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The State of Startups in 2026

36m 29s

The State of Startups in 2026

A pivotal shift is underway in the startup ecosystem, marked by a surge in "heart tech" companies—those building physical, hardware-based solutions—now making up 20% of YC startups. Key areas include robotics, defense, industrial manufacturing, and compute infrastructure, driven by AI-driven innovation and strategic demand. The median revenue of YC companies has jumped from $8,000 to $20,000 monthly, reflecting faster growth and more mature, end-to-end automation powered by AI agents. Founders are increasingly experienced, with a growing number of PhDs and technical depth, enabling breakthroughs in complex domains like silicon photonics and data center design. These advancements are accelerating research and reducing reliance on massive engineering teams. Defense and domestic manufacturing are booming due to national security needs and supply chain reboots. A new category of high-value companies is emerging: those selling data and RL environments to AI labs, generating substantial revenue in a short time. Additionally, AI agents are now capable of executing full workflows—from recruiting to manufacturing—dramatically increasing product value. This shift is not just about software but about full automation, where the most valuable products solve entire jobs. The era of solo, technically elite founders is thriving, and the key to success is now knowing what to build, not just who to partner with. This moment of technological acceleration suggests a fundamental transformation in how startups innovate, scale, and deliver value.

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Frankly, some of the most powerful and bad-ass founders that we've been seeing lately, there might be in their late 30s, 40s, even 50s. I mean, there's a sort of resurgence of the experienced founder. A lot of people seem to say that they want to be YC for solo founders, but it turns out YC is the YC for solo founders. What a weird moment we are in history where you wake up in the morning, you like wire up a new model, and then these things that even a month ago, you're just like, why isn't it working? It just starts working. Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. At YC, we work with thousands of founders per year, which means we start to see things before they're obvious. So we wanted to share some of that with you today. What's the state of the art, and what's coming next? What should you, the builder, know? Let's get started. Diana, you have a few things to share with us. So we did a bit of an analysis for all the companies we accepted in the last 18, 12 months, and we have some pretty shocking stats to share with everyone. So one of the big ones is the number of heart tech companies that are in the bad. It has gone from 8% to 20%. There's a lot of underlying reasons why that has happened. We will go deeper into that. The other one is the rate of growth of companies and what YC does to the companies has accelerated. So the median YC company when it gets accepted is at zero in revenue, it's pre-revenue pre-product, and by the end of the batch, in the past, companies we get about 8K median revenue, and now the companies in median are getting to 20,000 monthly revenue, as opposed to 8K. So those are the top two that we can dive deeper into. Yeah, let's dig into heart tech first. Like, what are these heart tech companies and what's driving this? Things that actually touch atoms and not just bits. Yeah, and I think you have the category breakdown of the heart tech companies, right, Diana? Yeah, so specifically robotics has been a big one. It has gone from 1% of the batch to about 6%, 7% of the batch, industrial manufacturing, building things back in the US has been a huge trend. It has gone from about 4% to 10% of the batch. The other one is defense is a big one. We all have been working with a lot of defense startup. It has gone from about 1.5% to about 5% of the batch. The other big one is there's this compute need that the world is getting into with AI. So there's a lot of companies building the semiconductor stack or botonics. It has gone from about 1% of the batch from a year ago to about close to 4% of the batch. And the other one even below the stack of compute is power. So there's a lot of power infrastructure as well. It has gone from also 1% to about close to 3% of the batch. So all these numbers across the physical atom stacks have somewhere triple or quintupled. Yeah, this is the age of the machine, I think. And that's, I mean, as the world goes, our motto, the t-shirt says, "Make something people want." And people sure do want those things right now. And the other interesting factor about all these companies that are going deep into atoms is that we've been funding more technical founders and with more expertise than ever, right, Jared? We have this fun stat about the current summer batch. In the current summer batch, one in six of the founders actually has a PhD. It's way more than that's been historically. And it's because, yeah, if you're doing something with silicon photonics, you're probably going to need a pretty strong research background. And so we've been funding a lot more of those founders. And those founders, I think, have disproportionately been doing, like, especially well. I think AGI compounds this in a really fascinating and awesome way in that, like, you might think in the past, you actually, like, heart tech was hard because you had supply chains. You had an incredible software component often. I think Paul Merlucky talked about this a lot when