Why RL Won — Kyle Corbitt, OpenPipe (acq. CoreWeave)

**Alessio** (0:04)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Latent Space.

**Swix** (0:10)
Hello, hello. And we're so excited to have Kyle finally in the studio. Welcome.

**Kyle Corbitt** (0:15)
Hey, very excited to be here.

**Swix** (0:17)
Kyle, you're CEO, founder, co-founder.

**Kyle Corbitt** (0:20)
Co-founder, CEO.

**Swix** (0:21)
Of OpenPipe, which started two years ago and recently got acquired by CoreWeave. Congrats.

**Kyle Corbitt** (0:27)
Thanks.

**Swix** (0:28)
Where I think you might be our first, like, started and exited founder that we've had on the pod, maybe, ish. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not keeping track.

**Alessio** (0:37)
Especially on that timeline.

**Kyle Corbitt** (0:38)
Well, I don't think I was exited when we, I don't remember if we set this up before or after we announced we were getting acquired.

**Swix** (0:45)
I specifically pinged you because you got, I think you got acquired. You've been on my list to watch. Obviously, you've spoken three times at AIE. And you've been on my list of like, when is it a good time to have a OpenPipe or fine tuning RL discussion? And then you got acquired. And I'm like, okay, yeah, that's a good, that's a good time to talk about it. Also because I think like it gives us a window to talk about acquisitions, consolidation, like what should be an independent company, what maybe doesn't have to be anyway. But we'll maybe do this chronologically so we don't, we don't get too far ahead of ourselves. You are famously Director of Startup School.
Maybe for people who don't know, like what is Startup School? Did that make you become, like fall in love with the data color orange?

**Kyle Corbitt** (1:29)
I'm wearing an orange shirt for those who are listening, a very bright orange shirt. This is my conference shirt and I felt like it was appropriate for the pod as well. So yes, I was at Y Combinator for about four and a half years and led the Startup School team there. So Startup School, it's changed over the years. It meant one thing before I was there, it means another thing now.
But during the time I was at YC, Startup School was basically all of the external facing a lot of the content, certainly all of the tech. So it was things like we had a MOOC effectively, where founders could come in, they could learn about how to start a company, they could get advice from YC founders, YC partners. We had a co-founder matching service that we built, which actually works really well. We got a lot of people through. Our total, I guess technically I probably doesn't matter anymore, but a very large fraction of the batches that went through YC while I was there were directly attributable to people that we found and ended up recruiting to YC through their experience too at Startup School. So that was kind of what we were working on.

**Swix** (2:28)
Yeah, I was going to consider it as like the scout program for YC, like the YC before the YC. Any notable famous people that met as part of your co-founder matching? Because I'm always very negative on those things, because it's like online dating, like the chances of success is super low. But when it works, it's really nice.

**Kyle Corbitt** (2:45)
You know, that's a great question. I left, so we launched that product probably nine months before I left, and so I don't know what the long-term outcomes were of that specifically.

**Swix** (2:55)
Yeah. So you left YC, you spent a year in the kind of the wilderness, you went to YC S23. What's that journey like?

**Kyle Corbitt** (3:04)
You know, I was very excited about AI things in general.
This was, so I left YC, I guess, beginning of 2022, and I was trying out a bunch of different things. I ended up landing on what turned into OpenPipe in early 2023 This was, let's see, so I'd been working, so my co-founder is my brother, my little brother, which has been a fun journey on its own. We were looking at different ideas, and one thing we realized was we actually started the company immediately after the GPT-4 launch. And what we saw as the opportunity in the market at the time, which has changed since then, was GPT-4 was insanely expensive and extremely powerful. But there was an opportunity to distill specific workflows from GPT-4 down to much smaller, much cheaper models. And there was a very clear value prop there. Given how expensive GPT-4 was, it was hard to deploy in production, but you could take those abilities and deploy them much more cheaply. So that was the first thing we built was this very managed, very clean distillation flow.