
Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to? - craigcannon
Hey HN.<p>I’m Craig. I work at YC. We’re starting the podcast up again and want your input.<p>Who do you think we should interview?<p>We’re open to all suggestions but maybe these prompts will help:<p>- Who has shaped technology and hasn’t done many interviews?<p>- Who has an interesting take on the future and is building it?<p>- Who is just really interesting and you’d love to hear more from?<p>Thanks for your input. Can’t wait to see who this post surfaces :)
======
birken
The type of podcast I'd like to listen to is if you got a roundtable of people
in various roles (like a roundtable of all technical founders, or a roundtable
of all first employees, or a roundtable of all solo founders), and then asked
them questions and let them discuss and debate topics, optimally ones
submitted by listeners. And perhaps if a subset of those people were
particularly good have them on semi-regularly.

There is a woodworking podcast I really like that is 3 woodworkers just
chatting with each other about various topics and responding to questions.
They all have different perspectives and skills and they often disagree about
things, but by listening I get a good idea of the breadth of opinions and
viewpoints.

IMO too many startup discussions are very narrow and don't talk about the
large breadth of viewpoints that are out there in all sorts of topics. This is
_especially_ true if the people doing most of the talking are either VCs or
successful founders and essentially are unchallenged by opposing viewpoints.

~~~
haldean
I agree with this. Also: what woodworking podcast is that?

~~~
birken
Wood Talk: [http://www.woodtalkshow.com/](http://www.woodtalkshow.com/)

I see another commenter posted a different one so it seems the format of 3
people chatting about a topic is popular!

~~~
aaachilless
+1 about the 3 people chatting thing. The Energy Gang [1] is one of my all
time favorite podcasts and it too follows this format.

[1] [https://www.greentechmedia.com/podcast/the-energy-
gang](https://www.greentechmedia.com/podcast/the-energy-gang)

------
philip1209
I'd love to hear "office hour"-style stuff. Somebody who's having a problem,
you work on solving it together, then maybe in a month you do a retro on how
it worked. Might be cool to wait enough time that the episode has a "before
and after" in the same episode.

~~~
craigcannon
Cool. We can definitely do that. Any particular size or type of company that
interests you?

~~~
philip1209
I think the thing I'm looking for is relatability. There are many podcasts
that idolize startups and founder life. The Dating Ring's podcast did the
opposite and showed vulnerability. To me, that's why it was an interesting
learning experience.

But to be specific - I think that small companies in make-or-break times would
be most interesting. Also, everything looks easier in retrospect, but
understanding the thought process and how they are balancing different options
would be interesting to me.

~~~
kartikkumar
This. As great as it is to hear about sensational founders that have turned
the world upside down, it is at times hard to relate to. It would be great to
show the ground truth of what small companies have to go through, and having
office-hours that help elucidate the thought processes to follow to make steps
forward would be invaluable. The best podcast episodes I've heard (and I
specifically say episodes because I don't think any show that I've heard has
consistently achieved it) on this subject have just been really good at being
down-to-Earth and relatable.

------
doublerebel
I'm interested in hearing more from serial technical founders. They're usually
quite busy and don't blog or do interviews as often as the CEOs.

For instance, I just started using LogDNA and was really impressed by the
product, looked up the team and discovered it's Lee Liu's third(?) company.
Alex Maccaw has had an influence on my career from his JS work and Stripe
product, then Sourcing.io and now Clearbit. Max Krohn: SparkNotes, OkCupid,
now Keybase, I still think Max's async solutions are some of the best in the
business.

Writing code while growing a team and communicating with the other founders to
build a product requires a smart balance. The technical choices made by these
founders tend to be very efficient and easy to communicate to others. I would
love to hear more from any of these founders (Thanks all for your work!), and
I'm sure YC knows of more such founders I haven't yet discovered.

~~~
craigcannon
Totally agreed. Will do!

------
anondon
* Elon Musk

* Paul Graham, haven't heard from him lately

* Pieter Thiel (ideally a long interview about Trump, Palantir, seastanding, Libertarianism)

* Sam Altman (sneak peek into the upcoming MOOC, things he's working on, OpenAI)

* OpenAI team

* Failed startups: Homejoy to begin with

Please ask HN for questions, before going to interview people. Ask deep and
difficult questions, and avoid boring, generic questions.

~~~
maximepico
That's an awesome list! I'd add any atypical startup founder -> energy,
agriculture, low tech etc.

