This Week at YC

February 16th, 2024

The last two newsletter intros have been about YC traditions, so let’s make it three. It’s becoming a tradition for me to write about traditions.

Once a week YC's Group Partners meet up to talk about what they’re seeing in the current batch — what’s working, what’s not, the anecdotes, the pivots. This often leads to conversations about what they’d want to see in the future — ideas they’d like to see more founders working on and applying to YC with.

Sometimes these conversations reach the point where they want to broadcast them to the world; to tell all the potential founders out there “Hey! If you’re thinking about building one of these things, you really should!”

Thus, the Request for Startups (or RFS). The RFS is a tradition that goes back almost to the beginning of YC; you can find examples going back as far as 2009.

This week we released a new RFS focusing on 20 different concepts — from better ways to fight cancer, to novel ways to use AI, to using tech to fight climate change. You can find the full list here.

One thing to note: these are in no way the only ideas YC will accept. In fact, we expect ideas from this list to be a small fraction of those we actually fund. But if any of these ideas inspire you to take your expertise and build something new and great, they’ve done their job.

- Greg

(Oh — and because a lot of people have already told us this new RFS inspired them to apply to YC, we're doing a one-off round of early interviews for the next batch. Find more info on that here.)

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Highlights and news from around YC

OpenAI Unveils Sora, an AI That Instantly Generates Eye-Popping Videos
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Rippling opens Asia-Pacific HQ as its international expansion gears up
TechCrunch

Armilla wants to give companies a warranty for AI
TechCrunch

"Jessica and I went to speak to the current YC batch. It seems a strange thing to say, but the thing that struck me about the current batch is how smart they seemed. They asked better questions in the Q&A, for example. Several of their questions would have made good essay topics."

- Paul Graham on X/Twitter