Dr. Vijoy Pandey of Cisco's Outshift incubator discusses his vision for a future where multi-agent human societies collaborate to solve major scientific and physical challenges. He introduces AGNTCY, an open-source project for the "Internet of Agents," designed to address the critical hurdles of agent interoperability and trust through a Zero Trust framework and Task-Based Access Control (T-BACK).
Emir Karabeg, co-founder of Sim, shares the journey of building a visual, end-to-end platform for AI agents. He discusses their pivot from a failed idea, their explosive open-source growth strategy, the philosophy of building an AI-native workflow tool, and the operational culture that took them from a YC batch to 60,000 developers.
Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the sustainability challenges of open-source that led to Elm's development pause, his new work on a full-stack typed functional language, and his thoughts on improving developer experience to make functional programming more accessible.
YC partners discuss go-to-market strategies for AI in legacy industries, balancing growth with defensibility, knowing when to pivot even with traction, tackling hard technical problems, and making key hiring and open-source decisions.
Liz Fong-Jones and Lesley Cordero explore the evolution of platform engineering from its DevOps and SRE roots, discussing the challenges of building effective developer platforms, the importance of psychological safety, the complexities of open source sustainability, and the delicate balance between centralized platform teams and developer autonomy.
Grant Miller uses a surfing analogy to explore the challenges and strategies of AI adoption. He discusses the historical waves of technological innovation, the current surge in AI—from generative models to agentic systems—and offers practical lessons on navigating this rapid change by being prepared, patient, and adaptable.