------
dzink
Tactical steps YC startups have taken to jump through any one of the de-
risking steps: [https://codingvc.com/how-to-de-risk-a-
startup/](https://codingvc.com/how-to-de-risk-a-startup/) would be fantastic.
Especially stories of creative jumps. You could do a poll of the YC network
internally and have people share stories that then get mentioned per-problem
or per-industry over time. A discussion underneath could allow others to share
stories as well - beyond the YC network (that may allow you guys to spot
interesting potential applicants and keep people engaged).

Generic advice is abundant and far less helpful. Individual founders could do
episodes as well, but it's hard to be genuine and talk about the hard stuff
when your startup's identity is affected - especially in front of customers
and investors.

By focusing on a problem - the contributing founders can chose to get credit
or stay anonymous with their answers. You could also do an episode on just
cool "Tell us about a time when you've hacked a non-computer system." answers
and it would be a great listen.

~~~
lpolovets
As the author of the linked post I'm a little biased, but I love this idea. I
think anonymous stories about concrete things founders do to de-risk their
ideas would be a really interesting subject, and potentially very useful.

------
jfornear
Some ideas:

Antonio García Martínez, author of _Chaos Monkeys_.

Bobby Goodlatte on Facebook's news feed algorithm and the election.

Peter Thiel on Trump and what's next, etc.

Justin Edmond on early Pinterest and diversity in Silicon Valley.

Dann Petty on Epicurrence and design culture in Silicon Valley.

Kim-Mai Culter on Initialized Capital and housing in the Bay Area.

~~~
atmosx
I would be very interested in Thiel's take on:

    
    
        * Trump presidency, what the tech/startup should expect from the new Gov.
        * His views on privacy and ethics (I know, Palantir and everything, but that's why it makes so interesting to hear from him)
        * His take on the top-10 technologies of the future

~~~
equalarrow
Agreed. I'm still scratching my head on why he would back Trump. Reading Zero
to One right now and it's great.

But, I guess there's just stuff I don't know about Trump that would make Thiel
support him. I'm not trying to say this in a negative way - I just am trying
to figure out the connection(s).

So if you could get him on a podcast talking about this, it would be awesome!

~~~
grzm
There are plenty of discussions on HN about this, including references to
talks and writings by Peter Thiel, if you're interested. You could probably
get a pretty good idea into why he did. Two references off the top of my head
that would be particularly on topic would be his keynote at the RNC and the
National Press Club interview.

RNC keynote:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTJB8AkT1dk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTJB8AkT1dk)

National Press Club interview: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-
LJqPQEJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4)

------
thisone
Can tell you what I don't want to hear, which is easier for me.

Not another tech podcast with hosts who sound bored.

Not another tech podcast that can't be arsed to put in the work to get good
sound quality.

Not another tech podcast where each episode interviews yet another person
about 'what they're working on' with no larger story.

And please if you have ads, dear god don't fall down the hole of writing or
reading ad copy that makes it sound like you're making a personal endorsement
out of the goodness of your own heart.

~~~
aaachilless
The "no, really, this is a personal endorsement, I use the product all the
time" podcast ads really put me off too, but I'm not sure there's a better
alternative. One of the great things about podcasts, for me, is the immersion.
I think the "personal" ads are there more to sustain immersion rather than to
fool the audience about the nature of the ad.

~~~
thisone
That was how I thought, who could really believe these ads are actually
personal endorsements, until I read a thread about people being angry about a
podcast with ads from 99 designs.

Some people really haven't developed the means to distingish host from ad. I
can't really blame them, take the casper ads and the ads for one of those
stupidly expensive boxed dinner companies. How many podcasts actually say 'hey
we got this stuff we're talking up for free'

Meh, just pisses me off. I don't want podcast umbrellas to die due to what i
find to be naive and shady ad practices.

------
wwalser
I listened to all of the previous episodes and enjoyed the podcast. I'm glad
you're getting it started back up. My only negative feedback would be that by
the end it felt similar to what investors say about demo day. All of the
companies stores were packaged up with a bow on them to the point that
basically every story was the same by the end of the episode.

I get it, this is VC content marketing after all, you need people to believe
that applying to YC, taking funding and going the VC route is the smart move
for their company. However, if you can't find a way to break the monotony I
can't imagine lots of people sticking with it.

General ideas: \- If you want to tell stories, I like the idea that someone
else mentioned, going multi-episode deep with a single company.

\- If you want to be useful, things like this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHzvmyMJEK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHzvmyMJEK4)
are super valuable. YC would be nice, but I was going to start a company
regardless. Learning what YC could or would do for me if I got in isn't
valuable. Learning stuff that I can and probably should do with or without YC
is super useful (which engenders me to like your brand).

