In this talk from Startup School Paris, AMI CEO Alexandre LeBrun talks about his journey building Vertos, selling Wit.ai to Facebook, and why the best advice for early founders is to pick an extremely narrow problem while holding an extremely large vision with the space.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
00:33 — Same YC batch, four companies later
01:40 — Zuckerberg’s email in the spam folder
02:14 — The YC rule on acquisition talks
03:04 — Always 20 years too early
04:45 — Play to your strengths, not the market
05:43 — Why AMI is different
06:46 — What is a world model?
08:31 — Training like a baby, not a reader
09:22 — Robots with actual brains
10:27 — Why VLAs are a bad hack
11:44 — Where LLMs still win
12:39 — World models already in the wild
13:15 — Why big labs can’t take the risk
16:12 — Is this still contrarian?
17:03 — How Jan recruited Alex
18:49 — Splitting research vs. execution
20:08 — Raising Europe’s biggest seed
22:23 — Expectations are the real price
23:24 — Why not SF?
24:48 — Zuckerberg wanted 10,000, not 100
27:25 — Go narrow, aim massive
28:38 — Outro
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