it came to Android. It's like having code Gen means that suddenly, even all the things that they do at Android can happen much, much faster, right? Even three or four years ago, you would talk about software engineering and, like, the top tier software engineers as one of the limiting reagents to being able to do really, really top tier full stack hardware. And that's less and less true. I mean, you still need one or two of them, or you need, like, a small team, but you don't need to hire 1,000 great engineers versus Google or meta or whoever else. And that really changes the economics. I mean, that's the true bull case for heart tech. It's not just that people are shying away from funding software businesses, but it's actually that the super smart models that we have now are actually accelerating scientific research and making it possible for startups to have bigger research breakthroughs earlier and that, therefore, these deep tech companies will actually work better. I think the other factor is there's basically three macro trends that are also driving all this growth on atoms and is seeing huge companies like SpaceX have such a successful IPO has created a generation of founders wanting to build in space. There's lots of these companies that are building across the whole stack. So it's been companies that in the current batch in summer 26, this is company that we work with called Exosat. That's trying to build basically a sovereign start link solution. There's other company that I work with in winter 2016. It's called Beyond Reach Labs that's building solar panels for satellites in space. If you imagine companies like Star Cloud wanting to have all these data center in space, they will need to have power. So this is an obvious solution. Now, the other macro trend is, I think we have a generation of current founders right now that have grown with the war that's been very front and center and spoken a lot in social media and they want to do something. Like, two of the companies I'm most excited about that I funded the last couple batches. One was Icarus last fall and then nine mothers this last spring. And both of them were defense. Icarus is doing like a solar powered U2 spy plane that gives overwatch and can also do comms, which is actually really important. The future of drone war is being able to actually communicate with your drones on the ground and see what's going on. They've been able to get to seven figure contracts with the new Department of War. And then likewise with drone war special forces has been buying nine mothers anti-drone defense. So it's basically a shotgun turret with CV. But it's actually almost the only way that you can protect special forces deep behind and enemy lines. I mean, these are people who have been training for years and years in a very elite special force that America doesn't have thousands of these people. We have a very, very small set. And so protecting them from what could be like a commodity drone attack is actually really existential for the Department of War. So just really cool to see this new administration actually approach defense in a very different way. Like, classically, there was just a lot of frankly capture from the big defense primes that are just doing sort of cost plus. They think of themselves as consultants. And to be able to see new startups that can actually take advantage of all of the AI, all of the tech, all of the new ways of building things, to build things that frankly the defense primes can't build. You know, that's a really powerful mega trend right now. Now, the thing about defense is not just those full solutions that get sold to the government. There's also a lot of category of startups that are dual use that they sell both through the private sector and to the government and that have to do with everything down the supply chain. So things like manufacturing things back in America, building, custom. I think you had this company, Knox Medal. Yeah, they're bringing metal manufacturing back to America. America has like largely lost its metal industry. It got hollowed out over the last few decades and can't build stuff without metal. And so, Knox Medal is like rebuilding America's metal supply chain. And they're doing it in the heartland of America in, in Detroit, where there's all these like empty factories that have basically just been like sitting there. And there's an example of like the trend where it's not just people are doing hardware companies where the hardware companies themselves are growing faster than ever. I think I saw a PG-Tweet that Knox Medal is growing like that software growth rate. Do you understand that? How are they growing so fast? So one reason is that a lot of their customers are these new defense tech startups that have sprung up and need metal to build all their all their stuff and the existing suppliers that are these sort of like sleepy old businesses mostly run by old people. Just like can't keep up with the pace that the new defense tech startups want to build that. And it reminds me a bit of like when the web 2.0 boom happened early in the YC days, we would have these new startups, but then they would prefer to buy from new startups that could sort of like move at their speed and like work well with them like Stripe, for example. You could use a legacy credit card vendor, but like it's just like way better to work with Stripe. And so I feel like they're sort of becoming that for the whole defense tech ecosystem. Now the third trend is basically compute is a very heavy physical atoms process to get all these data centers live. very quickly because a lot of the demand for AI that