\- Have founders talk about tactics which helped them or consider a tactical
episode once every N weeks? Amongst startup podcasts there's a lot of theory
(platitudes?), "build something people want", "work harder", "software is
eating the world" which is good and has it's place but there's a glut of it in
the podcast/startup world. While chatting with YC partners after Startup
School this year, the tactical advice was the stuff that stuck with me. I
heard multiple tactical ideas repeated several times, things like "Get a phone
number if possible, it's much better than email. Early founders under estimate
phone calls." or "If you do cold email, you need to be sending 100 emails a
day." and each time it was said, the group of people listening was surprised.

\- 1:1, Qasar gives some of the most brutal but realistic responses to
business ideas and whether or not they can be scaled quickly. I think he'd be
a fun guest.

~~~
craigcannon
That's a good note. I'm now thinking of the podcast as more of a channel than
a show. I.e. a place where we can try out multiple episode types.

Re: tactics. Maybe we just choose one particular topic per tactics episode and
drill down on relevant strategies?

I guess we can include Qasar ;)

~~~
wwalser
Just don't let Justin join him. They'd clown too hard :p

------
markovbling
I'd love to hear more detail - the past podcasts were interesting but largely
fluff.

Maybe post a thread on HN asking for volunteers who post a description of
their startup and you do live office hours with the highest voted startup each
week.

On the question of who it would be cool to hear from, I'd love to hear from YC
alums talking about their YC experience, not just a sentence about it but
going into detail about mistakes they made and things that helped.

~~~
craigcannon
K. What about the YC experience do you want to know more about?

~~~
markovbling
Assuming you were in YC: 1\. Give examples of things you were advised to do
differently that added value 2\. What did you notice in other startups from
your batch that made them succeed? 3\. What did you notice in other startups
from your batch that made them fail? 4\. Any funny stories? 5\. What would you
have done differently over the course of the YC program if you could do it
over again?

------
Impossible
I'd like to hear more failure stories, which could mean startups that imploded
spectacularly, but could also mean successes that weren't as big as expected
(aquihires, shut downs after an aquisition, etc.) As mentioned elsewhere in
the comments, most startup stories have heavy survivorship bias involved, and
as a result end up with the same lessons.

It'd also be cool to see some more technology focused interviews, specifically
focusing on how technical founders or CTOs built their original prototypes or
MVPs and the technical decisions made on the path to get the startup where it
is today, although I understand that being completely out of scope for a
business focused podcast.

As a black man I'd like to hear from black founders, and other founders that
might encounter bias (women, international founders, etc.) about unique
challenges they've dealt with, especially when it comes to raising money.

The interviews on the podcast have been interesting and inspiring, but they
tend to lack useful actionable information beyond the same generic advice you
can get anywhere (talk to users, focus on growth, etc.) I'd like to see more
actionable problem solving advice and less about how great a particular
startup is or how lucky a particular group of founders was.

~~~
craigcannon
Cool. Thanks for the feedback.

------
etr71115
In line with Female Founder Stories & the Employee #1 series, it'd be
fascinating to hear (un)successful founders' perspectives on previous failures
(potential program title: "Start Overs"?), what they would have done
differently, if there's still a market for their idea, and what they learned
from it for their future successes.

Ideal speakers:

Travis Kalanick -- Scour

Drew Houston -- Accolade

Justin Kan & Emmett Shear -- Kiko

Jack Dorsey -- Uber Imitator in the early 2000s

Sean Parker -- Napster

Parker Conrad -- SigFig

Ben Silbermann -- Audiobeta

~~~
wwalser
Similar to this, I'd love to know how YC feels about it's founders who have an
exit big enough to be a personal success but aren't successful from a VC
perspective. I know, for example, that most investors are probably not happy
about a $5-15MM sell on $1-2MM of raised money.

