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We help founders make something people want. The Y Combinator Podcast is where builders talk about building. From the earliest days of an idea to scaling a company that changes the world, YC partners and founders share real stories, lessons, and tactics from the frontlines.
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The Software Composer Podcast

Riley Brown and Ansh Nanda

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The Software Composer Podcast pulls back the curtain on how regular people are using AI to build incredible software - we're talking apps making $100K to $5M monthly using tools like Claude, Cursor, and Replit. Every episode, my co-host Ansh and I break down exactly how these apps work, share mind-blowing success stories, and show you step-by-step how to build your own. Whether you're just getting started or you're deep in the AI world, we're here to show you what's possible when you combine ...
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Pattern Breakers

Floodgate

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Host Mike Maples Jr. from venture capital firm Floodgate offers lessons from the rare startup super performers — BEFORE they were successful. Pattern Breakers features interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most legendary entrepreneurs and thought leaders, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger, business maverick Mark Cuban, and Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke.
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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman. If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show note ...
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Verlicity AI

Cristian Worthington and Sandra Giffin

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Verlicity AI is an exploration of how artificial intelligence is reshaping business and society—without the hype. Join us for thought-provoking conversations, practical insights on AI’s real-world challenges and opportunities. Each episode offers balanced perspectives to help you navigate the fast-changing AI landscape—and stay one step ahead.
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World Class

Chris Vasquez

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We are all born with heroic potential... The question is, how do you execute on it? Hosted by tech investor & entrepreneur Chris Vasquez, World Class is a personal development show on a mission to humanize greatness and equip builders with insights to achieve extraordinary success in business & life.
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AI for Business

