startups
(11)
AvidXchange and Rho Are Barely Rivals
They both automate accounts payable, but the resemblance ends there. One is built around the messy workflows of established industries; the other starts with the bank account of a funded startup.
Commsor Bet That Your Network Was the Product
The community-software startup spent six years arguing that trust, not cold email, is how companies actually grow - then folded the idea, and itself, into The Swarm.
Plain and Gladly Are Both Trying to Kill the Support Ticket
Two startups, two very different customers, one shared enemy. Plain wants developers to forget the inbox; Gladly wants retailers to forget the case number. Here is what the end of the ticket actually looks like.
Ryan Petersen on AI, Logistics, and the Future of Flexport
In this episode of Y Combinator's podcast The Light Cone, Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen explains how artificial intelligence is transforming global logistics. Petersen details how AI already saved 2% of Flexport's ocean freight spend while improving transit time 20%, how the company aims to make ocean container shipping 8-10% cheaper, and how AI agents now make phone calls, parse contracts, detect unhappy customers, and automate freight forwarding work. He also reflects on incumbency advantages in AI, his personal 'founder mode' evolution, capital discipline, and a sweeping philosophical vision of what automation means for humanity.
The Data Was Locked in a Vault. Subsalt Found a Way to Share It Without Opening the Door.
This Microsoft customer story details how healthcare technology startup Subsalt built a HIPAA-compliant synthetic data sandbox on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Fabric to help medical researchers and students at UT Southwestern Medical Center access real-quality clinical data in days instead of months, accelerating research outcomes while safeguarding patient privacy.
How My Company Built an AI App So Good We Sold It for $650 Million
In this Y Combinator Startup School talk, Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext, explains how his team stopped everything at $20M in revenue to build CoCounsel, the first AI assistant for lawyers, on early access to GPT-4 — a bet that led to a $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. He lays out a practical playbook across three areas: how to pick an idea (target jobs people already pay for, in categories of assist, replace, or do the previously unthinkable), how to actually build reliable AI (map exactly what a professional does, turn each step into prompts or plain code, and grind on evaluations until you pass 97-99% of tests), and how to market and sell it (build a genuinely great product first, price to value, build trust with head-to-head comparisons, and watch out for pilots that never convert to real revenue).
Inside Clay: What Is a Go-To-Market Engineer?
In this episode of 'Stories of Scale,' a host spends a full day inside Clay, the $5 billion New York startup that coined the term 'go-to-market engineer,' to figure out what this fast-growing role actually is. Shadowing Everett Berry, Clay's Head of GTM Engineering, along with teammates like Spencer, Varun (co-founder), and George, the video unpacks how GTM engineers blend engineering, marketing, and sales to build automated systems that find, understand, and reach customers. It also reveals Clay's two-team 'flywheel' — an internal pipeline team and a forward-deployed customer-facing team — that helped the company scale from five years of near-zero revenue to over $100 million and 16,000+ customers.
How the Best Startups Really Begin — YC Office Hours
In this episode of Y Combinator's Office Hours, a rotating cast of YC group partners pulls back the curtain on how legendary startups actually began. Using real interview memories of companies like Solugen, CaptivateIQ, Amplitude, Segment, Brex, Jeeves and Nourish, the partners argue that companies such as Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox looked indistinguishable from every other early-stage startup on day zero. The through-line: greatness comes not from a magical origin but from tens of thousands of decisions, a bias for action, obstinate conviction, clear and honest communication, and the willingness to pivot until you build something people want.
The AI-Native Empire: ElevenLabs and Legora on the All-In Stage
Recorded live at the RAISE Summit inside the Louvre, this two-part All-In Podcast conversation, hosted by Jason Calacanis, features ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski and Legora founder and CEO Max Junestrand. Staniszewski details how ElevenLabs raced from a research project to roughly $600 million in annual revenue in under three years, why the company runs on small engineer-embedded teams with zero product managers, how it protects voices from impersonation while paying creators over $22 million, and how it out-competes frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic on voice. Junestrand explains how Legora is compressing the trillion-dollar legal-services market with AI agents, growing 50% quarter-over-quarter for seven straight quarters, deploying 'forward-deployed lawyers,' and disrupting legacy players like LexisNexis and Westlaw.
David Senra breaks down Peter Thiel's Zero to One
In this episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra revisits Peter Thiel and Blake Masters' book 'Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future' after a four-year gap, deliberately re-reading a fresh copy so his old highlights wouldn't influence him. He argues the book isn't a how-to manual but a prompt for your own thinking, whose central message is that founders should aim to build a 'creative monopoly'—a business so good no one else can offer a close substitute. Threading examples from Apple, Amazon, PayPal, Polaroid, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs, Senra explores Thiel's key ideas: thinking from first principles, the contrarian question, secrets, the power law, durability over growth, sales and distribution as product design, and the irreplaceable value of the founder.
Laurence Allen
Laurence Allen, co-founder and CEO of Terranova, explains how his startup lifts land out of flood zones by injecting slurries of waste wood chips deep underground, an inexpensive, scalable alternative to seawalls, levees, and demolition. Drawing on a 1970s Venice mudjacking experiment and powered by autonomous robots and AI geology modeling, Terranova aims to be 'the anti-subsidence,' protecting whole communities and critical infrastructure. Allen also reflects on his formative internship at SpaceX, his maker upbringing, the intensity of deep-tech founding, and his vision for licensing the technology to contractors worldwide.