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© Copyright 2026 Jessica Livingston
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Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy are The Social Radars. Carolynn and Jessica have been working together to help thousands of startups at Y Combinator for almost 20 years. Come be a fly on the wall as they talk to some of the most successful founders in Silicon Valley about how they did it.
57 Episodes
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In today's episode we talk to the founder of a startup that will have momentous consequences for the whole world if it works: David Kirtley, Founder & CEO of Helion Energy, who is building an actual fusion power plant. Fusion has always been something that was 20 years in the future. Not anymore. The new Helion model, which they're constructing right now, is going to achieve net electricity production.
In the latest episode we talk to one of the great YC insiders, Jared Friedman, who was in the third batch back in summer 2006, as cofounder of Scribd, and who has worked since 2015 as a YC partner. Jared really embodies the spirit of YC. He's incisive, but also a mensch, as you'll notice when you listen to the episode.
Jessica & Carolynn Announce Season 5 of The Social Radars
In today’s episode, we talk to Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic. Building a supersonic airliner sounds hard, and it is: startups often have dramatic ups and downs, but Boom’s are among the most dramatic we’ve heard. His story was a gripping series of last-minute saves.
In today's Social Radars, we talk to Sajith Wickramasekara of Benchling. For Sajith, founder mode means a pervasive feeling of responsibility for everything at the company. Nothing can be bad at Benchling.
In the latest Social Radars, we talk to Jen Herbach of Adventris, which is working on a cancer vaccine. She was in the audience of Brian Chesky's famous founder mode talk, and immediately went home and started changing things.
In this episode we talk to Andy Lapsa of Stoke Space. This startup is literally doing rocket science, because they're building fully reusable rockets. Anyone who meets Andy is struck by the depth of his expertise, and in this company that's what founder mode means: a deep understanding of all the engineering problems.
In this Social Radars episode we talk to Emmett Shear, who told us about an interesting founder mode technique he developed when he was running Twitch. He wanted people there to be able to answer the question "What would Emmett do?" and he found the best way to ensure this was via the weekly all-hands, which he'd spend hours preparing for.
In today’s episode, Christina Cacioppo gives us her take on founder mode, which is becoming more important now that Vanta has 1000 employees around the world. She told us about a new variant of the idea: founder mode in fundraising. Christina delayed fundraising till after Vanta hit $100m ARR, which caused some investors to dismiss her, but she ended up net ahead.
In this episode we talked to Kashish Gupta of Hightouch, who made an important point about founder mode: one of the most important things founders can do that employees can't is to take big risks.
In this episode we talk to Paul Gross of Remora Carbon, a startup that does carbon capture right out of the exhausts of trucks and trains. Paul has a unique take on founder mode: once a quarter he decides what the three top risks to the company are, and for that quarter, those three things, whatever they are, are the main things he works on.
1In this episode, taped in front of a live audience, Chris Best tells us the story of Substack. He reminisces about his adventures with Elon Musk, and explains how he persisted in bringing to market a component of Substack that he knew was critical to their vision, even though any non-founder CEO would have killed it after years without any growth.
In this episode, Jake Heller talks about how he and his cofounder discovered the perfect product in a weekend of intense experimentation after GPT4 was released, and then changed the whole direction of the company. This was a classic case of founder mode, because Casetext was already 9 years old at that point and it was hard to convince everyone to change course.
Paul Graham talks about how the concept of founder mode arose from Brian Chesky's famous talk in 2024, what it means, and the latest things he's observed in the startup world.
We spoke with YC president & CEO Garry Tan about the Founder Mode event he organized for YC alumni. He talks about why founder mode matters and how the concept is evolving the the age of AI.
At YC's first Founder Mode event, we talk with Brian Chesky, whose legendary talk last year was the origin of the concept. Unless you were one of the lucky founders in that audience, this interview is probably the closest you can get to experiencing it.
In part 4 of our series with legendary investor Ron Conway, we get into the story of Napster. Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999 and was the first app to let people access music on demand, at scale. Though it ultimately failed amidst a series of lawsuits, Napster blazed the trail for Spotify and Apple Music, leaving in its wake a series of stories as interesting as the founders themselves.
In Part 3 of our conversation with Ron Conway, he takes us behind the scenes at early Google. Ron was involved with Google almost from the start; he and Ram Shriram arranged their Series A round. So if you want to know what a really, really big success looked like at the beginning, this is the episode for you.
In today's episode we talk with Drew Houston, founder and CEO of Dropbox. We've known Drew for a long time (YC funded Dropbox in 2007) and he's extremely candid about the many challenges he faced, and overcame, in the journey from building something that solved his own problem to serving as an essential part of the foundation of today's tech infrastructure. If you want to understand what it takes to be the CEO of a public company, this episode is for you.
Today we catch up with Sam Altman, Founder and CEO of OpenAI. Sam was in Y Combinator's first batch in 2005 and later returned as YC's president from 2014 to 2019, so he's one of the people in Silicon Valley that we know best. In this episode we cover his whole journey from Stanford sophomore to one of the most influential figures in tech.
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PB is great. He doesn’t want to exaggerate about his life and talk like he has always been motivated. It is important to know that there is always ups and downs in everyone’s journey!
I love your podcast. Listened to all 8 episodes in 3 days. Please make it a weekly podcast, I am sure a lot of people will enjoy it. Thanks!