we've been talking has been skyrocketing and there's a very interesting stat where GPUs from NVIDIA listed like an A100 GPU per hour is actually appreciating and cost which is unusual in the past when you get a A100 by now I'm sort of old. They're pretty old yeah. The price is going up because it's just too much demand and not enough supply and compute. So there's a lot of startups that are now working on bringing data centers live and you have everything from the construction of the sites to the software to planet to actually doing the data center build out to interesting solutions that have to do with how to power them and combination of energy battery so this all these category of startups and even to the point of going down to the core compute oscillations there's a number of startups that are building new new silicon for an alternative to to NVIDIA. There's this company the Tyler worked with called Lamb Labs that's building new processors for compute. There's another one that I'm working on this batch called bot that is trying to build basically new custom hardware architecture that's using ternary representation for models because what it turns out which is a funny trend right now if you look at all the Embedia architectures from A100s to H100s and now the B B 300s each of these generations they're actually going down in floating point precision in terms of what they were they're going from FP32 168 etc and it turns out that the LLM architecture doesn't need the full precision floating. FP2 is even somewhat usable. Right so this is what bot is trying to do and I think you have an interesting one that's doing the interconnect with with photonics. Yeah there's a company called dipole labs in the current batch that is replacing the switches that are in data centers which are essentially the like routing systems between different GPUs if like GPU want eight wants to talk to GPU be they talk to each other through this device it's called a switch and these switches right now are electronic and so there's actually an issue which is like the switches are not keeping up with the GPUs the the speed of the GPUs keeps going up and the switches are actually the bottleneck for many data centers in any different workloads and so dipole labs is building the first fully optical switch where it's like all photons from GPUA all the way to GPUB and so it will actually be much faster than the electronic switches that we use now. Now the last one that's driving all this move to atoms is this aspect where robotics is going to happen so there's a lot of companies building the stack around that and everything from vertical robotics and specific industries to the infrastructure to the plower robots to data selling to the new robotics labs because there's this moment that everyone in the industry is feeling that we're going to get to the chat GPT moment it's not quite there yet and I think we're figuring it out and knew a scaling law around it so there's a lot of that and we had quan here a couple episodes ago and we're believers that's that's going to happen I mean robotics from pie from pie right half is AI and half is a hardware this reading this morning that even aster is like a big leap forward for for robotics like I forget the benchmark but there's a benchmark where like fable was maybe at 10% and aster is showing like you do like 60 to 70% of the tasks so data did just you know wake up in you know another couple weeks and another breakthrough happens and we're a little bit closer it's been really cool for me to see the research and some of heart attack because you know I see we've been finding heart attack companies since 2014 that's really when we we started but it was like pretty hard to get these companies funded before like I remember like pre pre this recent research and we would like fund awesome stuff that we were super excited like rockets and planes and chips and data centers and stuff like that and then like VCs would just be like we only do B2B SaaS and it's hard to bootstrap a company like this so you really do need like downstream investors who can fund lots of who can who can fund you know a full a full capital build out and so it's cool that like it seems like Silicon Valley which historically like Ventura was set up to fund heart attack but it like drifted away from it for a decade or two because it was so profitable to just fund SaaS companies and so it's cool to have it coming back to its roots yeah on the point about like the the pure investors wanted to do hard tech again it does seem like that I've never seen that happen so quickly I mean it seemed like it happened pretty immediately when like SaaS stocks were down earlier this year Claude code was surging and that just became like the I mean I feel like even at demo day literally happened I feel like that happened for me mid the winter batch at the start of this year and it seemed by even demo day that investors were starting to be a lot more interested in hard tech companies and that's just extrapolated I mean it is worth knowing though on the other side like since that a bunch of the SaaS stocks have actually recovered and are doing better than ever like Salesforce is like the prime example of that thinks Snowflake recently had like two days ago had this like blowout earnings and so it's possible that it all hits yeah maybe I mean that would be the dream case I mean I sort of think we're seeing real stuff like it clearly the software that gets built in the future and what's valuable is different like it just has to be and so partly it seems like what we've seen with Salesforce is the classic the system of record argument is