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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

[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!

[segmenta @segmenta]

Introducing https://t.co/llpyn3CJN8: a space for your agents to work together.

10 years ago, I built Twitter's first deep learning-powered bots to fight spam and abuse. Now the bots are agents, and they're good enough to be teammates. They just have nowhere to work together.

• Spin up Hermes, Claude Code, Codex and OpenClaw agents, or add your existing ones
• Give them a shared goal. They plan, write docs and hand off work like people do
• You follow along and step in anytime. Just @ them
• Free. Bring your own agents and pay nothing, or we host them at cost

It's how we run our own company now.

Open source and self-hostable.

[NebuSec @nebusecurity]

Read about our collaborative efforts with @Microsoft, including how NebuSec's autonomous pipeline works alongside MDASH to identify vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel and automatically generate working exploits.

The Linux kernel has long been a major target for vulnerability research. NebuSec began scanning the Linux kernel in November 2025 and has since identified 2,386 vulnerabilities, with 170 patches merged into the mainline kernel.

https://t.co/geD0EVIDpa

[Aaron Epstein @aaron_epstein]

Find anything about anyone @ploid_ai

[Alex Fleury @alexfleury160]

Today we're excited to announce Monte.

We're building the post-training platform to enable every company to train proprietary AI models on their own work.

Your agents do real work every day. The model behind them never learns from it.

Monte partners directly with your team to train the best model for your specific work. We use our platform to post-train open-weight models on your tasks, deploy them to serve your traffic, and continuously improve them based on real usage.

If your team is ready to train your own models, we'd love to talk. @trymonte_ai

[Alfonso Márquez de la Plata @alfonsomdelap]

Today we are launching @Sintropix, backed by @ycombinator: The AI-native ERP that closes your books every day and files your taxes in every country you operate in.

We connect to your banks, invoicing and payroll, and handle the accounting end-to-end. Founders get one place to do their finance work: track KPIs, see consolidated P&L and ARR reports, and forecast runway.

[Suhail @Suhail]

We completely maxed out all our inference compute in 2w across customers. Incredible. There’s so much room to get better still.

Unreal.

If you have a friend good at post-training or inference perf optimization, please intro us. 5 person team rn.

$20K referral award.

[Jan Senderek @jans]

In 2014, I sold my first company Loom to Dropbox.

Today, I’m proud to announce Roma 2.0 (YC F26): the first to-do list for AI agents.

Everyone uses a different agent: Claude, Grok Bot, Muse…

Until now, none of them could work together.

Roma automatically creates tasks and hands them to the right agent.

Allowing you and your agents to work together, with shared context.

Try it here: https://t.co/w9Ag9OrTUO

[Michael Hazard @michael_hazard_]

Dad never taught you to change a tire? Say less.

Rodeo Robotics. Robots for vehicle maintenance.

[Daniel Lenton @DanielLenton1]

OpenClaw, Hermes Agent and Prime Agent don't meaningfully learn from experience.

On Continual-ARC, our new benchmark at @letsunifyai, none of them were able to memorize anything of value and none were able to generalize to new tasks. Training a small 9B model's weights did both.

[Hyperbench (YC F26) @hyperbenchAI]

Introducing @hyperbenchAI : AI agents for hardware/software co-development.

Coding agents often lack the context to understand how a software change affects a physical system.

Hyperbench maps repositories, hardware components, interfaces, protocols, and test evidence into one system graph, giving agents the context to understand how the pieces connect.

Sign up for the beta: hyperbench [dot] ai/# private-beta

[Ben Butterworth @uxduck]

Today we're launching @uxduckhq, backed by @ycombinator: the AI-native software for the next billion drones.

Drone production in Ukraine has increased 1000x in 4 years. Each team rebuilds the same software.

[Yugesh Kothari @YugeshKothari]

@SemiAnalysis_ released GDPx about a week ago, with chip design tasks from us at @ergodexlabs. Fable 5.2 landed yesterday: the overall chip design score moved a lot, but our tasks saw no gains. Still a long way to go in AI for chip design!

[tim glaser @timgl]

Self-driving is out of beta

- we got pricing wrong at the start. we were charging $15 per pr, and reports were free

- agents do most of their work while creating reports. that's where the value was, and what people actually cared about

- now every run is billed, including reports, based on how long the agent spends in the sandbox and how much context is read