bootstrap

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

A 20-minute S3 episode touring Terraform Industries, a startup making synthetic natural gas from air and solar power. It walks through the reactor, injection system, direct air capture and electrolyzer, plus the company's cost goals and next milestone.

Y Combinator partner Pete Koomen, who led Optimizely to $100M ARR, walks through the enterprise sales funnel. Chapters cover prospecting, outreach, qualification, pricing, closing, procurement and implementation.

Journalist Vincent Woo discusses his New York Magazine piece on Lambda School's misleading promises, including its income share agreements and placement claims, in an interview on This Week in Startups. The host questions him pointedly.

A Startup School talk by YC partner and former Airbnb growth head Gustaf Alstromer on how startups get their first customers. It covers doing things that don't scale, founders learning sales, the sales funnel, and charging your first customer.

A roughly 3.7-hour Lex Fridman podcast with Pieter Levels, the solo developer behind over 40 startups. They discuss programming, viral AI products, indie hacking and digital nomad life.

Fernando Rojo explains how BeatGig reached $10M in sales with one frontend engineer by sharing code between React Native and Next.js, covering navigation, animation, theming and performance.

Lex Fridman interviews Instagram co-founder and former CEO Kevin Systrom about building the product, its early days and its pivot story.

A two-hour Oxide and Friends session answering questions after shipping the first Oxide rack. Topics include making hardware as a startup and why Oxide chose illumos.

A feature-length documentary on General Magic, the 1989 startup that envisioned the smartphone and handheld connected devices, featuring Tony Fadell, Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat. It covers the company's vision and eventual failure.

Louis Rossmann explains how Google delisted his repair business site for almost a year, and how having AI rewrite his authentic content into corporate-style text finally restored his rankings.

Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips discloses that he has invested in Framework, the modular repairable laptop maker. He explains his reasoning and the commitments he is making to viewers about future coverage.

Part one of a two-part skeptical series examining Elon Musk's past business dealings to test whether he is a self-made genius billionaire.

Y Combinator partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how startups shifted from attracting outsiders to status- and money-seeking conformists. They give advice for nonconformist founders.

A long interview with Elon Musk at Gigafactory Texas on Tesla's early days, covering why electric vehicles, who founded Tesla, founder departures, Roadster engineering and early funding.

A Y Combinator video on vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for letting LLMs write code. It reports what YC founders say about debugging, models and how much of their code is AI-written.

A six-minute excerpt from Steve Jobs' 1995 Lost Interview on why a great idea does not automatically become a great product. He says ideas change substantially once you actually build them.

CNBC interview with Tesla founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning about starting the company in 2003, the battery idea, the Roadster, and Elon Musk's role.

Louis Rossmann recounts calling NYC's Department of Consumer Affairs after his repair business was fined, only to find the agency staff could not explain what the law required. The call starts around 3:14.