We also don't hear much about the financial mechanics of those types of
acquisitions. I'd like to understand the considerations that go into smaller
acquisitions/acquihires like: Sam A.(Loopt) & Kevin H.(Wufoo) or Justin
K.(Exec).

~~~
craigcannon
k

------
Skeletor
Some ideas that I think are outside of the wheelhouse of typical Silicon
Valley thought leaders:

1) Mike Bloomberg: Talk about founding and tech development of Bloomberg
Professional Service (don't talk about politics at all)

2) Judy Faulkner: Founder and CEO of EPIC systems, a large privately held
Hospital EHR vendor (Epic is one of the largest and most insular tech
companies in the world)

3) Jack Ma: Founder of Alibaba

4) Pierre Omidyar: Founder Ebay

5) Bill Gates and/or Steve Ballmer

6) Mark Cuban

More traditional Silicon Valley:

1) Larry Ellison: CEO of Oracle

2) Marc Benioff: CEO/Founder Salesforce

3) Paul Buccheit: Talk about gmail and early Google R&D product only

4) Matt Cutts: Get him to tell us how SEO really works

5) Scott Cook: Founder Intuit

6) Jeff Bezos: Founder/CEO Amazon

7) Tony Fadell: iPod Designer & CEO of Nest

~~~
ObsoleteMailMan
YES regarding Mike Bloomberg. Epitome of relentlessly resourceful in the early
days of Bloomberg LP

------
kurttheviking
In addition to founder analysis and commentary, I think it would be useful to
hear from industry veterans about ongoing challenges/opportunities in their
industry and how new companies can/should attack them. In a similar vein, how
does socio-economic and political change affect these opportunities (e.g. new
legislation in certain markets allowing for new technologies and processes to
gain traction).

~~~
craigcannon
I like that a lot.

~~~
kurttheviking
Another thought I had is something debate-like; if you've ever listened to the
Intelligence Squared podcasts they basically take an issue and have two
"teams" of two people debate the issue. From a start-up perspective it would
be interesting to hear founders or veterans debate topics like "BitCoin is
going to revolutionize micropayments". I'm not sure if this is a good idea or
a terrible idea but I thought I'd put it out there for discussion.

~~~
craigcannon
Totally. I love when people make public bets. One of the episode ideas I
drafted was along those lines re: AI.

What topics would you want to hear discussed?

------
wasd
I really enjoyed the depth that Startup Podcast/Gimlet Media went with Dating
Ring. In my opinion, there's a lot of great content you can cover in an hour
but it's hard to cover new content given how many other podcasts there are.

~~~
craigcannon
So was it tracking a company that made it interesting or the fact that there
was more than an hour of conversations with them?

~~~
wwalser
Not the op but: Gimlet is very good at creating well put together and edited
stories. That seasons is very human and dives headlong into the painful (and
beautiful) parts of slowly grinding and iterating toward failure. Failure from
an investor perspective at least, it ends up being a non-scalable, labor
intensive lifestyle business that loads of people would be proud to have
built.

It was the opposite of the YC podcast: I'm a human that grew up, I went to
college X, Applied to YC, Tried X, Y but Z is the one that worked. Company is
great we raised money.

~~~
craigcannon
Yup. We definitely will cover more than YC companies and success stories.

Fwiw, I do like the success stories but prefer a longer interview (90 min+)
because you get a real sense of the person vs the PR version of them/their
company.

~~~
severine
It would be great if you got graycat to spill the beans about his website.

------
andr
It could be useful to have "horizontal" episodes around a problem, e.g. three
companies that survived a founder leaving.

~~~
craigcannon
Good idea!

------
bryanh
I'd suggest a "Car Talk" or "Ask This Old House" style call-in, submit-a-
question format. Short, diverse segments that are listener guided (though
sometimes the shows will have other prepped segments). These often border on
the how-to side of things - but are deeply educational (and very successful)
formats.

~~~
craigcannon
Cool. Seems like a lot of people want an office hours-style episode type.

~~~
parsnipsumthing
There are so many start up podcasts that focus on the origin of the
founders/company and how awesome they are and they all blur into one.
Rocketship, Tim Ferris etc. Please don't do a podcast like that.

You guys have the clout to do something a bit more special and unique than
just cool interviews with successful founders. And you probably don't have
time to do all of the narrative shaping that Gimlet and other media companies
do to find all the "quirky" stories that fill time. That's why something based
around office hours makes so much sense. Y Combinator's office hours on
youtube are amazing. You've even expanded office hours to non YC companies
because you see how valuable they are to the start up community. This is
another way of realizing that value.

------
gina650
Challenges we need to solve for Deep Space Travel, like pressure in the eyes
which makes astronauts lose vision. More on the Space Race and astroid & water
mining.

I just did a podcast with Kira Blackwell from NASA's CTO's office to announce
their iTech competition and they are down to their top 10 finalists. Top 3 are
announced in December. I have had a demo one of the products and it is a game
changer on earth as well. Bob Lindberg would be a good one, he was president
of NIA for 10 years now involved with Moon Express first company to get FAA
approval to leave earths orbit.

