Diana Hu cofounded Escher Reality, which went through the Summer 2017 batch of YC. They were acquired by Niantic and she is now the head of their AR platform. https://twitter.com/sdianahu https://www.ar.dev/ The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon. https://twitter.com/craigcannon Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ *** Topics 00:00 - Intro 00:15 - Getting into AR 2:30 - Her first exposure to AR 4:15 - AR's future role in media 7:20 - Deciding where to go with the product 9:30 - Innovations that enabled AR 14:00 - Building a product in a new market 17:00 - Raising money for a new market 21:15 - Advice for founders after an acquisition 26:15 - Immigrating to the US 30:45 - Advice for Immigrant founders 33:24 - Advice for founders in/after YC
AI isn't just making teams more productive. It's changing how companies should be built. In this episode of Startup School, YC Partner Diana Hu explains what it means to build an AI-native company, where AI isn't just a tool but the operating system your company runs on. She breaks down how to make your company queryable so agents can improve across every function, why management hierarchies break down when an intelligence layer replaces human middleware, and why early-stage founders have a massive edge in building this way from day one. 00:58 - AI as your company’s operating system 01:57 - Open vs closed loop companies 03:00 - Making your company fully queryable 05:00 - The rise of the 1,000x engineer 07:12 - Why middle management disappears 09:12 - Startups will win this shift Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
Chinese AI company DeepSeek recently made waves when it announced R1, an open-source reasoning model that it claimed achieved comparable performance to OpenAI’s o1, at a fraction of the cost. But for those following AI developments closely, DeepSeek and R1 didn’t come out of nowhere. In this episode of YC Decoded, General Partner Diana Hu breaks down the key engineering optimizations behind DeepSeek's remarkable new models — and contextualizes them within the broader history of recent AI breakthroughs. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/YCDecoded-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/YCDecoded-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:45 - DeepSeek 04:40 - How Nvidia helps 07:45 - Secret Sauce 10:35 - Results 12:45 - Outro
YC Group Partner Diana Hu was the CTO of her YC startup Escher Reality, which was acquired by Niantic (makers of Pokemon Go). She shares her advice for being a technical founder at the earliest stages - including topics like how to ship an MVP fast, how to deal with technology choices and technical debt, and how and when to hire an engineering team. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:09 - How to Build and Perpetuate as a Technical Founder 01:56 - What Does a Technical Founder Do? 04:38 - How To Build 08:30 - Build an MVP: The Startup Process 11:29 - Principles for Building Your MVP 15:04 - Choose the Tech Stack That Makes Sense for Your Startup 19:43 - What Happens In The Launch Stage? 22:43 - When You Launch: The Right Way to Build Tech 25:36 - How the role evolved from ideating to hiring 26:51 - Summary 27:59 - Outro