YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than ever. In this episode of the Lightcone, @garrytan, @snowmaker, @sdianahu, and @harjtaggar dig into what’s driving these changes and what they mean for founders. They discuss how AI is making it possible for smaller teams to take on more ambitious problems, why experienced founders are having a resurgence, and why knowing what to build is becoming more important than simply knowing how to build it. 01:06 — Startups Are Moving From Bits to Atoms 03:29 — Why AI Is Making Hard Tech Easier 05:21 — Defense, Manufacturing, and the Return of Hard Tech 09:48 — AI Compute Is Becoming a Physical Infrastructure Problem 12:34 — Robotics Is Approaching Its ChatGPT Moment 15:40 — Software Isn’t Dead. It’s Becoming the Harness 17:59 — Why AI Startups Are Growing Faster 22:52 — The Hidden Boom in Data and RL Environments 27:08 — Why Robotics Will Need Specialized Models 29:38 — The Rise of the Solo Founder 32:54 — Why Experienced Founders Are Back 34:59 — What Founders Should Do Right Now

We built Codex/Claude ultra mode, but for web research! Uses heavy agent parallelization, code execution, DB tool, and some other goodies, all orchestrated with frontier models The squad kept iterating until it was clearly SOTA. Lemme know what you think 🫡

Congrats to @ayushswrites and the Warp team!

Given that I was part of YC W20 and now YC F26, I'm often asked about the differences between the batches. This either comes from actual curiosity or some hidden expectation for me to say it's "gone downhill". Let me answer the former and dispel the latter. There are huge differences, but probably not in the way you'd expect. There's a lot of public chatter about YC backing younger founders, inexperienced founders, and losing its touch. This isn't true. Remotely. There were incredibly talented founders in YC W20, and the same is true for this batch as well. Last batch, we had PostHog and WhatNot. This time, we'll have similar outcomes. The other day, someone tweeted "YC doesn't back visionary founders". But the point of doing YC isn't to advertise your vision; it's to quickly test your hypothesis in a structured environment. The biggest difference between my batch experiences is the location. Previously, YC was in Mountain View, and while YC recommended founders to live in Mountain View, many (if not most) lived in San Francisco. This meant a fair part of the YC experience was commuting down on the Caltrain, attending events, and then going your separate ways. Now, YC is in Dogpatch, and literally everyone lives in the same four apartment buildings. That makes a massive difference. You run into founders in the elevator. You run into founders when getting packages, You run into founders on the street. Everyone is building something, everything is talking about agents & harnesses, everyone is talking about the YC calendar. This sense of location builds community. I think YC's done a great job of not going full-send on campus. It's good to have independence. You choose where you live, what you eat, how you work, what you do. But the co-location in Dogpatch creates a lot of spontaneous encounters that lead to learnings and sometimes even new customers. Another difference is the schedule and partitions. One issue with YC W20 is it had a rigid schedule, and too many founders in one room. It's hard to build relationships if you feel the constant pressure to meet more and more people. The new structure keeps everyone in consistent groups so you build actual connections; it also has opportunities to meet everyone else without exhausting everyone's social battery. I can somewhat understand the YC haters because YC can look like a bunch of copycats from the outside. I remember a few batches after YC W20, I was looking at YC announcements from W23 or S24 and thinking the same. But then you return to YC and realize that's all a bunch of nonsense: social media distorts reality, and the same brilliant founders that YC backs have been in YC all along. All in all, I think @ycombinator's evolution has been positive; the move to Dogpatch was brilliant; and the orange remains really f'ing orange.

Jev, now open source: Lev A 4B open source System One model based on Qwen backbone The best performance for it's small size huggingface.co/interfaze-ai/…

If your legal team is still chasing context, manually triaging requests, and working weekends to keep up, this one's for you. Intake turns ad-hoc requests into tracked work in Legora, executes the work with the Legora Agent, and sends it back to the requester, with a lawyer accountable throughout. Walter Myer, Product Lead at Legora and former lawyer, walks through how it works. Available on October 7.

they signed $1.37B in LOIs during the YC summer batch! incredibly ambitious

Introducing Agent Ultra - a step change in deep research Agent Ultra orchestrates swarms of agents to perform exhaustive research, build comprehensive lists, and answer questions requiring thousands of sources. In both evals and vibes, it's state of the art

Most folks don’t know that the inspo for @numeral was my own experience trying to deal with sales tax in 40+ states. Fast forward to today, the puzzle has only gotten more complex. Ah yes, Matt, the gold coins in the Discord server.

Here’s to the wanting. Here’s to the dreaming. Here’s to everyone.

Hop Aero is building rockets that can deliver cargo anywhere on Earth in minutes. They’re starting with military logistics and other time-sensitive payloads, including temperature-controlled materials with short shelf lives, where getting something there much faster can materially change the outcome. They’ve already built and successfully hot-fired a new rocket engine, and signed $1.37B in commercial LOIs.

Introducing Span-01, the first hyper-parallel reasoning classifier built for unseen challenges (RLAIF). 2x cheaper, 18% better than Jev. 700x cheaper, 4% better than GPT-6 Luna. Frontier reasoning for every behavior, at classifier speed. • Span-01: #1 on Behavior Benchmark • Span-01 Lite: Better than Jev and completely free!

Today, we're launching Masterpiece (YC P26). @masterpiece_lab We finance the companies building the intelligence economy, giving AI data vendors capital today instead of waiting 30–90 days for frontier labs to pay, funded through our $10M+ institutional credit facility and onchain liquidity via $USDml (coming soon). Every era has its masterpieces. We’re financing the next ones.

it is increasingly prudent to allocate more compute to validation than to generation you can think of it like having staff engineers checking the work of junior engineers. greptile plus and apex are incredibly powerful. for the last month we have been using apex on all our most critical changes, and it’s allowed us to move way faster and with far more confidence.

We’ve raised $85M for this moment. Introducing Warp 2.0: The first AI Head of HR. Every company is building AI to replace jobs. Warp is building AI to do the jobs no human should have to: If you work in HR, I want you to spend time with the manager who needs help or building company culture people actually want to work at. If you’re a founder, I want you to focus on signing clients or spending time with your family. You shouldn’t have to figure out how to register state tax in California. You shouldn’t have to pay outrageous penalties because you don't know what a DE 9C is. I want to make HR human again. Today, this is finally possible with the Warp Agent. I’d love for you to see it in action: warp.co/agent

Probably the coziest place I’ve worked at - they really did a good job with the yc night cafe

.@eightsleep is on track to surpass $1B in lifetime Pod sales by year-end, a defining milestone for our team and the category we set out to build. Pod 6 marks our next phase: making our technology even better and more accessible while expanding into healthcare and medical applications. We believe the future of sleep can have an even bigger impact on health. We’re just getting started. Thank you to Bloomberg for covering the milestone: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Breaking NEWS! @knowtexai is Named Prime Awardee on @DeptVetAffairs $775 Million Contract - available to VA medical centers and clinics nationwide. This is the largest public enterprise commitment to ambient #AI in #American #healthcare. Honored. ❤️🤍💙 globenewswire.com/news-relea…

YC night owl coworking sesh Kinda a vibe F26 so many more cross group events compared to P26