Peter Thiel was hinted to be a guest on the YC podcast so can't wait to hear
from him. I hope they focus the time to extract his vision of the future vs.
his past. His book is already great for those theories so I am interested to
hear what he is working on for his next chapter. Can someone ask if he is
going to run for president?

I always get a kick out of founders stories of extreme examples of being
relentlessly resourceful.

Gina Tomorrow's Tech Podcast
[https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294](https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294)

------
tmaly
Craig, I really enjoyed the podcast, I am actually working my way through all
of the old episodes during my commute.

I would really like to hear from founders that are still running the business
and are still profitable.

Something like how posts on indiehackers.com but with more detail would be
interesting.

~~~
craigcannon
Yeah, I like those stories as well.

In case it wasn't clear in the post, we aren't going to only interview people
affiliated with YC. So feel free to suggest people/projects that come to mind.

------
ObsoleteMailMan
\- Hard tech founders

\- Kyle Vogt from Cruise Automation (specifically interested in how he became
such a good engineer), he hardly has any interviews that talk about this

\- Nothing really public from Helion Energy, could be interesting

\- What did founders do in the early days to develop technical chops while
remaining frugal? This seems to be more than just learning syntax and really
worth discussing.

\- If great companies start as projects, have an entire discussion about that
and what shape those take (if it's just a side project, do you do user
interviews? Etc.)

\- How to pick growth metrics in hard tech startups

\- President of University of Waterloo or Eric from Pebble and what about the
school creates such great engineers/founders and how Americans can emulate
that

\- FarmLogs Founders: Jesse Vollmar and Brad Koch

\- A discussion on blending strategy with acting quickly and developing really
great, original ideas (and how they evolve from small projects)

\- Anything with Qasar again, that guy is the real deal

\- "The best founders may be working on things that seem small but get them
done extraordinarily quickly" \- discussion on this

\- Mike Duncan from BankJoy

\- Adam D'Angelo from Quora

\- Rob Rhinehart from Soylent

\- FLEX Fits

~~~
craigcannon
thanks!

------
lpolovets
I'd love to hear interviews about practical topics that early stage technical
founders face. Specifically, for a company that has 1 or 3 or 6 engineers,
what do people do for QA? How are on-call duties handled? How are sudden
catastrophes handled? How do teams decide how much time to allocate toward
feature-building vs. improving infrastructure? And so on.

I care less about who the specific guests are and more about specific topics.
Origin stories are really fun to hear, but I don't get a lot of practical
value out of listening to them.

~~~
craigcannon
Got it. Thanks!

------
exolymph
Hearing about failures (whether micro or macro) is almost always more
interesting than hearing about successes.

------
wj
I would love it if you interviewed founders that you turned down but who went
on to have some level of success. (For me meaning some level of profitability
or improving people's lives rather than calling raising a round a success.)

I imagine a lot of the podcast audience is those that have been or would be
rejected from YC at this point in their journey so there might be more lessons
there for us than from the outliers that were accepted to YC.

~~~
craigcannon
That'd be a good one. May have to put out a call to hn for that!

------
superasn
Since you said you're open to All suggestions I'd like to listen to people who
are there on indiehackers.com, i.e. the little guys and solopreneurs who make
it big specifically focusing on what they did right like growth hacks, etc and
what mistakes they made that they see only in hindsight.

This is niche i know but it would be good because many people here like me
will find it more relatable than hearing people who have celebrity like
status.

------
allergeek
Hi Craig, hi folks. I'd like to hear you talk with Buster Benson, currently at
Slack, and Jonathan Harris, [http://number27.org/](http://number27.org/)

Thank you for rethinking the series! Al

------
aaachilless
It seems like many people would like some sort of user-submitted Q&A format.
In my experience, the Q&A segments of podcast episodes tend to be maybe 1/4 as
interesting as the rest of the episode. People being interviewed are more
likely to say broadly interesting things when given open space to ideate with
the occasional gentle nudge from the interviewer. It's true that some user-
submitted questions will be great, but natural conversation with interesting
and intelligent people is by far my favorite kind of podcast to listen to.

A couple examples of excellent podcasts of this variety are the Ezra Klein
Show [1] and Sam Harris's Waking Up [2].

[1] [http://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast](http://www.vox.com/ezra-
klein-show-podcast) [2]
[https://www.samharris.org/podcast](https://www.samharris.org/podcast)

~~~
craigcannon
Yeah, I think it'd probably be best in two parts: longform conversation then
Q&A. Maybe even broken into two episodes.

