Tag: Podcasts

As Reid Hoffman says, starting a company is like “jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down.”  It’s hard. Very, very hard! And being an entrepreneur can be one of the loneliest places on Earth, especially when you’re staring down a challenge that you’ve never seen before and don’t know who to turn to. That’s why AWS and Masters of Scale are partnering to create this unique opportunity for startups to help startups. 

Picture this: You oversee a fleet of servers that supports one of the world’s most massive online retail companies, and a special promotion everyone thought would bump sales by 21% is actually giving closer to a 120% boost—all in the first minute. That’s exactly where Brian Herman, Director of Datacenter Compute Capacity at Amazon Web Services, was standing in 2015, moments after the first Prime Day launched.

Aza Steel might be a bit of a prodigy, but he never set out to be a technological savior for teachers and parents. In fact, when he first developed the Chrome browser extension that would become the seed of his company in the early aughts, he was just a UCLA sociology major trying to find a way to track his laptop’s location in case it was stolen.

What do you get when you put the world’s brightest scientists in a room, arm them with the most advanced tools of their trade, and get them to work on the world’s hardest problems? Not much without data. At least that’s the thought behind Repositive.io, the first portal for researchers to browse the world’s human genomic data.

Joanna McFarland is the co-founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive, a ridesharing app specifically geared toward alleviating the daily stress of planning hectic family transportation schedules.

James Norman, founder and CEO of Pilotly, may have come up through the entertainment industry, but he’s got a broader target in mind.

The anti-social downsides of social technologies are starting to be a big concern for tech companies these days. It’s a surprise, since Web 2.0 was all about building out the social capacity of existing tech offerings. But Brent Bushnell of Two Bit Circus isn’t worried. In fact, he believes he’s well positioned for the next big thing: bringing people back together again in public.

For most adventurers, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail would be a crowning achievement in its own right. But one Caltech professor is upping the ante: he wants to design a robot that can complete the famous trek, all with outside assistance. That’s why Dr. Aaron Ames and his team have created Cassie, the world’s first fully autonomous robot designed to navigate the harshest and most complex environments in the world.

And there’s more help available from experts to get your application to the YC Spring/Summer? 2018 Class dialed-in.
Dreaming of a Spot in Y Combinator? The 8 Things This YC Alum Says Your Application Must Deliver

If you use a voice-based personal assistant like Alexa, chances are advances in AI have already made it into their backend for companies to yield savings from processing efficiency. But sooner or later, deep learning is going to change your life.