The AIpreneur

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Dive into the ever evolving world of AI for Business, where we bring you the latest AI News and AI Tools in 5 minutes. You'll learn everything you need to take advantage of the opportunities in AI and stay ahead of the competition. Whether you're an entrepreneur, tech enthusiast, or simply curious about the future, stay up-to-date with the fast paced development of artificial intelligence in a quick and easy format.
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Alex Rampell is a General Partner at Andressen Horowitz, where he leads their $1.7BN apps fund. Just last week, a16z announced they had raised $15BN for their latest funds, over 20% of all capital raised by venture firms. At a16z, Alex has led deals into Plaid, Mercury and OpenDoor to name a few. AGENDA: 04:55 How to Do 5x on a $15BN Fund Pool? 09:…
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Luke Harries is Head of Growth at ElevenLabs, where he leads marketing, product, engineering, and developer experience. ElevenLabs has raised $281M with the latest round pricing the company at a $6.6B valuation. Previously, Luke held roles at PostHog and Microsoft, and is also an angel investor supporting startups like Lovable and Runna. AGENDA: Th…
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Stoke Space is racing to build the world's first fully reusable rockets that can launch, survive reentry, and fly again and again. In this episode of Hard Tech, YC’s Aaron Epstein sits down with Stoke Space co-founders Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman to find out why they chose to take on one of the hardest problems in rocket science, how an obsession wi…
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AGENDA: 04:30 Groq Acquired by NVIDIA for $20BN: The Breakdown 17:13 Meta's $2BN Acquisition of Manus: Did They Sell Too Early 36:04 OpenAI's Stock-Based Compensation Strategy 47:42 Will AI Replace Venture Capitalists 56:13 Navan Trading at 4x ARR: Who is Good Enough to Go Public? 01:09:46 The Rise of Invisible Unemployment 01:14:21 The Future of W…
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For the last 50 years, humans have been forced to think like machines. We’ve squeezed our lives into checkboxes, databases, and rigid forms just to make computers work. But what happens when the machines finally start thinking like us? In this Season 1 Finale of the Verlicity AI Podcast, Cristian and Sandra explore the defining shift of our time: t…
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 When Amplitude launched in 2012, the analytics market looked crowded, and the company spent more than a year struggling to find any traction. But co-founder and CEO Spenser Skates prioritized truth seeking over narratives. He studied the outcomes of past Y Combinator batches and noticed a simple rule: Most companies died before they even learned e…
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I have interviewed 1,000 entrepreneurs over 10 years. Nik Storonsky and our guest today are the two best that I have interviewed. Joining the show today; Alan Chang, Co-Founder and CEO of Fuse Energy. Alan has scaled Fuse Energy from $2M in revenue in the first year, to $20M the second year to now $400M in the third year. Like Netflix beat incumben…
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Matt Fitzpatrick is the CEO of Invisible Technologies, leading the company's mission to make AI work. Since joining as CEO in January 2025, he has raised $100M and accelerated AI adoption across industries from sports to consumer and government. Previously, Matt was a Senior Partner at McKinsey, where he led QuantumBlack Labs, the firm's AI R&D and…
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Writer and thinker Cate Hall joins me to talk about the tightrope between radical optimism and deep pessimism — and what it actually takes to stay hopeful in a world that doesn’t always reward it. We dig into her widely loved “50 Secrets” post, the kind of people who end up walking that edge, and how she thinks about preserving agency and perspecti…
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Psychologist and founder coach Dr. Gena Gorlin joins me to discuss The Founder’s Mindset — how to stay hopeful, resilient, and creative while building something from the ground up. We talk about the psychology of entrepreneurship, why losing can be a sign of progress, and how to keep optimism alive amid a culture that often feels discouraged. I als…
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In this special holiday episode, Cristian and Sandra cast humanity in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge—wealthy in technology, yet paralyzed by the fear of what comes next. Join us as we summon the Ghosts of AI Past, Present, and Future to explore the "Scrooge Moment" we are all living through. Are we destined for obsolescence, or is there a path to red…
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AGENDA: 03:48 Founder of the Year 2025 06:58 Product of the Year 10:05 Fund of the Year 20:52 Breakout Companies of 2025: Who Made the Biggest Impact? 26:57 Biggest Surprises of 2025 32:57 Predictions for 2026: Top Performing Tech Stocks of the Year 35:25 B2B Stocks to Watch 38:31 Why Salesforce Could Be the Buy of 2026 47:11 Google, Meta, Apple, N…
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Gérald Marolf is the Chief Product Officer at On Running. Gérald oversees the full range of On's shoes, apparel and accessories to make sure each delivers performance, comfort and style. Before On, Gérald spent over a decade building consumer brands with collaborators such as Microsoft and Ferrari. AGENDA: 00:00 – Why Most "Great Products" Fail to …
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Gemini 3 was a landmark frontier model launch in AI this year — but the story behind its performance isn’t just about adding more compute. In this episode, I sit down with Sebastian Bourgeaud, a pre-training lead for Gemini 3 at Google DeepMind and co-author of the seminal RETRO paper. In his first-ever podcast interview, Sebastian takes us inside …
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AGENDA: 03:32 Lightspeed's $9 Billion Fundraise 05:20 The Impact of Mega Funds on Seed VCs 10:09 The Supercycle of Growth and Late-Stage Investments 13:06 Disney Invests $1BN into OpenAI and What It Means 23:19 Oracle Hit Hard: Is Now the Time to Buy 28:34 Broadcom's Market Cap Drop and Anthropic's AI Chip Orders 35:04 Cursor Competes with Figma: T…
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ARC-AGI is redefining how to measure progress on the path to AGI - focusing on reasoning, generalization, and adaptability instead of memorization or scale. During this month's NeurIPS 2025 conference, YC's Diana Hu sat down with ARC Prize Foundation President Greg Kamradt to find out why most AI benchmarks fail, how ARC-AGI reveals the limits of t…