~~~
ObsoleteMailMan
Have you considered hosting these on Facebook Live? Could get Live feedback
from the audience to source questions according to what gets brought up.

------
venm
I would love to hear people from companies that are featured on the Monday
macro ..their problems, their solutions, their perspectives, their past
failures, their hopes, their practices, their needs, their mentors, their
ideas, their backgrounds, their evolving strategies, their milestones,their
inspiration, and of course, their successes

------
laksmanv
I'd like to hear from founders who are part of the HN community but not
necessarily venture backed or have gone through an accelerators, ie. hackers
with profitable and successful sideprojects

------
cbau
I really liked hearing the information that was hard to find elsewhere: mostly
the story of the company's founding and early days, and their analysis of
their markets. Was very useful when interviewing within YC's portfolio!

~~~
giarc
I agree - I think a podcast of company origins would be great. I think that
teaches entrepreneurs more than hearing about their thoughts on the future or
other unrelated markets.

------
nipung
Hey Craig,

I love podcasts, and as a matter of fact host one myself called Veni Vidi VC.
Despite the shameless plug, I would love to hear from successful YC founders
who have had exits.

The entire process is fascinating to me, including: \- building a company \-
raising funds, and \- making it ready to be absorbed as part of a corporation
or better yet, becoming a public company

Infact, all founders from every startup in this list is interesting to me -
[https://mattermark.com/mattermark-startup-index-
top-10-y-com...](https://mattermark.com/mattermark-startup-index-
top-10-y-combinator-companies-by-stage/).

~~~
craigcannon
K. Can you be more specific? Is it the post-exit stuff that's most
interesting? Personally, I want to avoid telling stories that have already
been widely documented.

~~~
nipung
Okay, if you want to focus on completely untold stories I believe every
stories from every startup from Seed to Series A is interesting. For example -
the process of figuring out a mission, testing out a product market fit, and
pivoting to a product that is actually usable by customers would be uber cool
to hear about.

Also would love to hear about YC projects that are not that famous - OpenAI,
Smart Cities project, etc.

~~~
craigcannon
K

------
srb-
Big fan of the old Podcast and looking forward to the new ones! As for a
suggestion:

I wouldn't want this to be every episode, but a themed episode on a specific
'hot' industry could be neat, i.e. interviewing founders of three companies in
related fields. e.g. drones, crypto-currencies, bio, etc...

Often there's so many promising directions in a new industry that existing
founders don't have time to explore all the opportunities.

YC should encourage them to share these avenues of potential in a discussion
format... because who knows, maybe someone listening could grab an idea and
run with it (and be in the next batch.)

~~~
craigcannon
Good note. Thanks!

------
jkingsbery
I love hearing Russ Roberts of econ talk
([http://www.econtalk.org/](http://www.econtalk.org/)), but he's almost always
interviewing someone. It would be cool to hear him because (1) he interviews a
lot of people who either write about or are involved in building the future
(automation, driverless cars, sharing economy, etc.), and (2) he has a
different perspective on how to approach problems making him interesting to
listen to.

~~~
craigcannon
Right on. Thanks!

------
jennykaypollock
Sam Altman Elon Musk Founders of Airbnb Ali Diab Collective Health CEO Second
time founders First time founders in the midst of working on their startup
Angel Investors Chris Sacca Host live office hours with companies in YC Any
additional insight in to YC

------
franciscomello
I'd love if the podcast were more about teaching other founders how to build
billion-dollar companies, and less about their stories. Most interviews are
founding anecdotes, while the greatest benefit would come from learning from
interviewees' mistakes.

~~~
craigcannon
k

------
yranadive
Micheal Seibel, Jared Friedman, Justin Kan, Qasar Younis, Emmett Shear, Sean
Byrnes(Flurry, OutlierAI), Javier Soltero (MS Outlook mobile app fame), Brian
Chesky, Chad Rigetti

~~~
craigcannon
k. thanks!

------
KerryJones
Slightly off topic, but something like the "Office Hours" that Kevin & Qasar
did, more of a vlog, would be amazing. Favorite part of the event.

~~~
craigcannon
K

------
giarc
>Who is just really interesting and you’d love to hear more from?

I'd actually like you to tell me who is interesting. I'd like to hear
fun/interesting stories from YC companies. Perhaps there are great stories of
companies that flamed out or failed to build a product and therefore we have
never heard of them. I want to hear about those people just as much as I want
to hear about Dropbox/Airbnb/Stripe et al.

------
sandGorgon
Audio or video ? Snapchat/Periscope/Facebook Live would be a much better
medium.

IMHO Justin Kan already demonstrated what works - office hours !

Office hours are YC's killer feature ..and also the reason why Startup
School's format also follows office hours. I don't think YC should do a
Techcrunchy podcast.

If anything - do a weekly Q&A with someone famous _where users are able to
submit questions_.

TL;DR - bring the YC format to the podcast.

