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YC Startup School

Notes from the talks at YC Startup School

Created Jul 30, 2026 · Updated Sep 14, 2026

Notes on the fifteen talks from Y Combinator's Startup School 2026.

Max Junestrand: The Willingness to Learn Faster
Michael Kratsios: How Washington Makes AI Policy
Susan Kare: Just Enough Detail
Chelsea Finn: The State of the Art in Robotics
Peter Steinberger: Fun Is Velocity
Max Hodak: Speed Is Built From Boring Infrastructure
Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence
Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work
Patrick Collison: What If You Succeed?
Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI
Alexandr Wang: A Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity
Blake Scholl: The Problem With Becoming an Expert
Sam Altman: Never a Better Time to Do a Startup
Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of the Prompt
Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

Five claims recur across speakers who had no reason to coordinate: conviction nobody shares is the asset rather than the risk, the constraint has moved from capability to ambition, systems thinking survives while specifics do not, be empirical, and the panic about timing is misplaced.

Source playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEb7ftOB0yf0

AI Startup School

Notes on the seventeen talks from Y Combinator's AI Startup School, recorded in San Francisco on 16 and 17 June 2025.

Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
Elon Musk: Aspire to Work, Not Glory
Sam Altman: Don't Build the Five Ideas Everyone Has
Andrew Ng: Speed Is the Strategy
Jake Heller: Pick a Job, Then Grind the Evals
Fei-Fei Li: Problems Bordering on Delusional
Satya Nadella: Earn the Social Permission
François Chollet: Skill Is Not Intelligence
Aravind Srinivas: The Only Moat Is Speed
Amjad Masad: Application Software Goes to Zero
Chelsea Finn: Scale Is Necessary, Not Sufficient
Aaron Levie: The Backlog Nobody Could Afford
Jared Kaplan: Ask the Dumbest Possible Question
Michael Truell: Be Consistent With Your Beliefs
Jordan Fisher: Plan Two Years Out, Ask Better Questions
John Jumper: Research Was Worth a Hundredfold
Dylan Field: Craft Is the Differentiator

Source playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5NPx4adxl97CZb8vU4numwi

Startup School India

Notes on the seven sessions from Y Combinator's Startup School India, released 6 May to 27 June 2026.

Harshil Mathur: AI Is Compressing Every Moat
Aadit Palicha: Starting From The Extreme
Varun Vummadi: Turning Down The Safe Offer
Mukund Jha: Living At The Edge
Vidit Aatrey: Rigid On The Problem, Flexible On The Solution
Lalit Keshre: Love It Or Hate It
Closing Panel: India Can Create The Largest AI Companies

Source playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5M5RuOSM11oH-EjjQpkFelI

Startup School Paris

Notes on the seven sessions from Y Combinator's Startup School Paris, recorded in Paris from 22 to 25 July 2026.

James Hawkins: Why Ambitious Ideas Are Easier To Sell
Paul Copplestone: How Supabase Grew
Stanislas Polu: Building Alongside the Labs
Elliot Andre & Matt Rouif: Training Yourself To Dream Bigger
Olivier Pomel: Monitoring The Entire Cloud
Alexandre LeBrun: What Big Tech Missed
YC Partners: What Actually Makes A Startup Durable