Product market fit

Oct 19, 2026

Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI

Jean-Denis Greze, Town's CEO and former Plaid CTO, explains why he shut down a nearly $1M-revenue AI tax business for SMBs and pivoted to Town, an AI assistant that works from email and calendar. The conversation with a16z's Alex Rampell covers founder decision-making under time pressure, product-market fit, the consumer-grade enterprise thesis, token allocation as a business model, neutrality versus frontier labs, horizontal versus vertical strategy, uneven AI diffusion, and how agents may reshape commerce and advertising.

Oct 11, 2026

Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (VP Google Labs)

Josh Woodward, head of Google Labs, the Gemini app, and AI Studio, explains why every company needs to operate like a labs team in the AI era. He covers where great ideas really come from, the almost-possible framework, how to recognize product-market fit by watching people's eyes, when to kill an idea, the skills rising in value such as unlearning rate and explosive endurance, why roles are not collapsing into a single builder, and how to structure an internal lab that graduates ideas without being crowded out.

Sep 16, 2026

AI Tech Stack | The Founders and Builders Architecting Product Market Fit | Creator's Cut | 2026 |4K

This panel discussion explores the evolving AI tech stack and its impact on product-market fit, ethical governance, and business transformation. Experts from Humana, Catenate, In-Telecom, and Spacer AI explain how AI-powered prompts are replacing static dashboards, detail multi-model API strategies for cost efficiency, and delve into the critical role of human-in-the-loop oversight for autonomous agents to ensure data security and responsible AI deployment. They emphasize that true value lies in domain expertise and solving real-world pain points, not just building 'shiny toys'.

Aug 10, 2026

Peter Steinberger: What Happens When 4.7 Million People Let It Cook

Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, shares the candid story of building one of the world's largest open-source AI projects. Starting from a personal annoyance, OpenClaw went viral, leading to both immense success and unforeseen challenges, including burnout, security pressures, and feature creep. He offers invaluable lessons on product-market fit, managing hyper-growth in open source, the peril of dependencies, and the philosophy that "fun is velocity" in building impactful technology.

Jul 28, 2026

How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Cognition — Jia Wu

Cognition's deployed engineering team focuses on measuring customer outcomes, not just token usage, achieving significant productivity gains with their AI agent, Devin. This involves understanding deep business problems, strategically applying Devin's capabilities, and feeding insights back to product development, fundamentally reshaping the role of a deployed engineer.

Jul 25, 2026

What Actually Makes A Startup Durable

YC partners discuss how founders should navigate the AI era, emphasizing the rapid decrease in AI costs, the evolving definition of a 'hard problem' for startups, the critical importance of human connection and co-founders, and practical advice on building AI-native loops, pivoting, and achieving distribution in a world where software is easy to build.