~~~
craigcannon
audio for now. we kicked around a few ideas re vlogging but decided to start
here.

we'll definitely include office hours/q&a tho!

------
fuqted
I've got no real input other than it would be awesome to get Larry Page. I'm
likely in the 1% of the 1% in terms of how many founder stories I've listened
to or watched, and I'm not tired of it yet. A good story can come from the
most random places. _Though I appreciate good intro music_ so there's a
suggestion.

When would you expect to start airing?

~~~
craigcannon
Hopefully before the end of the year.

------
rgovind
Interviews with VCs and Entrepreneurs are dime a dozen nowadays. What I see
missing is resources which help technical people think about business aspects.
How does one understand/analyze competition, market size, customers etc.

I really liked AMA from YC partners here on hacker news. They answered a few
questions about how one should things about early stage starting up. I would
like to see more of such things.

~~~
craigcannon
cool. thanks for the feedback

------
zodiac
I don't have suggestions for specific people but my favorite episodes so far
were ones where the founders went more in-depth into their industries; eg
Docker, Plaid, Flexport.

Also enjoyed the ones where they talk about how they got their first users. In
many episodes the conversation I felt skipped this or spent too little time on
it.

~~~
craigcannon
More early stuff is definitely a trend in this thread.

------
guylepage3
\- Paul Graham \- Pieter Thiel \- Sam Altman & Elon Musk (on OpenAI) \- Albert
Wenger (on Universal Capital and how we'll deal with AI without a total
economic collapse)

------
ents
Maciej Ceglowski

------
vmorgulis
Lorenz Meier, the author of Pixhawk (an autopilot for drones):

[https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/lomeier/](https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/lomeier/)

[https://pixhawk.org/credits](https://pixhawk.org/credits)

------
ericb
-Elon Musk

-Jason Cohen CEO of WPEngine

-Gail Goodman, former CEO of Constant Contact

-Jason Lemkin of Saastr

-Peter Thiel

-Author of TensorFlow (apparently terrytangyuan@gmail.com)

-David Skok of Matrix Partners

------
cryptomango
Market & tech trend analysis would be nice. I think that YC already covers
interviews with industry leaders pretty well.

------
ejsilva
I would love to hear from the right hand support teams for growing tech
companies (Tesla, Amazon, Google, etc.). What makes them great support staff
for founders, and how do you either look for such people, and/or if you are
one, kick butt in your role. Thanks!

~~~
craigcannon
yeah, I like stories from behind the scenes people as well

------
gordon_freeman
I'd like to hear from Founders who have very interesting stories and journeys
to share. I do not care if their products got traction,flopped or big hit. All
I want to get is how can we as listeners can learn from their success or
failures. Thanks for doing this.

~~~
craigcannon
Yup! Lmk if anyone is of particular interest to you.

~~~
gordon_freeman
So Airbnb founders for their grit and determination -- maxing out all their
credit cards and even started selling political branded cereal boxes to keep
the lights on.

Dollar Shave Club on their growth strategies -- how they posted a product
video which went viral and got started their business.

I know, these are the success ones but would also love to hear from founders
whose apps/startups did not work out.

Again, it is great to see someone from HN getting this involved in getting
suggestions and feedback. Thanks.

Looking forward to the podcast.

------
ryanstanton
Peter Diamandis (okay, he's done a lot of interviews and blogs a lot, but has
a great perspective on the impact of tech on humanity)

------
seltzered_
YC harc folks (e.g. Bret Victor, Yoshiko ohshima ) -theyve shaped technology
but afaik they don't do many interviews

Vinay Gupta - hexayurt dude / blockchain evangelizer now trying to start an
accelerator

Mariana mazzucato - economist, author of rethinking capitalism

~~~
craigcannon
Bret's definitely on the list! Hope we can make that happen.

Thanks for the suggestions!

------
tmaly
Craig, I thought about it more. Hearing about customer development and the
nitty gritty details of how the startup reached product market fit would be
some details I would like to hear an in depth discussion on.

~~~
craigcannon
Can do!