actually playing out the modes are intact for now yeah like if you have a thing that agents can use that is actually valuable and if anything you're just like agents where you suffer a lot more than human tool and that seems to be driving Salesforce growth and so kind of takes us back to the other trend that we've talked a little bit about is if you think of agents as your customers and you make things that agents one and your software is something that agents want to use then that seems like the right type of software yeah Salesforce is super interesting because I think they started releasing their own slack harness slack AI harness and so I think we're right at the beginning of like the next AI harness wars it's like codex wants to be a cloud code wants to be it open cloud to be it hermys open code it seems like they're going to be a bunch of them and it's not going to be quite like the browser wars and that the browser wars 10 toward like one winner but you know I guess it's anyone's guess and then yeah Benioff has a pretty big advantage in that you have a lot of the most AI-appilled people and companies in the world still use slack and you know if the harness is in there and it's your system of record for how people collaborate then you have like this mega data mode and then you know SaaS can still be as valuable as it's ever been valued if those modes hold yeah I thought you had a really interesting tweet maybe a week also ago about how software or system of record companies will have to become like harnesses yeah I mean that's based that was about slack I would say it's like basically if you are a system of record you either will be preyed upon like you'll release an MCP and then maybe like the data you know you lose your moat around the data the data goes elsewhere like becomes very trivial to switch or you kind of have to be a harness you have to be the way people not just read and write but actually do their work inside you know your system of record and get the most value out of it means it's a little bit like the model companies like was the was it RKGI was a benchmark where or there was a benchmark where of the yeah where the pre or pre-astra chat GBT model didn't do as well but then they said well that's just because it was plugged into the wrong harness yeah it's like the model plus the harness gets you the output oh yeah I mean with a custom harness they claim Astra got to night north of 90% on RKGI 3 yes I think a couple months ago this was in the low two digits right which is an impressive leap and I think you have a very good point around software it's not that software and SaaS is dead what people claim on the internet is just that is has transformed we actually seen this in the batch the percentage of companies we accepted that do sort of full stack end to end work or a task has gone from just 10% to over 25% of the batch this has to do with actually doing the job the agent does the job not just like a point solution which old SaaS in five eight years ago was just like a point solution and you needed a you needed someone to operate the SaaS software right now it just runs by itself and actually in the batch this is where we're seeing a lot of the growth in revenue I think I gave that stat of the median startup when it gets into YC is a zero in revenue and it has gone from by the end of the batch was about 8K and MRR now is like about 20K and MRR and a lot of these that's huge jump that's like non-trivial big jump for the median right the average is even higher and it has to do with doing the full end to end job with for example doing insurance broker actually doing the clinical intake doing the full end to end workflow of I don't know medical billing etc and these are the ones that are growing a lot and I think there's another factor with us happen I think we talked about this in couple episodes ago we right now are about almost a year since agentic coding started to work since opus 4.5 that we're seeing these workflows fully blossom and the result are basically people want their job just be done and I'm willing to buy software that just gets the job done I think when people hear these revenue numbers growing so fast and easy knock on it It's like maybe it's just AI hype and these companies are just like shelves. out money for AI products because it's like the cool thing to do. To be fair, that's probably some of that, but I think the bull case is actually something that we said in episode two years ago when agents were really just beginning to be a thing where the products are just going to be more valuable. If they automate the whole job, they will actually just be more valuable than some system of record that tracks the job, it doesn't do the job, and then for companies we'll just pay more money for the product. I definitely see that in companies that I work with where yeah, they just go to a company, and the value proposition is so great that like large enterprises are going to write big checks very early. Yeah, company that I'm seeing having this effect is two-spokes, AI recruiting tool. It's been an incredible great trade for the last couple of years now, but they'd started out as, I mean, I would say it was essentially sort of LL-empowered people search, like the thing that they did was you could type in sort of the spec of the type of person you wanted to hire, and it did a really good job of pulling the good profiles of people that you may want to contact. But then you still have to go and contact the people, and recently they've launched an agent product, which is really taking off, and the agent like doesn't just search for the people, it like contacts