Y Combinator

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[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Should governments intervene to slow down AI development?

Join our inaugural YC Debate on Monday, 11/16 at 6pm:

Jacob Coxon (ex-Anthropic, OpenAI) will argue the affirmative.
Robin Hanson (GMU) will argue the negative.

https://t.co/0vzMiVzFWh

[Aaron Epstein @aaron_epstein]

The future’s going to be so cool

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Founders: think carefully about board construction. It is exceptionally easy to have fair-weather friends who run for the hills the moment something gets choppy.

Have personally experienced this. Be paranoid. You can’t fix it once it’s a problem, only in advance.

[Raphaël Dabadie @RaphaelDabadie]

Consulting firms are about to command more intelligence than they could ever hire.

We’re launching Foaster: the AI infrastructure for consulting teams to run engagements with agents.

As intelligence explodes, firms will delegate entire workstreams to agents powered by their methods, knowledge, and client data. Consultants will direct that intelligence and turn its work into real change.

Making that possible takes a dedicated engineering and research team. That’s our role: we build, deploy, and continuously advance the infrastructure, bringing AI-led interviews at scale, autonomous PowerPoint agents, continuous benchmarking, and more to your firm, including on-premise at your clients.

[Jon Xu @xuster]

That’s a wrap at YC Startup School Taipei. It was so great to meet the talented builders here, many of whom showed us cool demos of what they’re building. Thanks for such a warm welcome, the future is bright.

[Sarthak Jain @sarthak_jain_42]

Elithia (@ycombinator F26) reviews the medical records in a malpractice case like a junior doctor: thousands of pages in, a cited report and timeline out.

70+ physicians check and correct it.

Every correction builds toward the world's best record of how physicians decide.

https://t.co/hzJmAumdvI

[Tavus @tavus]

Part of what makes Tavus models work best is our built-in perception with Raven.

People rely on subtle cues, like a look or a shift in tone, to understand each other.

Unlike most AI, PALs see and hear those cues, so they perceive the world around them and interact like we do.

[Abby Grills @AGrillz]

The internet is the greatest dataset ever created.

Today we’re launching Riveter V2 to make it accessible.

Describe any dataset. @riveterhq researches the live web and returns it complete and structured, in the app, via API, or over MCP.

Reply “data” for 1,000 free credits.

[Matias Voldby Drejer @matiasdrejer]

We believe most interaction with AI will happen through speech. But models still talk like machines.

This is a data problem.

Today we're launching @agenticdataco (YC F26): real-world speech data + audio-native RL environments so speech models sound and act human.

[AnyAlpha @AnyAlphaAI]

We’re proud to announce the partnership:
@Kalshi x AnyAlpha
AnyAlpha is the agentic trading platform that turns trading ideas into AI agents.
Kalshi traders can now connect their account to AnyAlpha and let their agents trade 24/7.

[Orikeda Trashi @OTrashi]

Today we are launching @BioDelivera a programmable drug delivery platform that delivers therapies only to diseased cells enabling cures for every disease. 🎯🧪

Less than 3% of an injected therapy reaches diseased cells. The rest ends up in healthy organs. At @BioDelivera we want to change that, our mission is to make every therapy accessible to patients.
Happy to build with @ikeda_trashi this exciting technology!
Reach out at [email protected]

[David Lieb @dflieb]

Some novel interaction ideas here on Raven's AI phone

[Vivian Midha Shen @vivianmshen]

being earnest is a superpower. being high integrity founder makes people want to bet on you.

a bad startup idea can turn into the a generational company. but integrity is non-negotiable.

[Aaron Epstein @aaron_epstein]

Alessandro has an incredible story. He was originally going to be part of the P26 batch to help bring cancer drugs to market faster, when he was diagnosed with cancer himself.

He's since beat it, and is doing his life's work building NxtCure, an AI CRO using digital twins of humans to test cancer drugs before they reach patients.

Congrats on the launch @alessandrohammd!

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Tune in: https://t.co/r9aPnjIdYc

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

With Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes back in the conversation, we’re revisiting one of the most remarkable firsthand accounts of what actually happened inside the company.

Tyler Shultz joined Theranos fresh out of Stanford as a true believer in its mission. His grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, sat on the company’s board, and Elizabeth Holmes had become a mentor and even a presence at family gatherings. But once Tyler began working directly with Theranos’s technology, he discovered that the reality inside the lab looked very different from what the company was telling the world.

On The Social Radars, Tyler sat down with Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy to tell the full story of how he went from employee to whistleblower: the failed blood tests and red flags he uncovered, the culture of fear that kept employees silent, his attempts to raise concerns internally and with regulators, and the extraordinary legal pressure he faced after speaking to The Wall Street Journal.

This episode was originally recorded on December 4, 2024.

00:00 — Tyler Shultz’s Theranos Story
01:53 — Meeting Elizabeth Holmes
04:24 — The First Red Flags
08:03 — Theranos Launch Day
11:20 — Inside the Theranos Lab
16:33 — How Theranos Built a Culture of Fear
24:04 — What the Technology Couldn’t Do
27:43 — The Syphilis Test That Changed Everything
31:56 — Raising Concerns With Elizabeth
34:52 — Resigning From Theranos
51:53 — How Elizabeth Holmes Sold the Story
01:18:29 — Erika Cheung Speaks Up
01:21:17 — Trying to Convince George Shultz
01:36:43 — The Wall Street Journal Comes Calling
01:44:34 — Becoming a Source
01:46:41 — Theranos Goes Into Attack Mode
01:52:10 — The Ambush at His Grandfather’s House
02:16:05 — $500,000 in Legal Fees and Private Investigators
02:22:46 — Hitting the Lowest Point
02:30:41 — The Wall Street Journal Story Finally Breaks
02:37:01 — Going on the Record
02:45:20 — Life After Theranos

[Joanne Wang @joannewang_]

Epsilab is working with frontier labs to build RL environments for long-horizon enterprise work.

Today, low-quality data is an industry-wide problem. We founded Epsilab to bring together real-life data and top 1% domain expertise to solve this.

Backed by @ycombinator (F26).

[Jessica Livingston @jesslivingston]

Now that everyone's talking about Elizabeth Holmes again, we should recalibrate by hearing the story of the original whistleblower, Tyler Shultz.

https://t.co/20btEDsT1z

[Dan McGee @mcgeedan42]

We reworked CI from first principles and made Graphide, a CI runner 10-20x faster than GitHub.

On 24 open source repos, including 7 from our batchmates, 16 finished in under a minute. Pandas went from 33 minutes to under 3, with identical results.

[Omar Abdelaziz @OmarAbcXyz123]

We switched 10 people from iPhone to Blue. Weeks later, none of them want their iPhone back.

Introducing Blue: a phone you just talk to. Tell it what you need, and it gets done.

It has all the context, can use every single app, and even triages your notifications.

We built it for people who always have a little too much to do. The ones buried in messages, notifications, and to-dos.

If that's you, get yours today.

Backed by Y Combinator + 70 other VCs & angels.

https://t.co/R8o6ouHBJF

[Alessandro Hammond @alessandrohammd]

NxtCure Labs (backed by @ycombinator) just launched! We are an AI CRO with digital twins that test cancer drugs before they reach patients. We are 28% better than even the best frontier AI models. Oncology Trials take 10+ yrs, ~3% approved, 90%+ fail post-animal. Let's get new oncology drugs through trials!