Y Combinator
The complete archive of Y Combinator (2005-2026), from a walk home in Harvard Square to the most influential startup accelerator in the world. The full institutional history interwoven with YC's entire video library: every Startup School lecture, How to Start a Startup class, founder story and talk, from Zuckerberg in 2012 to the AI era. Hundreds of hours of the people, ideas and companies that built Silicon Valley's engine room.
A chronological documentary of 710 moments on Loreline.
Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-22
Eras
- Walk Home, On 11 March 2005, walking home from dinner in Harvard Square, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston decide to start their own investment firm. Cambridge Seed becomes Y Combinator within days, and the Summer Founders Program invents the batch model.
- Go West, Reddit’s 2006 sale is the first big win. The batch model proves itself, the program moves to Silicon Valley, Hacker News launches, and a generation of founders, Dropbox, Airbnb, find their way to Mountain View.
- Paul Graham, The Cambridge program closes and YC consolidates in the Valley. Sequoia’s backing lets the batches grow; Stripe and Airbnb break out, Startup School scales to the biggest names in tech, and YC begins funding nonprofits.
- Altman & Scale, Sam Altman becomes president; the standard deal becomes $150k for 7%. The How to Start a Startup course puts YC’s playbook online, the batches grow into the hundreds, and Coinbase, DoorDash and Cruise arrive.
- Startup School, Geoff Ralston takes over as president. YC runs its first fully remote batch through the pandemic, raises the standard deal to $500k, and a flood of online talks and founder stories carries YC’s ideas worldwide.
- Tan & the AI Era, Garry Tan becomes president and CEO and moves YC back to San Francisco. The AI wave reshapes every batch, the first AI Startup School fills a hall with 2,500 students, and at twenty years YC has funded over 5,000 companies worth a combined $600 billion.
- - François Chollet: How We Get To AGI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Nobel Laureate John Jumper: AI is Revolutionizing Scientific Discovery. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - How Replit Went From $10M to $100M ARR In Just 9 Months. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - How Diode Is 10x-ing Hardware Design. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Salient: The Fintech Startup Processing $1B+ in Loans with AI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Context Engineering for Engineers. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Advanced Context Engineering for Agents. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Context Engineering: Lessons Learned from Scaling CoCounsel. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Using LongMemEval to Improve Agent Memory. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience). From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - OpenAI vs. Deepseek vs. Qwen: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Exa: Organizing the World’s Knowledge. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - HappyRobot: Automating the Work That Moves the World. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Motion: Redefining How Work Gets Done. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Recall.ai: Unlocking the World’s Conversations. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - The Future of Software Creation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Numeral: Building the Global Tax Platform. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Why Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Greptile: AI That Actually Understands Codebases. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Juicebox: AI Agents for the Hiring Process. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Alex: Your AI Recruiting Partner. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - RevenueCat: Powering Subscriptions for the App Economy. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - The 7 Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Ask These Questions Before Starting An AI Startup. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - This Startup Is Trying To Delete 29% Of All CO2 Emissions. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Emergent: The AI App Builder for Everyone. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Billion-Dollar Unpopular Startup Ideas. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Transformers Explained: The Discovery That Changed AI Forever. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Aleph: The AI Platform for Modern Finance. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Commure: The AI Operating System for Healthcare. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Good News For Startups: Enterprise Is Bad At AI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Giga: The AI Platform for Enterprise Support. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Magic Patterns: The AI Design Tool for Product Teams. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Sim: The Visual, End-to-End Agent Builder. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Inside The Startup Launching AI Data Centers Into Space. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Tavus: The AI Human Platform. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - AI Is Eating Logistics. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Sphere: The Global Tax Compliance Platform. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were Impossible Until Now. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Parahelp: The End-to-End AI Support Agent. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - How Amplitude Went From Skeptics to “All In” on AI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Veriff: The Global Identity Infrastructure. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - How Intelligent Is AI, Really?. From the Y Combinator video archive (2025).
- - Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - A New Approach To AI Models. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Lessons from Building Open Source Libraries. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The ML Technique Every Founder Should Know. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - This Startup Is Trying To Solve The AI Memory Problem. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The Future of AI Molecular Discovery. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Artie: Real Time Data Streaming For The AI Age. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Why Your Startup Website Isn't Converting. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - This Startup Beat Gemini 3 on ARC-AGI - at Half the Cost. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - How We Redesigned Our Website. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - We're All Addicted To Claude Code. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - OpenClaw Creator: Why 80% Of Apps Will Disappear. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - CEO of Framer: Why Designers Should Become Founders. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The New Way To Build A Startup. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
…590 further moments continue the chronology here. Full text archive: /loreline-text/y-combinator.md
- - This AI Startup Is Taking Over Phone Sales. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The AI Agent Economy Is Here. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Rebuilding Customer Support for the AI Era. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The Powerful Alternative To Fine-Tuning. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - This Startup Built the Infrastructure Powering Voice AI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - This Is The Next Industry AI Will Disrupt. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - AI Is Unlocking Millions Of New Builders. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Inside The Startup Reinventing The $6 Trillion Chemical Manufacturing Industry. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The Q/A Layer for the AI Coding Era. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The End of Manual Debugging. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - This Startup Catches Fraud at Scale. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - This Startup Is Automating America's Biggest Hospitals. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - This Startup Built AI That 80% of Callers Think Is Human. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - How Stripe Built Their New Website. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Replit's CEO On The Only Two Jobs Left In The Company Of The Future. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Harshil Mathur: AI Is Compressing Every Moat. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The Tool the Best Engineers Are Using Right Now. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - From Zapier for Devs to Powering 90% AI Agents. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - This $1.5 Trillion Industry Still Runs on Paper and Fax Machines. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Paul Graham, Founder of Y Combinator, Live from Stockholm. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Meet The DevTool Founders Building For AI Agents. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Circle CEO: 3 Things That Will Transform Stablecoins in 2027. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Zepto: How Two 17-Year-Olds Built India's Largest Seller Of Fruits and Vegetables. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - How a Private Chef Startup Went All In on AI Agents. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The ERP for the AI Revolution is here. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Inference, Diffusion, World Models, and More | YC Paper Club. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Why Two IIT Engineers Turned Down $550K Jobs To Build A Startup. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Walks Us Through His AI Coding Setup. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - How Legora Went From YC to $100M ARR in 18 Months. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Emergent: How Six Months of Tinkering Led To A $100M ARR Company. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The Most AI-Pilled CEO We Know. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - How Meesho Became India’s Biggest Shopping App. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Self-Play for LLMs, AI for Biology, Formal Verification, and More | YC Paper Club. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Garry Tan on the Past, Present, and Future of YC. The Peel with Turner Novak
- - Live Episode! Reddit: Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman. DeepSignal Studios
- - Groww: If Your Customers Don't Love It or Hate It, You've Already Lost. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - Pick One Idea and Go Deep. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - The Age Of The 40-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Here. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - AI Agents Are Killing the Engineering Pyramid - Here's What Replaces It. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
- - What It Actually Takes to Deploy a Voice Agent to a Fortune 500. From the Y Combinator video archive (2026).
Full text archive: /loreline-text/y-combinator.md
