From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups
Jake Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million.In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he shared how his team did it—from picking the right idea to building AI products that actually work—and how founders can turn a cool demo into a reliable tool used by real customers.
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Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution
Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the Transformer.In this video, YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language — from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need — the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era.
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YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours
Every founder faces moments where they’re not sure what to do next — such as how to go to market with AI products, when to pivot, and who/when to hire.In this episode of Office Hours, YC partners Pete Koomen, Brad Flora, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Gustaf Alströmer answer real questions from founders and share stories about how great teams build conviction, learn faster, and make better decisions as they grow.
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What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs
For years, we've heard two major narratives about AI. One predicting the end of human work, the other dismissing it as hype. The truth is more nuanced, and more hopeful.From radiology to software engineering, the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster, demand for human creativity and judgment grows.YC's Garry Tan explores what history, economics, and real companies show us— that technology doesn't replace people, it redefines what we can do.
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How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out
Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the issue tracking tool used by thousands of high-growth companies. Before Linear, he was the first designer at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb.On Design Review with YC's Aaron Epstein, Karri shares how his design background shaped Linear’s product philosophy, why quality and craft matter from day one, what founders should look for when hiring, and how AI is changing the way teams build. It’s a deep dive into building products that truly stand out.
We help founders make something people want. The Y Combinator Podcast is where builders talk about building. From the earliest days of an idea to scaling a company that changes the world, YC partners and founders share real stories, lessons, and tactics from the frontlines.
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