Y Combinator Startup Podcast

How To Get Your First Customers

When you're starting out, it isn’t enough to just build a minimum viable product. You also need a minimum evolvable product - one that can adapt to the needs of those critical early customers. In this episode of Main Function, YC General Partner Ankit Gupta offers an update to the classic MVP playbook. He’ll outline strategies for getting your first customers, the power of adaptability and how feedback from early users will ultimately shape the future of your product and your company.Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobsChapters:00:00 – The Minimum Evolvable Product00:46 – Finding the First Believers01:29 – Counterintuitive Rules To Get Early Users02:10 – Learn Fast, Don’t Fear Churn02:52 – How Early Users Shape the Market You Enter04:22 – Tesla Case Study05:14 – How To Build To Evolve

Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets

Stoke Space is racing to build the world's first fully reusable rockets that can launch, survive reentry, and fly again and again. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC’s Aaron Epstein sits down with Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman to find out why they chose to take on one of the hardest problems in rocket science, how an obsession with efficiency gives them an edge, and what full reusability could unlock for the future of spaceflight.Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobsChapters: 00:00 —

What Surprised Us Most In 2025

2025 was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode, the YC partners break down the surprises of the year, from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the application layer, and why the next wave of AI startups may be just getting started.

How Intelligent Is AI, Really?

ARC-AGI is redefining how to measure progress on the path to AGI - focusing on reasoning, generalization, and adaptability instead of memorization or scale.During this month's NeurIPS 2025 conference, YC's Diana Hu sat down with ARC Prize Foundation President Greg Kamradt to find out why most AI benchmarks fail, how ARC-AGI reveals the limits of today’s models, and why measuring intelligence may be harder than building it.

The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide

Head of Design Ryo Lu helped transform Cursor from a feature-layer on top of VS Code into one of the world's leading AI code editors.He joins YC's Aaron Epstein on Design Review to talk about the path that brought him to Cursor, how rapid prototyping reshaped the core product and how he's breaking down the barriers that once separated designers and coders.