Solugen is reinventing the trillion-dollar chemical manufacturing industry by combining biology and chemistry in a new way. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC's Jared Friedman visits co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt at their Houston HQ to see how they went from a $7,000 PVC reactor to a billion-dollar company competing with industry giants. They cover the breakthrough behind their enzymatic + catalytic production, how they found their first customers, and why starting small and staying close to customers let them win in a capital-intensive industry.

Chapters:00:00 - A New Kind of Chemical Plant01:02 - Fusing Biology + Chemistry In a New Way02:23 - The Eureka Moment: From Pancreatic Cancer to Hydrogen Peroxide03:30 - Using A Sugar Feedstock Over Oil and Gas 04:22 - Proving Enzymes Work at Scale In Chemical Manufacturing05:16 - The $7K PVC Reactor06:44 - Finding First Customers at YC08:12 - What The Co-founders Got Out of YC09:33 - Seed Round to Bio Forge10:32 - Scaling to a Full-Size Plant (Bioforge)11:57 - The Future of American Manufacturing12:29 - The Next Decade of Solugen

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

In this episode of The Lightcone, we talk with Mukund and Madhav Jha, the founders of Emergent - an AI platform that lets anyone build and ship production-ready software. In just eight months, users have created more than 7 million apps on Emergent, with the number doubling in just the last 45 days. We discuss how they built one of the most powerful AI coding agents, why they focused on non-technical users and what it's like building in India for a global audience.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

01:06 - What Is Emergent?

01:18 - Founder Backstory

02:09 - From AI Testing to General Coding Agents

02:52 - Getting Ahead of the Market

04:18 - The Pivot to Non-Technical Users

05:22 - Why Second Movers Can Win in AI

09:04 - Building for Production, Not Just Prototypes

18:21 - Live Demo: Building Apps with Emergent

24:40 - How Emergent Hires and Runs a Lean Team

29:04 - Is SaaS Dead? The Rise of Personalized Software

34:04 - The Future: Niche Apps, Solo Builders and AI Agency

YC alum Max Hodak is the co-founder of Neuralink and founder of Science, a company building brain-computer interfaces that can restore sight.Science has developed a tiny retinal implant that stimulates cells in the eye to help blind patients see again. More than 40 patients have already received the treatment in clinical trials, including one who recently read a full novel for the first time in over a decade.In this episode of How to Build the Future, Max joined Garry to discuss how BCIs work, what it takes to engineer the brain, and why brain-computer interfaces may become one of the most important technologies of the next decade.

As no-code design tools become more common, so do the pitfalls. You know what they look like - the purple gradients, annoying hover effects, sections that fade as you scroll. So how do you avoid a site that feels vibe coded while still taking advantage of these new tools? In this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Visiting Partner Raphael Schaad, the founder and designer of Cron (now Notion Calendar). Together they’ll review user submitted sites with an eye for how to leverage these tools and avoid the common vibe coding mistakes.

Poetiq is a new startup founded by former DeepMind researchers that recently achieved a major jump on the ARC-AGI and Humanity's Last Exam benchmark by layering a recursive self-improvement system on top of existing models. In this episode of Lightcone, Poetiq's Founder & CEO Ian Fischer joined us to discuss how small teams can build “reasoning harnesses” that outperform base models, what that means for startups and why automating prompt engineering may be one of the most powerful levers in AI today.Chapters:00:00 – Intro00:40 – What Is Poetiq?01:07 – Recursive Self-Improvement Explained02:07 – The Fine-Tuning Trap02:59 – “Stilts” for LLMs03:14 – Recursive Self-Improvement vs. Fine-Tuning05:05 – Taking the Top Spot on ARC-AGI06:37 – Beating Claude on Humanity’s Last Exam08:40 – How the Meta-System Works10:26 – Beyond RL: A New S-Curve11:32 – Automating Prompt Engineering13:37 – From 5% to 95% Performance14:50 – Early Access & Putting Your Agent on Stilts16:17 – From YC Founder to DeepMind Researcher18:29 – Advice for Engineers in the AI EraApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

With the takeoff of OpenClaw and MoltBook, a new agent-driven economy is taking shape.

In this episode of the Lightcone, we took a look at the explosive growth of AI dev tools and whether the time has come for builders to make something agents want.

A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, sits down to share the incredible journey of developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era.

In the AI era, startups aren't winning by hiring faster — they're winning by automating as many internal functions as possible. In this episode of Main Function, Garry breaks down how tiny teams are beating companies 20x their size by building automations into every workflow, from engineering to ops to customer support.

You’ve probably already heard all about OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot). The viral sensation is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own device, connects with messaging apps you already use, and goes beyond chat to actually execute tasks like managing your email, calendars, files, workflows, and more. Now meet the man behind it. YC’s Raphael Schaad sat down with Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, to discuss the “aha” moment behind the viral personal AI agent, why local-first agents could replace many of today’s apps, and how personal agents will reshape the future of software.

Chapters:

00:00 – OpenClaw takes over the internet

00:44 – Life after going viral

01:28 – Why OpenClaw took off, what sets it apart

02:56 – Bots talking to bots (and hiring humans)

04:11 – From “God AI” to swarm intelligence

05:07 – Peter’s original “aha” moment

06:38 – Rebuilding the agent as a conversation

07:38 – The moment it exceeded expectations

10:21 – Are apps going to disappear?

12:31 – Memory, data silos, and ownership

14:39 – The privacy reality of personal agents

15:05 – Letting the bot loose in public Discord

16:55 – Giving an agent a personality

18:19 – Contrarian building philosophy

20:09 – CLIs vs MCPs

21:28 – Building for humans first

21:46 – The road ahead

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply

Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings? Maybe they're addicted to coding agents! In this episode of Lightcone, Calvin French-Owen — a co-founder of Segment and former engineer on OpenAI's Codex team — joins us to talk about why coding agents suddenly feel so powerful, the differences between Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, and what the future of work will look like.

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/apply

Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Chapters:

00:00 – The Minimum Evolvable Product

00:46 – Finding the First Believers

01:29 – Counterintuitive Rules To Get Early Users

02:10 – Learn Fast, Don’t Fear Churn

02:52 – How Early Users Shape the Market You Enter

04:22 – Tesla Case Study

05:14 – How To Build To Evolve