Qasar Younis
Qasar Younis is the co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, a company that develops software platforms and simulation tools for autonomous vehicles and physical AI systems. He previously served as COO of Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017, where he helped raise the firm's $700 million Continuity Fund and oversaw investments in companies including OpenAI, Cruise, and Scale AI. Earlier in his career, he co-founded TalkBin, a customer feedback startup acquired by Google in 2011, and worked as an automotive engineer at General Motors and Bosch. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Kettering University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
“Sloan and Kettering created this with levels and vice presidents and how do you do functional and matrix organizations. It's really like the source code.”
Source→“General Motors is a customer and I went to the General Motors Institute so we have a lot of love for the company.”
Source→“That's where our bread and butter was when we started the business — we hired so many people out of the Microsoft Flight Sim.”
Source→“DeLorean's book... this is a real true insight into a large corporation... he fights for years for his co-author not to publish the book. The co-author still publishes.”
Source→“In this intelligence revolution, the companies that impact the physical world might actually be bigger than the companies that impact the digital world.”
Source→“My other hot take is I worked at both companies — Google and General Motors. Those companies are way more similar than they're different. Way, way more similar. The Google leveling system is the same as the General Motors leveling system.”
Source→“When you have researchers, which Waymo really was coming out of an Alphabet research organization, they didn't put commercial constraints. So the sensors are bespoke and expensive... It's a lot easier to go from something that's really cheap and make it more featureful than something that's overbuilt and then trying to trim and make it really cheap.”
Source→“Cruise was this company that did amazing self-driving work and then one accident, General Motors owns them and they get super scared and they pull back. Just getting these things into production is actually more difficult than it seems.”
Source→“You can see it most clearly with Tesla... miles per disengagement are really high — miles is like in the thousands, which is very impressive.”
Source→“You take a Komatsu dirt mover in a mine — those are made for 20, 25 years. So the buyers of those products, they might not have gotten their full cycle ROI on them.”
Source→“If you look under the hood of a dirt mover or a combine or diesel truck, they'll have Cummins engines in them but nobody says Caterpillar is not a good company. It's just a component that they buy.”
Source→“Today the world is ready to consume AI in the real world and that's a lot because of ChatGPT and Anthropic and all these things that's happened. So people are no longer like, what's a self-driving car.”
Source→“Volkswagen board members are members of the government. These are extensions of the state.”
Source→“I think, when we look back, I think that's going to be the bigger story. And then look back 25 years from now. I think we'll look back, it's kind of like, if you look at the early days of the internet, there were companies that are really focused on getting websites up, static websites up. And so when you look back over the last 25, 30 years of the internet, you really think about Amazon, you really think about Apple.”
Source→“We're working with Huntington [Ingalls] to put intelligence on the actual ships... or we're working with Heidelberg Materials to put intelligence in quarries, and in ports and in mines.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.