------
Insanity
I think it is interesting that when interviewing someone they do not just
focus on his job but also on the person himself. The developeronfire podcast
is one that comes to mind that has this, which I really do enjoy listening to.

~~~
craigcannon
completely agreed!

------
sndean
Not sure if this is within the podcast's scope or not:

Editas Medicine
([http://www.editasmedicine.com/](http://www.editasmedicine.com/)).

Or people from similar companies. Gene editing startups, essentially.

~~~
craigcannon
Definitely within the scope. Thanks for the specific suggestion.

------
wonjunetai
Would love to hear from Ben Silbermann - his quiet personality makes him
someone who isn't interviewed as frequently.

------
RickS
"Talk to users" and the surrounding processes/changes/workflows. There's no
such thing as "too deep" on this. I'd pay for a podcast where it's JUST that,
with a new test every week.

~~~
craigcannon
k

~~~
codinghorror
Hey I am an expert on talking to users! That's how we built Stack Overflow,
and now Discourse! Pick me. Me me me.

------
Kinnard
Deepgram because their interview would be very meta, they just raised $1.9M,
and they're a YC company: [http://deepgram.com](http://deepgram.com)

------
Danilka
Don't have a single theme. Startup School Radio is great. However, you listen
to essentially same stuff again and again. Try mixing things up and give a
fresh piece of advice/experience each time.

------
davidw
I don't do podcasts, I vastly prefer the written word:

* I can scan quickly.

* I can search for things.

* It's easier for me to read things than listen. I don't drive much, so don't have dead time when I can only listen.

~~~
severine
A good conversation is different from an essay, it would be great if there
were transcripts of the podcasts, isn't any YC company working on speech-to-
text?

------
halite
I'll listen if Jessica Livingston interviews.

~~~
codinghorror
That would be awesome.

------
Deckard256
There's a lot more out there than just technology. I'd love to hear from the
creators of Meow Wolf, for instance.

~~~
craigcannon
Totally. Definitely want to explore digital art as well.

------
nl
I'd love to hear YC Partners (and some founders) have discussions about areas
where they have great expertise and passion.

------
kriro
I'd like more non webapp/CRUD people. Biotech, hardware, energy...whatever you
can muster really :)

~~~
craigcannon
can do

------
meagher
Failed startups! Everyone gets barraged with success stories. It could be
anonymous anecdotes: we did X and failed.

------
gigatexal
Patrick Kennedy of TalkPythonToMe - he's a cool guy and has awesome insights,
I think he'd make a great guest.

------
rhizome
Maciej and Yegge

------
tilite
Theil on Trump. Or a roundtable of others discussing how this political shift
will/could change the direction of the Valley.

------
ludicast
My answer is going to be boring. Stick to business as usual.

I enjoyed 90% of the guests and learned a ton. I never felt a retooling was
needed.

Maybe @aaron needed more hosts, but he did a fine job.

Would love to complain about something, but all I can say from a listener
viewpoint is that taking time away to retool wasn't needed imho.

The way you sourced your guests was pretty good, just keep doing that.

------
Sabinus
Any employee from Tesla or SpaceX.

~~~
allergeek
up

------
qwertyuiop924
It does have to be VC focused, doesn't it?

Ah well. We may not all be VCs, but it _is_ your business.

------
Dowwie
How about interviewing technologist-teachers who are teaching youth how to
program?

~~~
craigcannon
Good idea!

------
rmason
A shout out for some great Michigan entrepreneurs:

Dug Song, Duo Security

Bill Hamilton, TechSmith

Jeff Epstein, Ambassador

Nathan Hughes, Detroit Labs

------
TheSmoke
i think it'd be a good one to interview donald trump before his presidency.
about his entrepreneurship past, his future actions on startup visas/programs,
supporting startups, etc.

------
hweiss613
Justin Kan, Jeff Bezos, Evan Spiegel

------
jbrambleDC
Definitely Peter Thiel.

Travis Kalanick.

Balaji Srinivasan.

------
codinghorror
Me. You should interview me. Because I'm awesome.

~~~
craigcannon
:)

------
oismail91
Michael Moritz Sequoia Capital

------
jger15
Venkatesh Rao from ribbonfarm

~~~
craigcannon
definitely on my list :)

------
mars4rp
a radio shrink kind of format would be interesting, people outside the YC can
call in with their startup problems and YC partners answer it.

------
cnnrjcbsn
Alain Meier and Chris Morton from BlockScore

------
hkmurakami
folks from the 90's .com (or earlier), who've largely retired and are in the
woodwork now.

~~~
craigcannon
k

------
sebleon
pg - can't get enough of his advice

------
erichacks
Larry Page

