Y Combinator

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

Jul 28, 2026 · 39:01

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.'

What Top AI Labs Are Really Doing With Observability

Jul 24, 2026 · 30:30

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.

He Built the World's #1 Open-Source Coding Agent

Jul 24, 2026 · 44:27

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…