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Latest episodes
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Greypoint: Proving a Four-Person Team on a Different Clock
October 27, 2026 · 15 minGreypoint is four people in San Francisco building drone swarms, and the public record shows no contract or raise since Demo Day. That matters because the defense money they would count on is requested, not appropriated, and a slipping…
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W27 Applicants: The Draft You Haven't Finished
October 20, 2026 · 16 minYou have to hear this one if there's an unfinished YC application sitting in a tab you keep opening and closing. The Winter 2027 on-time deadline is November 2 at 8pm Pacific, thirteen days from now, and it's the line between a decision by…
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Anonymous Founder: Extension or Default Alive
October 6, 2026 · 18 minYou have to hear this one because it starts at month fourteen, with real users, real revenue, and a Series A bar you haven't quite cleared. Nothing forces your hand, which means you have time to make a bad decision slowly, and the stakes…
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Two Founders, One Year Out: The Series A Cliff
September 29, 2026 · 17 minTwo YC founders are sitting on seed rounds sized for a market that no longer exists, and neither knows yet whether they'll clear the bar. One raised in Summer '25, the other in Winter '26, both roughly a year out from Demo Day with normal…
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Nadia: Walking Into the Room After the $200M Number
September 22, 2026 · 18 minNadia walked into YC's F26 kickoff carrying the shadow of a number nobody in the room would say out loud: the $200 million valuation her company, Nine Mothers, hit as an eight-month-old startup in the S26 batch. Every founder in the new…
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Greypoint: Building Hardware in an AI Batch
September 15, 2026 · 17 minFour founders, one CNC machine, and a pitch that stopped a room full of investors cold: Greypoint Industries is building drone technology to compete with defense primes that have decades of institutional weight behind them. Jordan Khoo…
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9 Mothers: The $200M That Warped the Batch
September 9, 2026 · 17 minDays before Demo Day, a $200 million valuation for an unnamed S26 startup lands in a YC founder group chat and won't stop spreading. On this episode of Year One, Miles and Grant trace how that single number rewrites every other founder's…
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Demo Day+72: How S26 Term Sheets Get Priced
September 1, 2026 · 17 minThe applause hasn't even faded and the phones are already lighting up. This episode of Year One picks up in the 72 hours after S26's Demo Day, when term sheets start arriving with clocks attached and top companies field hundreds of offers…
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Nadia: The Verdict Arrives
August 25, 2026 · 15 minNadia has just opened the YC decision email she has been waiting on for weeks, and in this episode you hear the exact moment she finds out if her company’s next year is completely rewritten. The stakes are simple and huge: either she’s in…
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Nadia: The Ten Days Before August 28
August 18, 2026 · 11 minTen days before Y Combinator's August 28 decision date, founder Nadia is stuck in the kind of limbo that quietly reshapes how she runs her company. Her Fall 2026 seed round may hinge on a single letter, and on this episode of Year One…
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Nadia: What the Yes or No Actually Bought Her
August 11, 2026 · 12 minNadia read the email four times and still couldn't parse it. An ambiguous status update from Y Combinator landed Tuesday night, and what followed was ninety seconds of dead air before she said a word. On this episode of Year One, hosts…
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Nadia: The Verdict Lands August 28
August 4, 2026 · 12 minFounder Nadia submitted her YC Fall 2026 application just before the July 27 deadline, and now she's twenty-four days into total silence, waiting for an interview invite she can't control. In this Year One episode, she reveals the real…
About the show
Every billion-dollar YC company survived a brutal first year after Demo Day. Year One captures those twelve months as they happen, tracking one founder's make-or-break decision per episode: the pivot that saved the company, the co-founder fight that almost killed it, the fundraising round that closed at 2am on a Thursday. Two hosts (one former YC founder, one startup reporter) sit down with recent batch founders while the wounds are still fresh, then bring in YC partners to dissect what went right, what went wrong, and what the founder couldn't see from inside the fog. If you're an aspiring founder, an early startup employee, or an investor trying to understand why 90% of startups stall while a handful become Stripe or Airbnb, this is the show that replaces hindsight polish with the version founders tell each other at 1am on Bookface.