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David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm's Growth investing team. His team has backed many of the defining companies of this era, including Databricks, Figma, Stripe, SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI, and is now investing behind a new generation of AI startups like Cursor, Harvey, and Abridge. AGENDA: 03:05 – Why…
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Head of Design Ryo Lu helped transform Cursor from a feature-layer on top of VS Code into one of the world's leading AI code editors.He joins YC's Aaron Epstein on Design Review to talk about the path that brought him to Cursor, how rapid prototyping reshaped the core product and how he's breaking down the barriers that once separated designers and…
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Raaz Herberg is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP Product Strategy at Wiz, the fastest-growing cloud security company in history. As one of the first 10 employees, Raaz has helped scale the business from nothing to a multi-billion-dollar ARR business. Before Wiz, Raaz was a Senior PM working on Azure at Microsoft. AGENDA: 03:51 What No One Knows A…
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AGENDA: 03:46 SpaceX's $800 Billion Valuation: A Deep Dive 09:18 IPO Market Predictions for 2026 18:18 Netflix's Bold Move: Acquiring Warner Brothers 27:43 Tiger's New Fund Strategy 33:02 Databricks' Head of AI $500 Million Seed Round 36:38 Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Valuation 48:22 Will LLMs Kill the App Layer 01:02:02 Google's AI Capabilities…
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If you are building a business, you are likely feeling two things about AI simultaneously: absolute exhilaration and total terror. In the wake of massive tectonic shifts caused by the release of Gemini 3, entrepreneurs are watching months of work become obsolete in the blink of an eye. It begs the terrifying question: Was it a mistake to start? In …
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In just a few years, James Hawkins took PostHog from an idea hacked together right before YC's W20 deadline to a unicorn powering product analytics for thousands of teams. He joins YC's Brad Flora to talk about surviving six months of "pivot hell," why open-source analytics was the breakthrough, and how PostHog grew from fighting for its first user…
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Tarek Mansour is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Kalshi, the leader in the world of prediction markets. Just last week, they announced their $1BN raise at an $11BN valuation. In total, they have raised $1.59BN from some of the best, including Sequoia, a16z, General Catalyst, IVP, Meritech, and more. They also last week announced exclusive partnerships wit…
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Bending Spoons is the acquisition machine of the tech world. They have acquired the likes of Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Streamyard and more. However, they never open their gates to the secrets behind Evernote's product machine. Today that changes with Federico Simionato joining 20Product. Fede has been a Product Lead at Bending Spoons for 8 years…
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AGENDA: 04:20 Thrive and OpenAI Partnership 07:14 Databricks Raising $5BN at $134BN Valuation: Cheap or Not? 17:39 Eventbrite Acquired by Bending Spoons for $500M 21:39 Pagerduty's $1BN Market Cap, Just 2x Revenue 26:59 The TAM Trap: Why SaaS Is Like Japan 37:42 Lessons from Companies Hitting $100M ARR 44:57 The Future of Labour Markets is F****** …
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Jonathan Siddharth is Founder and CEO of Turing, one of the fastest-growing AI companies advancing frontier models. Jonathan has led the company to an astonishing $300M ARR with just $225M raised and a profitable company. A Stanford-trained AI scientist, Jonathan previously helped pioneer natural language search at Powerset, which was acquired by M…
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Every major shift in consumer tech has a moment when it suddenly becomes accessible to millions. Michael Mignano helped spark one of those moments with Anchor, making podcast creation something anyone could do with a tap. Now at Lightspeed, he sees AI bringing a similar leap to music, media, and everyday apps.In this conversation, he and Garry trac…
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John McMahon is widely regarded as one of the greatest enterprise-software sales leaders of all time. He's the only person to have served as Chief Revenue Officer at five public software companies: PTC, GeoTel, Ariba, BladeLogic and BMC Software. He helped scale BladeLogic from a startup into a public company — ultimately leading to its ~$880M sale…
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AGENDA: 04:06 Anthropic's $30BN Investment from Microsoft and NVIDIA 07:01 Google vs. OpenAI: Sam Altman's "War Mode" Memo 15:27 NVIDIA's Customer Concentration: Bull or Bear 22:12 Is "War Mode" BS: Does Hyper-Aggressive Ever Work? 36:12 Sierra Hits $100M ARR: Justify $10BN Price? 46:14 Implementation is the Biggest Barrier to Enterprise AI Growth …
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In a world where Artificial Intelligence is rapidly approaching the status of a "Wish Fulfillment Machine," a single, terrifying question hangs over every professional: If the machine can do the work, why am I here? Join hosts Cristian Worthington and Sandra Giffin for a provocative new episode of the Verlicity AI Podcast that challenges the prevai…
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We’re told that AI progress is slowing down, that pre-training has hit a wall, that scaling laws are running out of road. Yet we’re releasing this episode in the middle of a wild couple of weeks that saw GPT-5.1, GPT-5.1 Codex Max, fresh reasoning modes and long-running agents ship from OpenAI — on top of a flood of new frontier models elsewhere. T…
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Maor Shlomo is the Founder and CEO of Base44, the AI building platform that Maor built from idea to $80M acquisition by Wix, in just 8 months. Today the company serves millions of users and will hit $50M ARR by the end of the year. Before Base44, Maor was the Co-Founder and CTO of Explorium. AGENDA: 00:05 – 00:10: How Vibe Coding is Going to Kill S…
