Y Combinator

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[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Over the past year, we've been building our own internal agent infrastructure at YC: over 350 tools, self-improving skill loops, and a shared organizational brain that gets smarter overnight.

In this episode of the @LightconePod, we sat down with YC General Partner Pete @koomen to talk about how he led the effort from the ground up.

We cover how giving agents unrestricted access to one database was the key unlock, the self-improving skill loops that get smarter overnight, and why he thinks we've arrived at the personal computer moment for AI.

00:39 — YC's AI Stack
02:15 — The Finance Team Problem That Started It All
05:07 — SQL Access Changes Everything
07:20 — One Database to Rule Them All
09:14 — Jevons Paradox
10:07 — Denormalizing for Agents
12:15 — The Single-Player Era of Agents
14:16 — 350 Tools and a Shared Registry
16:24 — Skillify, DRY, and MECE Resolvers
18:23 — The Self-Improving Dream Cycle
20:26 — The Two-Sentence Pitch Skill
23:06 — How Super Intelligence Compounds
25:10 — Recording Everything as a Building Layer
27:10 — The Shared Organizational Brain
29:18 — Trust-Default Culture as a Requirement
30:44 — Raising the Floor for New Employees
32:35 — Horseless Carriages
34:24 — Why Chat Is the Best Interface for Agents
38:50 — Just-in-Time Software
40:49 — Centralizing vs. Decentralizing AI
43:32 — The Personal AI Revolution

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

I met the @industriestenet founders while visiting KTH in Stockholm this January. They invited me to tour their basement lab and showed me an early prototype of their quad drone.

They were obsessed with deleting unnecessary parts. When I left they handed me a 'business card': a custom PCB they'd designed to replace four boards on a standard quad.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Two YC decacorns in one day and one of them is building commercial fusion. Polaris hit 150 million degrees C, first privately funded machine to do it. This is the abundance future, built by people who actually ship. https://t.co/calTVslNEw

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

So close to product market fit is still not product market fit

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

The number one question we got asked during our YC batch by investors was, “why are you doing yc”? We could have raised capital without it very easily. And the answer then was the same as the answer is now, that YC made us a lot more ambitious and made Corgi a much bigger company

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Huge milestone here. Firecrawl is making something agents want.

[Ankit Gupta @agupta]

oh wow a second YC-funded decacorn in the same day that must be some sort of record

[Ankit Gupta @agupta]

new YC-funded decacorn

[Paul Graham @paulg]

There's a startup in the current YC batch that built an MRI machine in 101 days.

[Nemil Dalal @nemild]

Matt Levine's Money Stuff column in Bloomberg had a great callout on @river_markets, in our current @ycombinator batch.

Cracked team of prediction market traders now building the prime broker for prediction markets that they wanted.

https://t.co/6ImbGbW5z5

[Harj Taggar @harjtaggar]

The best hires are the ones you can delegate outcomes to, not tasks. Good hires come back with smart questions about the next step. Great ones just get the job done.

[Charlie Holtz @charlieholtz]

This was fun :)

Building Conductor with Conductor is very addictive. Here’s my workflow!

[Zeno Rocha @zenorocha]

our OpenAI traffic 3x'd.

the cause: ChatGPT added branded links inside answers instead of burying them in citations.¹

but that's the small story.

Codex went from 600k to 5m weekly users.²

agents are choosing the stack now.

[Tasklet @TaskletAI]

Introducing: Tasklet for Teams.

One place for your team's agents, connections, apps, and knowledge. Scale productivity without adding headcount.

[Aaron Epstein @aaron_epstein]

Founders always want to know the magic words to convince investors to invest. There aren't any.

The best way to convince investors is for you to be convinced yourself.

[Philip Johnston @PhilipJohnston]

Thanks so much @garrytan! 🙏🙏 Wouldn’t have happened without @ycombinator!
@t_blom

[Paul Graham @paulg]

All through YC's history, investors (for obvious reasons) have tried to tell founders that YC wasn't worth it. In 2010 they just said we sucked. Now, since it's obvious we didn't, they've had to change the claim: now it's YC *used* to be great, but has declined from what it was.

[Dasha @dasha_shunina]

Meet the most promising companies from the latest @ycombinator batch 👀

One big takeaway:

AI agents need more than intelligence.
They need memory, identity, observability, compliance, insurance and power.

My latest @Forbes deep dive 👇

https://t.co/1IPkx2hqSi

[Harj Taggar @harjtaggar]

I remember interviewing the @supabase founders over a spotty Zoom connection during the first days of COVID lockdown.

What's wild is they've been growing insanely fast since that YC interview and yet you can see in the graph how much AI bent an already steep curve.

Congrats @kiwicopple @AntWilson and team!

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

We sat down with Helion founder David Kirtley last year to learn more about how they're approaching the problem differently, as they develop a new fusion system: https://t.co/ICptuP4rxv

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Congrats to @Dkirtley and @Helion_Energy on their $465M Series G at a $15.5B valuation!

Helion is building the world's first commercial fusion power plant, Orion. Their Polaris prototype recently exceeded 150 million degrees Celsius, the first privately funded fusion machine to run on deuterium-tritium fuel. They've already signed a power purchase agreement with Microsoft to deliver 50 megawatts of power for its data centers by 2028.

https://t.co/XLvkkZxAGg