the people, it'll be able to schedule the interview, do a bunch of things. That sounds awesome. Yeah, and they're seeing that that's going to just on a like per account basis, I think is going to double or triple like the revenue they make from a single customer, because customers want more and more of these agents. I don't think it's fair to say that it's like, it's not like it's like ultimately the job of the recruiter at all. It's just changing it. Like the recruiters didn't necessarily want to be doing like that sort of vote reach out to like 500 people anyway, like the thing that makes the recruiter job, I would say like more skilled and interesting is like there's like culture fit. That's just going to be really hard for like an AI to do a phone screen that assesses like how well someone's going to be like a culture fit and and the human element of it. And so I think they're finding that the recruiters themselves are actually really excited to use the agents because it frees them up to do the work that they feel is like unique and interesting. The other shocking stat is that the companies that really accelerate during the batch, they really start taking off. One of the things that we start experiencing this year that we never experienced in the past is we have companies breaking from zero to seven figures in revenue during the batch. And that is in a span of three months. And that's talking in the past that would have taken for a company to get to that about 18 months or more. And they're doing it in that amount of time. Part of it is they're solving real problems. And because of agent decoding, they're actually building products that are a lot more mature as well. And they're able, these founders that are super AI-pilled run, I don't know, 20 coding agent sessions to get to that product maturity. And there's another category of companies that's also been growing super fast recently, which is companies that sell data or RL environments to the labs. This one might be interesting to talk about because a lot of these companies are pretty stealthy. They tend to have a disincentive to talk about how well they're doing, you know, compared to most companies that like to talk about how well they're doing. And so I think people out there might not realize how big a category this has become. When YC funded scale back in 2016, this was like a tiny little niche thing. It wasn't even a category. There was initially it was basically just scale who was doing it and then our core began to do it. And then like a couple other companies, the last couple years have become a big category. We pulled the data recently. And just in the last two years, YC has funded more than a dozen companies that are each making more than 10 million dollars a year selling data or RL environments to the labs. And in many cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. And these are companies that were just just a couple of years old. That's pretty fast to revenue honestly. Yeah, it's like pretty bananas. Do you want to talk about anything Gary? I mean, the big ones, I mean, I think after query and data curve both really, really great. I mean, there are probably too many to name that are honestly like maybe don't even want to be mentioned because once you have something that's working, you almost don't want people to know. I think that it's kind of natural to understand this though. I mean, data is one of the legs of the scaling law. And you know, much has been made of compute. But without the data, how are you going to make these models that much better? The RL environment thing is interesting. I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, there's a lot of like pure customization that's happening for specific use cases. Like you'll have like RL environments for finance, for instance, and someone can go very, very infinitely deep with that. And it's like a little bit of expertise. It's a bunch of computer science. It's some systems work. But RL seems to be, I mean, one of the big engines for how I mean, people are maybe benchmark maxing a little bit more than they should, but it costs money to do it. And it's seemingly here to stay in terms of how big model companies are going to approach it. Reportedly, the big labs are spending about a billion dollars on this. It's not a very known fact, but there's this actually a real business to be built around this. And RL environments is the current flavor of it. And there's things with long-term horizon tasks that are getting built up. And I think that is starting to also emerge in robotics. The labs also want to solve the problem of getting AI to work on the physical world. So they need a lot of the environments in the real world. So things with egocentric data, tele-op, robotic tasks, starting to emerge as big data category where labs are spending eight, nine-figure deals with these companies. We had a number of companies in the batch that work on that and been able to close, close revenues in that space. Companies like in the current batch of summer 26, there's Praxis Robotics. There's one that I'm working with that has a network of places across the world where industrial manufacturing gets done. They collect data from that. There's this other company that Brad work with called DeepReach that also has data that local entrepreneurs in across the world do. And human archive and winter 26, yeah, there have been a bunch of these companies recently. I think like if I were going to prognosticate like one of the things going back to the, you know, all systems of record need to be AI harnesses, they might also need to start training their own models. And that's