The Social Radars

Updated: 26 Mar 2025 • 39 episodes
thesocialradars.captivate.fm

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.

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Carolynn Levy + Jessica Livingston & Drew Houston 26 Mar 2025 • EN

Drew Houston, Founder & CEO, Dropbox

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 fou

90 min
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Carolynn Levy + Jessica Livingston & Sam Altman 12 Mar 2025 • EN

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

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 influen

72 min
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In today's episode Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble and Beeper, shares the journey of building one of the first smartwatches. The Pebble watch made history as Kickstarter’s most-funded project at the time, raising $10.3 million. What happened next showed how difficult it was to build a hardware startup in the 201

64 min
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In today's episode we go down into the engine room of the AI Revolution with Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang. Since 2016 Scale has been supplying training data to most of the top AI models. In fact there's probably no one with a better overall view of the field than Alexandr.

61 min
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Today we catch up with Harj Taggar, who knows as much about startups as anyone of his generation. YC funded two of his startups, Auctomatic in 2007 and Triplebyte in 2015. In between them he was the first partner we hired besides the founders, and now he's a YC partner again. Among other things he happened to have a fr

85 min
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In today’s episode, we chat with all three of the Gusto founders: Josh Reeves, Eddie Kim, and Tomer London. Gusto is a payroll and employee benefits company that YC funded in 2012. The striking thing about Josh, Eddie, and Tomer is their level of commitment: to their customers, their employees, and one another. It's ra

73 min
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