Startup school

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

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.

Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, reflects on the evolution of startups from YC's first batch to the current AI-driven era. He discusses the unprecedented opportunities for ambitious founders, the critical role of startups in distributing AI's power, the importance of conviction against conventional wisdom, and the rapid advancements in AI models, while also addressing safety concerns and envisioning an optimistic future for human agency.

Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, shares critical lessons from NVIDIA's journey, emphasizing how early failures and a commitment to learning new technologies, like purchasing textbooks from Fry's to pivot the company, laid the groundwork for their success. He discusses NVIDIA's strategic vision, driven by accelerating algorithm domains and seeing AlexNet as a universal function approximator, which led to a reinvention of the computing stack. Huang also explores the future of AI with agents, the importance of fine-grained control, and the "Linux moment" of open-source AI, while also forecasting the rise of physical AI and job creation. He concludes with profound advice on resilience, systems thinking, and the "how hard can it be?" mindset for aspiring entrepreneurs in this unprecedented era of technological reset.

New Ways To Design With AI Tools

New Ways To Design With AI Tools

YC Head of Design Eve Bouffard shares her revolutionary AI-first workflow, transforming product design, branding, and prototyping. Using projects like Paxel, SOTA Zine, and YC Startup School, she demonstrates how coding agents, voice interaction, and "disposable design" enable rapid iteration, deep personalization, and consistent branding, pushing the bottleneck from software to imagination.

India Can Create The Largest AI Companies

India Can Create The Largest AI Companies

This panel from Startup School India explores why India's technical talent is poised to lead the global AI wave, challenging traditional career advice. It highlights Y Combinator's focus on young, high-agency founders who leverage AI for rapid prototyping and embrace 'second mover advantage' to build global companies, emphasizing customer obsession and relentless resourcefulness.