Business
Year One
Every billion-dollar YC company survived a brutal first year after Demo Day.
Episodes
The archive
23 episodes, newest first.
- Mato: Betting YC Will Turbocharge AI PodcastingJoin Miles and Grant as they interview Alex Benz about Applying to YC Summer 2026.
- The SAFE Trap: What a W26 Founder Signed at 2amA W26 founder walks Miles and Grant through the exact term sheet they signed days after Demo Day, including the cap that looked fine until the dilution math hit. Then a YC partner pattern-matches against hundreds of founders who learned the same lesson the hard way.
- Hex Security: $1M ARR in 8 WeeksYC W26 just wrapped Demo Day with a record 14 companies hitting $1M ARR before they ever pitched. This episode gets inside one of those companies, Hex Security, to ask the question nobody covers: what actually happened in those eight weeks, and what does the W26 batch reveal about how the rules of early execution just changed.
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.
More shows
Elsewhere in the directory
Every one of them is made with Mato.
