What Are Top AI Founders Building? | A 5-Hour Podcast Breaks Down 260 Y Combinator AI Companies from the Past Year (Part 1)

🎉 Special celebration: "Crossroads" hits 100 days online, with paid subscribers surpassing 5,000 🎉

— This is a crossover episode between "Crossroads" and "Dragon-Slaying Technique," featuring host Minghao Zhuang.

What is Y Combinator? — The most famous startup incubator in Silicon Valley, commonly known as YC. Since its founding in 2005, it has invested in countless impressive early-stage tech companies.

Over the past year, YC invested in more than 260 AI startups. They represent, in miniature, the AI entrepreneurship trends of Silicon Valley and the world at large.

In this podcast episode, we visited each of these 260 companies' products and websites one by one, attempting to understand them, learn from them, and thereby grasp what AI's top founders are actually building. We believe this is far more valuable than reading 260 news items or 260 industry analyses.

If the keyword for 2023 was AI foundation models, then the keyword for 2024 is how AI applications find their real-world use cases and demonstrate value worth paying for — in short, PMF (Product Market Fit). We believe the best way to predict the future is to create it. So rather than armchair theorizing, let's open this YC list directly. The names on it are all builders actively creating in the AI era. Among them likely hide the next Google, the next OpenAI, the answers to what's coming.

Globally, startup investment has declined overall these past two years, but funding directed at AI has surged. From 2022 to 2023 alone, financing for generative AI companies nearly octupled, reaching $25.2 billion by end of December last year.

Despite remaining challenges for AI — such as top products seemingly hitting growth ceilings, new application scenarios proving difficult to land, profit models still uncertain — we believe these problems can all be improved and solved. Since there's already broad consensus that generative AI has created obvious value and represents an important direction for future technological development, the question we should be asking right now is: when and through what means and products will generative AI lead us into a new era following the PC internet and mobile internet ages.

This episode is a podcast marathon at 5.5 hours long. Thanks for sticking with us!

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📃 Reference document: 260 AI companies list: thefair.feishu.cn

🎬 Watch the video: We recorded our screens showing the corresponding companies' websites and introductions while recording the podcast, split into two parts: ① www.bilibili.com, ② www.bilibili.com

💈 Special thanks: Zhitao, "Kid from the Mountain Valley" (Shangougouli de Haizi), and Weizhi — three engineer friends who helped us experience and understand the technical companies on the list. And to "Product Sister Er" (Chanpin Erjie), whose compilation and publication of this list inspired us to record this episode.

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🚦 Subscribe to "Crossroads": We track the industry transformations and new entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the new wave of AI technology. "Crossroads" is Steve Jobs's metaphor for Apple — standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, where great products are born. AI is transforming industries across the board. We seek out, interview, and gather together the "active builders" of the AI era, exploring and embracing new changes and new possibilities alongside them.

👦🏻 Host Koji: Co-founder of The Fair and Tangdao, and someone actively diving into AI himself. On Jike: [A self-introduction from Koji]

👧🏻 Host Ronghui: Works at a tech VC, former Silicon Valley correspondent for Yicai Weekly. On Jike:

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