What took each of those eight YC companies three months of nonstop work to build in 2005 can now be done by a coding agent in seven minutes, and most founders are reading that as their death sentence.
Sam Altman, who was a Stanford sophomore in that first batch building a location-sharing company called Loopt, closed Startup School 2026 by arguing the exact opposite: that this is the greatest moment in history to start a company.
We pulled a recent exclusive conversation of Sam with Garry Tan apart into the specific moves Altman says convert collapsing build costs into trillion-dollar outcomes, so you do not have to watch it.
In this guide you’ll find:
Why a 7-minute agent task means you should build a MORE ambitious company, not a smaller one
Why hard tech jumped from 5% to 25% of YC, and the timing signal that says build now
The conviction test: only 50 people believed AGI was possible, and 45 worked at OpenAI
How Altman met his OpenAI co-founder 8 years early, and the network strategy behind it
Why founding a startup is how you fight AI power concentration (and the underclass meme is wrong)
The demand numbers that prove the runway: inference growing 10x a year and a permanent compute shortage
Launch your site faster than ever with Framer - now with Agents that make every part of your workflow effortless
Framer is the pro website builder for creators, teams, and businesses that care enough to get every detail right. Now with Agents that work alongside you across the full website workflow: designing new pages, managing your CMS, editing content, and adding SEO all without leaving the tool where the real site lives. Trusted by teams at companies like Miro and Perplexity.
Agents bring speed and scale; you bring taste, judgment, and control. Together you can:
Build and iterate faster: generate sections, refine layout and styling, and ship updates in minutes.
Scale content with confidence: update CMS collections, localize copy, and keep metadata consistent across pages.
Stay production‑ready: reviewable changes, collaboration, and safeguards that help teams ship without handoffs.
Let’s begin!
