Business
Year One
Every billion-dollar YC company survived a brutal first year after Demo Day.
Episodes
The archive
23 episodes, newest first.
- Corgi: The Cease-and-Desist Heard on XMiles and Grant bring back their IP attorney to trace how Corgi's vibe-coding scandal snowballed into cease-and-desist letters over joke tweets, a trade secrets war with a rival insurer, and a pattern that has S26 founders taking notes.
- Corgi: The IP Scandal Every S26 Founder Is IgnoringYC-backed insurtech Corgi went viral this week after its CEO admitted the team vibe coded a product that looked word-for-word like a competitor's open-source software. Miles and Grant sit with an S26 founder building entirely on AI-generated code, then bring in a startup IP attorney to map the legal exposure sitting inside every company in the batch.
- S26 Day One: What the First Week Actually DecidesMiles and Grant get inside the opening days of YC's Summer 2026 batch with two S26 founders in real time, then bring in a YC partner to explain why week one separates the companies that will matter by Demo Day from the ones that won't.
- S26: The $2M Token TrapSam Altman walked into a closed YC event on May 20, 2026 and offered every startup in the S26 batch $2 million in OpenAI API tokens structured as an uncapped SAFE. Miles and Grant sit with one founder who signed and one who passed, then bring in a YC partner to break down what compute-as-investment actually does to a cap table before you ever pitch a Series A.
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- Jorge: Turning BrainHi’s GTM Into an Engineered MachineJorge shares how his family sales roots helped him overcome early GTM challenges, engineer a scalable sales process at BrainHi, and secure a spot in Y Combinator.
- The S26 Email: What Getting In (and Not) Actually MeansS26 decisions just landed by June 5. Miles and Grant sit with two founders in the raw 24 hours after the email drops, then bring in a YC partner to break down what W26's record bar means for who got a yes, what rejection actually signals, and what the next 90 days look like for both.
- The S26 Call: Two Founders, One Decision WindowYC S26 decisions land by June 5 — Miles and Grant sit with a founder who got the call and one who didn't, then bring in a YC partner to break down what actually separated them in a batch where 30,000 applications competed for roughly 200 spots.
- The Quiet Breakdown: What Year One Actually CostsA W26 founder and a therapist who works exclusively with startup founders map the psychological arc of the twelve months after Demo Day, from the false high of batch graduation to the wall nobody prepares you for.
- Jon: The Co-Founder Split Nobody Saw ComingJon Yoo of Suger pivoted mid-YC, closed his seed round, then lost his co-founder. Miles and Grant reconstruct the split and what it takes to keep building alone.
- W26: The Moment 'AI-Powered' Stopped Being EnoughA W26 AI founder walks Miles and Grant through the exact moment their pitch stopped working, then a seed-stage VC breaks down which companies in this record batch are actually building something defensible and which are one product announcement away from irrelevance.
About
What the show is
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.
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Elsewhere in the directory
Every one of them is made with Mato.