where things like river AI or tinker start becoming really interesting. Out of the box, like you can sit there in cloud code, or even open, I use open cloud to train my own models, which is very fun. It'll do its own data cleaning and everything. But to date, like that hasn't been a huge factor, but I can see that becoming a much, much bigger factor. I mean, when you have proprietary data and you can train, I mean, the open, open weight models are really nearly frontier. If you can like sort of special purpose train these things to do even better than what the frontier can do, like that's going to be really, really powerful. I think this is actually going to be even bigger in robotics. I mean, this is a hypothesis not proven yet. But robotic foundation models and robotics, I think I have a very different characteristics versus LLM. LLM is the whole thing is your model reality as language. And for robotics, you model reality in the physical 3D space, which has way more degrees of freedom. And perhaps in order to get robots to work in a specific vertical, like let's say robots that do operations in data centers. I have this company called boost robotic that build robots for data centers like doing the cabling. It is possible for these robots to work. It's better to get a model that fine-tune and train and custom data that just works in that environment because the thing that's also challenging for robotics, they need to be in real time and respond very quickly to the stimuli and have an action plan, which is different than LLM's. LLM's you can have this feature where you can just let it go and come back, but for robotics, you can. Because if I don't know, let's say you connect that cable to the data center and then someone comes in and knocks the robot out and thinks good, get connected to the wrong plug, let's say. Yeah, my understanding is that all the YC companies that are using physical intelligences models to deploy robotics, they're all fine-tuning the pie models. I don't think any of them are able to use the pie models out of the box even though it's a great like starting point, you have to actually fine-tune it for like your specific case, like data center cables in order for it to work. You work with this company ultra, right? Yeah, we start with the pie model, but then they have like thousands of hours of footage of like putting things in boxes that makes it really good at putting things in boxes. I've heard the argument basically that, you know, you could look at Cloud code. Like, Cloud code can use its, it's code transcripts to figure out who the top coders are, and you can take that and turn it around, and you know, basically train the next coding model to be even better. If you happen to own TikTok, you happen to have all of the data on what people watch and click on and what's compelling, and you can use that to make much more compelling videos and seed dance. So, you know, that's already been happening. I just, you know, I think that that trend is going to continue in a fairly spectacular way from here. So one of the things that we've been noticing I think all of us have is that, frankly, some of the most powerful and badass founders that we've been seeing lately, there might be in their late 30s, 40s, even 50s. Diana, you have a few stats that you found surprising. One of the shocking stats from analyzing the septic companies from a year ago, we used to only have about 5% of the companies except that B saw the founders and now we're over 18-19% which is a huge, this is the highest bike that we've seen. Almost one fifth of the batch so, and it seems like it's going to keep going. Before you had to have so many different skills, you had to be a great hustler, you had to be able to explain and we would say they have to be good talkers, right? You need someone who can be a hot person, someone who can actually come in and convince someone of something, and then if you paired that with someone who is a world-class technologist, that's sort of the combo that is so ideal, and so classically you would need co-founders to do that, you didn't necessarily need one, but it would increase your chances by so so much. I feel like a lot of that is changing to this degree. It's becoming such that knowing what to prompt and knowing what to build is so much more difficult and valuable than just knowing the CTO being able to code the thing. I think what's going on is that we've always actually had hugely successful single founders. I think people don't realise that there's about YC, there's different definitions of it, but for all intensive purposes, I'll prove it with Instacart, Brian, Armstrong with Quainbase, at least when the batch started, we're single founders. Yeah, Parker Conrad got into YC as a single founder and then I interviewed LaXerini, who ended up being his CTO. The bar for being able to have the idea, be able to sell it, and be able to build it all by yourself, which is really, really high. That's actually totally doable. Yeah, I think that's what's going on. In that case, those three are just incredibly exceptional people, and there's very, very few people who are capable of that, and now you can actually get going, and so I think you just don't have to be quite that exceptional, at least on one of those dimensions, the building part, to be able to get going. In that net, it's still valuable to have co-founders, it's still a measure of like, if your co-founders are super elite, that means you're probably super elite, and it just increases the chance of success by a lot. In each of those cases, they did bring on co-founders. I think in each of those cases, you just get going