In collaboration with @olam_labs, we ran a series of experiments letting agent swarms compete in Minecraft and Mindustry. We wanted to see what kinds of agent dynamics would emerge when they shared a world over long periods of time. We found civil bureaucracy, thousands of telegraphic A2A messages, and OpenAI models retrieving the game's source code to beat Claude. More on our findings below:

The bottlenecks in AI are moving beyond the models. We’re excited about startups building the hardware, infra, financial systems, and specialized software to bring AI into the real economy, from factories and data centers to government and space.

There’s a misconception that a successful launch video needs to cost tens of thousands of dollars and feel like a high production commercial. But @FarzaTV has a different approach. Farza is the founder of @heyclicky and previously built Buildspace, one of the largest online schools for people working on their own ideas. He’s been making videos for over a decade, and today his posts regularly get millions of views. Rather than treating launches as rare, high-stakes moments, he’s made them part of the everyday process of building a company. Farza sat down with YC’s @aaron_epstein to share his playbook for turning demos into stories people actually want to watch. He breaks down how he scripts videos that still feel off the cuff, why founders should launch constantly, and and how to figure out which channels actually convert. 01:44 — Launch Constantly 03:38 — Start Shipping Demos 05:02 — Show the Process 06:07 — The Clicky Launch 07:43 — Write a Hook That Stops the Scroll 10:30 — Why Farza Scripts Every Video 12:04 — Designing the First 10 Seconds 15:15 — Demo-Driven Development 17:25 — You Have to Take a Thousand Shots 20:48 — Farza’s Formula for Videos That Convert 23:01 — Turning Demos Into Stories 24:53 — Show What You're Actually Building 29:11 — Finding Customers on Social Media 31:02 — Which Platforms Actually Convert? 39:01 — Why Farza’s First Hire Was a Filmmaker 40:49 — The Video Stack 45:41 — The 30-Day Launch Challenge

Alexandr Wang on what matters in an age of abundant intelligence: “The scarce resource isn’t going to be intelligence or agency. I really think it’s going to be vision and ambition.” “Do you have a clear view of what you want the world to look like in the future? What is the one way in which you wanna put your finger on the scale for how the future of the world will develop?” “AI will make that easier... But the flip side of that is then all of a sudden you can dream bigger.”

Congrats to @kiwicopple, @AntWilson, and @supabase on their $150 million round at a $10.65 billion valuation! More than 13 million developers use Supabase as the backend for their apps. They're adding more than 1 million users and over 4 million databases every month, and 70% of new databases are now created by agents or AI-driven tools.

Vapi (@Vapi_AI) is the platform for building and deploying voice AI agents. It now serves about a billion calls a year for companies including Amazon, Uber, and Intuit, helping businesses automate phone calls with AI. Voice is becoming the default interface between businesses and their customers, but getting agents reliable enough for production is still much harder than it looks. In this episode of Founder Firesides, co-founders @jordan_dearsley and @nikhilro_ sit down with @gustaf to share the long path to product-market fit, from pivoting more than a dozen times to building an AI therapist that eventually became the foundation for Vapi. They explain why voice was the first idea that felt inevitable, and how sticking with that conviction before the technology was ready eventually paid off. 00:05 — Powering a billion calls a year 02:12 — Why voice AI suddenly started working 04:57 — More than a dozen pivots 09:08 — From calendar app to AI note taker 13:23 — Starting over in San Francisco 14:14 — The AI therapist that became Vapi 17:56 — Finding PMF 22:47 — Why the model labs won’t replace Vapi 26:49 — The future of voice AI

A lot of construction work is still done by hand simply because the machines to automate it don’t exist. That’s become a bottleneck for building things like solar farms, data centers, and other critical infrastructure. @cosmic_robotics is building those machines. Their robots have already installed 11,000 solar panels, and they just signed a major contract with the largest construction company in the country. They’re building the construction robots we’ll need on Earth today, and eventually on the Moon and Mars. @JamesAEmerick

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

How much we love building things! Especially with my twin co-founder, @OTrashi 🩵 And now, we’re incredibly excited to have @BioDelivera backed by @ycombinator ! 🚀 We both graduated with our PhDs this March, packed our bags, moved to San Francisco, and kept building @BioDelivera. It’s been a crazy journey, and we’re happy that it’s about to get even crazier ⚡️🌪️🌀 We’re working to solve one of the biggest challenges in translating science to humans: delivery. Getting medicines and gene editors to the right organs and cells is vital. We’re ready to revolutionize the drug delivery space with our GCVs! A huge thank you to our YC partners, @dessaigne and @nemild , for believing in us, and to everyone else who has been there for us and supported us endlessly along the way. 🩵 We’re just getting started! 🚀 follow us for more updates! #biotech# #ycombinator# #womenfounder# #pharma# #biodelivera#

Steve Wozniak will be joining me on the main stage on October 2nd @Supabase Select is a conference for builders, so we invited one of the GOATs get your ticket here:

Conviction: Trading Desk in Your Pocket. Describe a trading idea in natural language. Conviction tests it on historical data and deploys an AI agent that trades on your behalf. Trade like a quant: Here's how it works:

I first came to San Francisco when I was 15, with my dad. He is a programmer. To a teenager from a small island outside of Stockholm, this was the place where the future was being built. We walked into Salesforce East and stood there watching the enormous digital display of moving water. Outside, Salesforce Tower was starting to rise. I remember looking up and thinking it would be pretty sweet to have a tower someday. We are not there yet. What I could not have known is that I would be back years later, having dinner with @Benioff and welcoming @salesforce as a @WeAreLegora customer. Salesforce's Legal and Corporate Affairs organization will now use Legora across North America, EMEA and APAC. Their lawyers keep the judgment calls. We take care of the work around them. We have run on Slack since day one and became Salesforce customers when our sales team outgrew its first CRM, so it is good to have it run in the other direction too. Welcome to Legora, Salesforce. Dad, this one feels special.

@ycombinator built AI versions of its partners to help more people work through their startup ideas. For its Office Hour Simulator, the team needed useful answers delivered quickly enough for a spoken conversation. They had been testing lightweight Gemini and OpenAI models before moving to GLM-5.2 on a dedicated Wafer endpoint. YC then compared that deployment with GPT-4.1 mini on OpenAI and Gemma 4 31B on Cerebras, evaluating answer quality, latency, and conversation duration. The Wafer configuration delivered 31% lower average LLM latency than OpenAI and 44% lower than Cerebras. Users spent 2.5 minutes longer talking to YC’s AI partners when using Wafer. Read how YC built the experience and landed on Wafer 🧵 link in thread

Last week, I got to go up on stage at YC Demo Day and pitch the idea of non-aligned, sovereign orbital infrastructure to thousands of investors @Exosat_ YC was an incredible experience Huge thanks to @bradflora and @ChristinaG325, it was great to work with you both!