Think of your website like a journey. Arriving on the landing page is just step one. From there you need to convince the visitor to dig deeper and to ultimately sign up or purchase your product. And the sites that do that well have at least one thing in common: good design. For this episode of Design Review, Aaron Epstein is joined by YC’s newest Group Partner, Pete Koomen, to cover some of the seemingly small things in a page’s design that can ultimately have huge impacts. Pete knows a thing or two about this subject; before joining YC, he was a co-founder of Optimizely, which helps thousands of companies run A/B tests to figure out which potential design changes work best. Special thanks to all companies who submitted their sites for review: Rivet, Decoherence, Solve Intelligence, and InEvent. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DesignReview-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/DesignReview-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro: Converting clicks to customers 00:28 - Optimizely 00:57 - Conversion funnel or Conversion flow 01:44 - Rivet 05:57 - Decoherence 13:23 - Solve Intelligence 18:04 - InEvent 23:23 - Outro
Y Combinator Group Partner, Pete Koomen, led his startup, Optimizely, to $100M ARR. In this video, Pete breaks down the enterprise sales funnel and shares his top tips on how a technical founder can start closing real deals for their startup. 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 03:29 - Prospecting 05:15 - Outreach 10:09 - Qualification 15:00 - Pricing 18:13 - Closing 18:58 - Avoid surprises in procurement process 20:02 - Implement 22:01 - Outro
In this episode of The Breakdown, Tom and Dave are joined by fellow YC General Partner Pete Koomen to lay out a new vision for how AI should actually work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software, but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don't want to do. From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators, they dig into what it means to build AI-native software—and why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think. Pete's essay, "AI Horseless Carriages": https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://workatastartup.com Chapters (Powered by https://chapterme.co/) - 0:00 – Intro 0:52 – Why AI apps are broken 2:39 – The problem with Google's AI App 4:00 – A better way to build AI apps 5:27 – The hidden system prompt 7:57 – What if you could access the system prompt? 9:40 – The developer-user divide in software 10:48 – The "horseless carriage" metaphor 13:35 – Email reading agent demo 14:34 – Everyone can be a prompt engineer 16:23 – Why coding agents feel magical 21:42 – Training AI like a human assistant 28:45 – The problem with chatbot interfaces 29:10 – Advice for founders
Building superintelligence inside a company isn't about adding AI as a feature. It's about making it the operating system the whole organization runs on. In this episode of the Lightcone, we sat down with YC's Pete Koomen to talk for the first time about how he led the effort to build YC's internal agent infrastructure from the ground up. We cover how giving agents unrestricted access to one database changed everything, the self-improving skill loops that get smarter overnight and why he thinks we've arrived at the personal computer moment for AI. Chapters: 00:00 — Intro 00:39 — YC's AI Stack 02:15 — The Finance Team Problem That Started It All 05:07 — SQL Access Changes Everything 07:20 — One Database to Rule Them All 09:14 — Jevons Paradox 10:07 — Denormalizing for Agents (GBrain) 12:15 — The Single-Player Era of Agents 14:16 — 350 Tools and a Shared Registry 16:24 — Skillify, DRY, and MECE Resolvers 18:23 — The Self-Improving Dream Cycle 20:26 — The Two-Sentence Pitch Skill 23:06 — How Super Intelligence Compounds 25:10 — Recording Everything as a Building Layer 27:10 — The Shared Organizational Brain 29:18 — Trust-Default Culture as a Requirement 30:44 — Raising the Floor for New Employees 32:35 — Horseless Carriages 34:24 — Why Chat Is the Best Interface for Agents 38:50 — Just-in-Time Software 40:49 — Centralizing vs. Decentralizing AI 43:32 — The Personal AI Revolution Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
Our series Versus pits two competing concepts against each other. In this episode, Y Combinator Visiting Group Partner, Pete Koomen, explores two common B2B sales strategies: Top Down and Bottom Up. Pete helps define each and discusses how a startup should choose and build their sales motion. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Sell your product: Bottoms up and Top down 00:23 - Top down sales 02:44 - Bottoms up sales 05:21 - Wrap-up 06:00 - Outro