and they got traction, and they added on co-founders sort of at a certain point, and so maybe like the, the equity ownership is different, or maybe the dynamic is just slightly different to the traditional way. You start out in the two of you in a room, and you're completely 50/50, I don't know what to say. I don't have this task, but I have definitely seen a greater trend towards that. People adding co-founders later in the company lifecycle after the thing has already gotten off the ground. I think that will be the trend. I think we'll see more single founders in the battle we've already seen, starting the batch, but at least of the things that succeed, I still expect that they're going to be adding co-founders as the company progresses. Do you also want to talk about the trend towards more experienced people starting companies? It does seem like people who have been around the block a few times are doing much, much better. Peter Steinberger is the canonical example. He's, I believe, in his early 40s, and he'd been a dev manager. He'd worked on startups before, and then he sort of uniquely got extremely AI-pilled with the clankers early, but then he just tried a lot of stuff, and then he knows what to build. That's one thing that I think is actually really encouraging. Basically, if you've been around the block, where the dragons are, you sort of have tastes, and then those people in particular are unusually powerful right now. There are so many classic gate-kept things that happen. Like, oh, you have to have a co-founder, you need a certain set of cool investors to be into you, and now it's just less and less true. It's actually like, you need to know what to build. That's the higher order bit now, is you need to know what to build. If you've lived a little bit, and you've been in places, and you're very opinionated, actually, now you might not have an excuse. What's your excuse? You've been this loudmouth on the internet for so long. Why are you not building something just pop open, open code, and just go do it. Put your money where your mouth is. I also wonder if managing coding agents is actually, in some ways, not that different from managing people, and so people like Peter, or you, or Boris Churni, Toby from Shopify, who have had whole careers managing teams of engineers actually take to this super well, and can spin up huge teams of coding agents and manage them. Maybe more effectively than even a really smart 19 year old who hasn't had those years of experience. We can be a little bit less abusive to our agents, try to understand where they're coming from. You have to catch their emotions, like 99.9% less, so yeah, it's pretty helpful. I wonder what's the concrete advice for someone that wants to get started and want to build a company right now in the current era? I mean, just start prompting. I mean, opening up GPT6 today was pretty wild. I mean, just that moment where your agents are, you know, it's probably smarter. They, you know, a bunch of things that you've been annoyed about, like these bugs that, you know, you haven't had time to deep, deep dive yourself, you just be like, actually, could you just go back to the list of things that you couldn't figure out? Like, look at your, you know, all of our last chats, and, you know, anything that looks like you didn't figure out, like try to figure it out now, and it'll do it, like every single time, like, you know, it's what a weird moment we are in history where you wake up in the morning, you're like, wire up a new model, and then these things that even a month ago, you're just like, why isn't it working? And like, you know, to think that that might be this thing that we get to do for the next 18, 24 months, 36 months, like, you know, I don't know when it ends, but that's coding in the time of AGI, I guess. Well, that's all we have time for for today, but if you can't tell, we're all pretty excited about what's going on right now, and you should be too, so we can't wait to see what you build.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. There is a significant resurgence of "heart tech" startups—those building physical, hardware-based products—now accounting for up to 20% of YC accepted companies, with robotics, defense, manufacturing, and compute infrastructure leading the growth.
  2. The median revenue of YC startups has surged from $8,000 to $20,000 monthly, reflecting faster product maturation and end-to-end automation driven by AI agents.
  3. A growing number of founders now hold advanced technical backgrounds, with one in six current YC founders holding a PhD, enabling deeper expertise in complex hardware and compute domains.
  4. AI advancements—especially in agent-based automation—are accelerating research and development, reducing the need for large engineering teams and enabling startups to build full, end-to-end solutions faster.
  5. Defense and industrial manufacturing are booming, fueled by both strategic government demand and a need for domestic supply chains, with startups like Icarus and Knox Medal achieving rapid growth.
  6. Data and reinforcement learning (RL) environments are emerging as a high-value, stealthy category, with YC-funded companies now generating hundreds of millions in revenue from training AI models.
  7. Founders are increasingly experienced, with many in their 30s to 50s, and success is more tied to "knowing what to build" than to traditional startup traits like co-founding or networking.
  8. The most impactful trend is the shift from point solutions to full AI-powered workflows—where agents automate entire jobs—leading to rapid revenue growth and enterprise adoption.

