 252.2K views
What Top AI Labs Are Really Doing With Observability
Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog, recounts how two French engineers in New York built the company that monitors the entire cloud, starting with a Y Combinator rejection that became a driving force. He attributes Datadog’s success to staying close to raw customer feedback and support tickets, building culture by example rather than writing it down, and betting early on the cloud explosion. Datadog now employs 8,000 people and offers 20–25 products. Pomel reveals that the company went public on COVID lockdown day, saw its stock drop 65% in two weeks, and recovered through consistent storytelling to public investors. On AI, his co-founder told engineers that in two quarters they would not be writing any code anymore; Datadog is investing in agents and smarter observability. His key advice for founders is to move faster on both hiring and firing, since hiring quickly and fixing mistakes beats waiting for the perfect hire.Jul 24, 2026 · 30:30 · 6.7K views
He Built the World's #1 Open-Source Coding Agent
Jay V, founder and CEO of Opencode, explains how his open-source coding agent grew from 650,000 to 13 million monthly active users in 2025—a 20x increase—while processing 7 trillion tokens per day and reaching $40 million annualized revenue. Anthropic's attempt to block Opencode users from using Claude Code subscriptions inadvertently fueled the growth by equating the two products in users' minds. Opencode's success hinges on offering choice across 70+ models, including open-source alternatives like DeepSeek and GLM, which are cheaper and faster than frontier models, making coding agents accessible globally—especially in developing countries where a $200/month Claude Code subscription is prohibitively expensive. Jay shares that 12 Fortune 500 companies use Opencode, often discovered via bottom-up adoption. The product's terminal-first design and open positioning were deliberate choices. Jay also recounts his 16-year entrepreneurial journey: the same legal entity (incorporated 2010) applied to Y Combinator nine times before acceptance in 2021, and each prior failure—from a serverless platform to a terminal coffee shop—contributed to the product and market instincts that made…Jul 24, 2026 · 44:27 · 75.9K viewsSam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, and Y Combinator's Garry Tan discuss why this is the best time to start a startup, drawing on Altman's journey from YC's first batch in 2005 to building OpenAI. Altman argues that AI's rapid progress—models improving six months like two years—makes ambitious startups more viable than ever, as agents and cost reductions enable projects that were impossible a year ago. He recounts the early days of OpenAI when 'everybody was calling us an idiot,' advising founders to develop conviction in ideas others dismiss, and shares how helping people (like meeting Greg Brockman through Stripe) creates long-term serendipity. The conversation addresses the Hugging Face incident as a real alignment and security failure, and Altman emphasizes the importance of distributing power through startups to avoid concentration. He closes with advice to his younger self: 'It's all going to work out.'
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. Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/sam-altman-never-a-better-time-to Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:07 — From YC’s First Batch to Today 03:04 — What Paul Graham Taught Sam Altman 04:17 — Why Startups Matter More Than Ever 06:57 — The Coming Golden Age of Ambitious Startups 09:30 — Why Startups Win During Technology Shifts 11:46 — Building OpenAI When Nobody Believed in AGI 14:45 — Finding People Who Share Your Conviction 18:05 — Help People Before You Know Why 19:43 — Earnestness, Ambition, and Ignoring the Haters 24:04 — The AI Safety Incident That Changed the Stakes 26:58 — Preventing AI From Concentrating Power 30:41 — How Fast AI Models Will Improve 36:06 — The Best Version of an AI Future 37:47 — “It’s All Going to Work Out”