🚀 The YC startups turning Sci-Fi into reality

This Week at YC

April 14th, 2024

Many of the most recent YC newsletters have focused on our traditions, old and new. Things like the founder retreat, the batch talks, the Friday night demos, the group dinners, etc.

With the W24 batch coming to a close, Jared Friedman took to Twitter (or “X”, a name which still hasn’t grown on me) to share more on these and outline some of the things we did for the very first time this batch. If you’re looking for a glimpse of what it’s like to go through YC in 2024, it’s a great read.

Better yet, be a part of the next one. The deadline to apply for Summer 2024 is just a few days away.

- Greg

📺 The Latest

Featured content from the YC Library

🚀 Inside The Hard Tech Startups Turning Sci-Fi Into Reality

Most people know YC for funding software companies. But some of our most successful companies are the ones doing incredible things in the real world — the hard tech companies. They’re 3D printing rockets, launching satellites into space, engineering organisms, developing fusion energy, and more.

In this latest episode of Lightcone, Garry, Diana, Harj and Jared talk about a number of YC’s hard tech companies, how far they’ve come since Day 1, and some of the ways they got there faster.

Jared also wrote up a blog post with some amazing before/after pics here!

🌎 YC Community

Highlights and news from around YC
Beeper acquired by Automattic
Beeper Blog
Yoshi Mobility has come a long way since gassing up cars on the side of the road
TechCrunch
"One of the true pleasures of being back at YC is hand-picking and funding startups myself. 

Here are my YC W24 founders. I predict very big things in each of their ten year overnight successes 🫡"


- Garry Tan in a thread on X/Twitter
Starlink rival Astranis debuts next-gen satellite with 5x more capacity
PCMag

🚀 The Launchpad

Some of the most recent YC companies and product launches 
Go from a product idea to screen wireframes 10x faster.
S2022
An open source toolkit to build web-based video apps.
S2023
Surface insights and revenue-generating product opportunities from your customer data auto-magically.
S2023
Find more YC companies and discover new products

🔥 Hacker News

Top posts from this week
  1. Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness (www.afterbabel.com)
    1151 points by throwup238 | 1159 comments

  2. Llm.c – LLM training in simple, pure C/CUDA (github.com)
    1045 points by tosh | 169 comments

  3. Peter Higgs, physicist who discovered Higgs boson, has died (www.theguardian.com)
    943 points by angrygoat | 104 comments

  4. Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD (paulbupejr.com)
    870 points by 00702 | 129 comments

  5. Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P (github.com)
    783 points by nikitml | 317 comments

  6. Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem (mailman.nanog.org)
    737 points by speckx | 374 comments

  7. An open source initiative to share and compare heat pump performance data (heatpumpmonitor.org)
    697 points by protontypes | 334 comments

  8. Obituary for a Quiet Life (bittersoutherner.com)
    668 points by conanxin | 150 comments

  9. I Lost Faith in Kagi (d-shoot.net)
    658 points by Tomte | 593 comments

  10. U.S. imposes first-ever national drinking water limits on PFAS (apnews.com)
    626 points by geox | 419 comments
Read more on Hacker News
More YC resources: Why YC | Apply to YC | YC Library
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🟧 Meet the YC Winter 2024 Batch!

Sunday, April 7, 2024

Congrats, W24! | This Week at YC April 7th, 2024 This week was Demo Day for the Winter 2024 batch! This is where all of the startups from the latest YC cohort get to show an audience of the world's

🟧 25 YC companies doing amazing things with AI

Sunday, March 31, 2024

New Lightcone! This Week at YC March 31st, 2024 The latest episode of the Lightcone podcast is all about AI. Garry, Diana, Jared, and Harj kick things off with some never-before-seen videos generated

🧠 Why founders shouldn't think like investors

Friday, March 22, 2024

Build for customers, not VCs | This Week at YC March 22nd, 2024 "I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator," writes Paul Graham. "In fact they were one of the reasons we

🏠 YC's new home

Friday, March 15, 2024

Plus a new episode of Lightcone! This Week at YC March 15th, 2024 This week Garry, Jared, Diana and Harj are back with a brand new episode of the Lightcone Podcast, this time all about San Francisco

💰 The billion-dollar pivot

Friday, March 8, 2024

Lessons from Clipboard Health's founder This Week at YC March 8th, 2024 Today Clipboard Health is an incredible company with a product used by thousands of healthcare facilities, and was most

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