AI Startup School

Jake Heller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million. In this Y Combinator talk, Jake shares the journey from idea to exit — how Casetext identified the right problem, built reliable AI products beyond flashy demos, and earned trust in a high-stakes industry. He breaks down key lessons in picking the right AI idea, the three types of AI startups (Assist, Replace, or Do the Unthinkable), how to design products that perform under real-world pressure, and why great products ultimately outperform hype and marketing. This session also dives into pricing strategy, building trust with customers, and what founders should really focus on when scaling AI startups.

Jordan Fisher is the co-founder & CEO of Standard AI and now leads an AI alignment research team at Anthropic. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he frames the future of startups through questions rather than answers—asking how founders should navigate a world where AGI may be just a few years away. He surfaces the big questions startups should be asking in the age of AGI: Should you even start a company right now? What happens when software becomes commoditized? How do you build trust as teams shrink and AI takes on more responsibility?

For nearly two decades, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has been at the frontlines of how technology reshapes work—guiding the company through the rise of mobile, the cloud, and now the age of AI. In his fireside with YC General Partner David Lieb at AI Startup School, Aaron reflects on what it means to adapt a company over the long term, the hard lessons of staying relevant across multiple technology waves, and why he believes AI represents the most transformative shift yet.

Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit, now valued at $3B after a recent $250M Series C. He's spent nearly a decade making programming accessible to all—and with the rise of AI, that vision is closer than ever. In this talk from AI Startup School on June 17, 2025, Amjad traces the arc of computing from mainframes to personal computers to a future where AI agents can create software on demand. He explains why the value of traditional software will approach zero, fundamentally reshaping how companies are built and how work gets done.

Michael Truell on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. At 24, Michael Truell has already built Cursor into one of the fastest-growing companies in AI coding, hitting $100M ARR in just a year. In this fireside chat with YC General Partner Diana Hu, he shares the lessons that came from years of failed projects with his co-founders, why he believes programming is still essential even as AI changes how we code, and how Cursor is taking on GitHub Copilot with the conviction that all of software development will flow through models.

Dylan Field co-founded Figma to bring the design process online and make it multiplayer. From a meme maker built on WebGL to a design platform powering millions, Figma's journey hit a major milestone with its IPO in July 2025. In this conversation, Dylan shares the early challenges of building in the browser, the early risks and pivotal choices that shaped Figma’s growth, the principles that guided its product and community, and how he thinks about building tools that empower creativity at scale. Dylan Field on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

Jared Kaplan on June 16th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Jared Kaplan started out as a theoretical physicist chasing questions about the universe. Then he helped uncover one of AI’s most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable, almost physical way.That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language models—and led him to co-found Anthropic.

Chelsea Finn on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley, where she pioneered meta‑learning methods, and Google Brain, Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and co‑founder of Physical Intelligence, she’s using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy, real-world environments rather than confined lab setups. In this talk, Chelsea traces the evolution of her team’s work—from early experiments on robotic grasping and vision to today’s ambitious efforts at folding laundry, tidying kitchens, and generalizing across tasks—all without hand-crafted code. Instead, they used scalable foundation models and massive datasets, teaching robots physical common sense as they learn by doing. She shares stories of the rocky setbacks, the surprises hidden in data, and the moment it all clicked: robots equipped with generalizable physical intelligence can indeed adapt and assist in the unpredictable world around us.