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Max Altman is Co‑Founder & Managing Partner at Saga Ventures, a US$125 M early‑stage fund. Before Saga Max was an investor with Apollo Projects, Hydrazine Capital and Altman Capital (where he helped deploy over US$500 M) into breakout names such as Rippling and Reddit. AGENDA: 03:55 – Venture Capital Is FULL of Tourists With Single-Digit IQs 06:20 …
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Cursor Head of Design Ryo Lu has spent his career at the intersection of design and engineering—from building fan sites as a kid to designing products at Stripe, Asana, and Notion. Now he's rethinking how software itself gets made. On this episode of Design Review, Ryo joins YC's Aaron Epstein to break down how great product websites communicate wh…
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In this special release episode, Matt sits down with Nathan Lambert and Luca Soldaini from Ai2 (the Allen Institute for AI) to break down one of the biggest open-source AI drops of the year: OLMo 3. At a moment when most labs are offering “open weights” and calling it a day, AI2 is doing the opposite — publishing the models, the data, the recipes, …
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AGENDA: 04:47 Cursor Raises $2.3BN at $29BN Valuation 11:36 What Gemini 3 Means for Lovable, Cursor and Replit 30:54 Peter Thiel and Softbank Sell NVIDIA: The Bubble Bursting? 48:54 Oracle Credit Default Swaps: The Risk is Increasing 01:07:22 Stripe Does Tender at All-Time High: Why the Best Companies Will Never IPO 01:19:18 Why Retail WIll Cause a…
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When Wade Foster was a kid growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri, there weren’t many models for how to carve out a career in entrepreneurship. But when he and his friend Bryan Helmig developed an easier way to help users connect web-based applications, they ushered in what would eventually become Zapier, a remote automation giant that’s now worth …
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Dr. Andrew Ng is a globally recognized leader in AI. He is Founder of DeepLearning.AI, Executive Chairman of LandingAI, General Partner at AI Fund, Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera. As a pioneer in machine learning Andrew has authored or co-authored over 200 research papers in machine learning, robotics and related fields. In 2023, he was named …
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Carl Rivera is the Chief Design Officer at Shopify, where he previously led both Merchant Services and the Shop App as VP of Product. Before joining Shopify through its acquisition of Tictail, Carl was the co-founder and CEO of Tictail, the "Tumblr for e-commerce," where he built one of the most beloved design-forward commerce platforms of its era.…
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Starcloud recently made history by launching a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 into orbit — the first time a GPU that powerful has ever operated in space. It's the first step toward building AI data centers in orbit, powered by continuous sunlight and cooled by radiating heat into deep space.Their approach could one day rival the world's biggest data…
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AGENDA: 04:22 Sequoia's Leadership Transition 09:46 Michael Burry's Big Short on Nvidia and Palantir 17:41 Gamma Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation 32:34 Does Defensibility Exist Today When Copying is Easy 40:31 Should All Funds Be Way More Diversified 47:12 How to Run a Fundraising Process & What Not To Do 57:57 Datadog Surges 20% and Duolingo Crash…
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We all live with a silent burden: the constant, low-grade frustration of bad design. Bad UI and UX design is a multi-trillion dollar drag on the economy. From clunky software at work to confusing appliances at home, we've been trained to accept mediocrity. But that era is ending. In this episode, Sandra Giffin and Cristian Worthington explore how A…
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Ev Randle is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the best funds in venture capital. In their latest fund, they have Mercor ($10BN valuation), Sierra ($10BN valuation), Firework ($4BN valuation), Legora ($2Bn valuation) and Langchain ($1.4Bn valuation). To put this in multiples on invested capital, that is a 60x, two 30x and two 20x. Before Benchm…
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Most founders think hiring is about interviewing. But it's actually about selling.For Startup School, Juicebox co-founder & CEO David Paffenholz joins YC's Harj Taggar to share how early-stage founders can find, pitch, and close top engineering and sales talent— from crafting better outreach to winning great hires from Big Tech— even when you're an…
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Chad Peets is one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2023, Chad was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. Chad has worked with the world's best CEOs and CROs to build world-class go-to-market organizations. Chad is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Lacework and Luminary Cloud and on…
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Frontier AI is colliding with real-world infrastructure. Eiso Kant (Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Poolside) joins the MAD Podcast to unpack Project Horizon— a multi-gigawatt West Texas build—and why frontier labs must own energy, compute, and intelligence to compete. We map token economics, cloud-style margins, and the staged 250 MW rollout using 2.5 MW mod…
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AGENDA: 04:27 Navan's IPO: Winners, Losers and 20% Crater 12:55 Harvey Raises $150M at an $8BN Valuation 35:36 Was Sam Altman Wrong to Snap at Brad Gerstner 41:25 Why GOOG is a Buy and Amazon is a Short 47:43 Meta Down 10%, Buy or Sell? 51:12 If You Have Not Accelerated with AI, You Are Dead 01:05:20 Why Now is the Best Time for Series A and Worst …
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Joelle Pineau is the Chief AI Officer at Cohere, where she leads research on advancing large language models and practical AI systems. Before joining Cohere, she was VP of AI Research at Meta, where she founded and led Meta AI's Montreal lab. A professor at McGill University, Joelle is renowned for her pioneering work in reinforcement learning, rob…
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🎧 20VC x Tim Ferriss — Full Episode Timeline 00:00 – "How Do You Stay True to Yourself When You Have to Perform for the World?" 06:00 – "Why Tim Ferriss Refused to Go All-In on YouTube" 09:00 – "You Don't Need 10 Million Fans—You Need 1,000 True Believers." 12:00 – "The Internet Is Not a Relevance Machine—It's a Sensationalism Machine." 15:00 – "Mo…
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