Summary:

A pivotal shift is underway in the startup ecosystem, marked by a surge in "heart tech" companies—those building physical, hardware-based solutions—now making up 20% of YC startups. Key areas include robotics, defense, industrial manufacturing, and compute infrastructure, driven by AI-driven innovation and strategic demand. The median revenue of YC companies has jumped from $8,000 to $20,000 monthly, reflecting faster growth and more mature, end-to-end automation powered by AI agents.

Founders are increasingly experienced, with a growing number of PhDs and technical depth, enabling breakthroughs in complex domains like silicon photonics and data center design. These advancements are accelerating research and reducing reliance on massive engineering teams. Defense and domestic manufacturing are booming due to national security needs and supply chain reboots.

A new category of high-value companies is emerging: those selling data and RL environments to AI labs, generating substantial revenue in a short time. Additionally, AI agents are now capable of executing full workflows—from recruiting to manufacturing—dramatically increasing product value. This shift is not just about software but about full automation, where the most valuable products solve entire jobs.

The era of solo, technically elite founders is thriving, and the key to success is now knowing what to build, not just who to partner with. This moment of technological acceleration suggests a fundamental transformation in how startups innovate, scale, and deliver value.

FAQs

The number of heart tech companies has significantly increased, rising from 8% to 20% of accepted startups over the past 18 to 12 months. Key areas include robotics, industrial manufacturing, defense, and compute infrastructure.

Advances in AI and agent technology have accelerated scientific research and product development, enabling startups to build hardware innovations faster and with fewer engineering teams. This has made deep tech more accessible and economically viable.

The median YC company has grown from zero revenue at acceptance to around $8,000 monthly revenue in the past, now reaching $20,000 monthly revenue, reflecting faster growth and greater product-market fit.

AI agents are enabling startups to automate end-to-end workflows, leading to faster development cycles, higher customer adoption, and significant revenue growth—often doubling or tripling revenue per customer.

Yes—startups now selling data or reinforcement learning (RL) environments to AI labs are a major new trend. Many are achieving multi-million-dollar revenues within a few years, with companies like Praxis Robotics and DeepReach leading this space.

Yes—founders in their 40s and 50s are increasingly successful, with many having prior startup or technical experience. Their real-world insights and understanding of challenges give them a distinct edge in building viable products.

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