Most startup advice online is written by people who never shipped anything. Podcasts are different: you hear founders and operators talk about what they actually did, including the parts that went wrong.

Here are 10 shows worth your time, with one episode from each to start with.

My First Million is Shaan Puri and Sam Parr going through business ideas, side projects and the numbers behind small companies nobody writes about. Both sold their companies, so the ideas come with a sense of what it takes to run them.

Listen to it when you're looking for something to build, or when you want a reminder that boring businesses make money.

Lenny's Podcast is the closest thing to a reference manual for product, growth and early go-to-market. Lenny Rachitsky interviews product leads from companies you already use and pushes them for specifics: how they prioritised, what they measured, what they'd do differently.

Best for product people and technical founders who have a product but no repeatable way to grow it.

Y Combinator publishes Lightcone, office hours, founder interviews and the old Startup School lectures in one place. It's opinionated advice from partners who see thousands of companies a year, which makes it useful even if you never apply to YC.

Start with the shorter tactical videos on talking to users and pricing before the long-form episodes.

Acquired takes one company per episode and tells its full story, usually for 3 hours or more. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal do real research, so you get the decisions, the timing and the luck behind companies like Nvidia, Costco and Lockheed Martin.

It won't help you ship this week. It will change how you think about what a company can become in 20 years.

20VC is about the money side: term sheets, valuations, board dynamics and why rounds fall apart. Harry Stebbings asks investors and founders the questions most people avoid asking on the record.

Worth listening to before you start fundraising, so you understand what's normal and what isn't.

All-In is 4 investors arguing about markets, AI, policy and whatever happened that week. The tone is loose and the politics are heavy, but the market reads are early and you'll hear about shifts before they reach your feed.

Treat it as news with strong opinions attached, not as advice.

This Week in Startups has been running since 2009 and publishes several episodes a week. Jason Calacanis mixes founder interviews with breakdowns of funding news, plus recurring segments where lawyers and operators explain mechanics like vesting and advisor equity.

The volume is high, so pick episodes by topic instead of trying to keep up.

Rob Walling has been making Startups For the Rest of Us for bootstrapped SaaS founders since 2010. No blitzscaling, no unicorn math: pricing changes, churn, lifetime deals, getting from $10k to $100k MRR without raising.

This is the one to listen to if you're building a small, profitable product on your own.

David Senra reads biographies of entrepreneurs and turns each one into an episode on his channel. Rockefeller, Estée Lauder, Edwin Land, and now interviews with founders running companies today. Each episode is one person's working habits, obsessions and mistakes.

Useful when you need motivation that isn't a thread of 10 tips.

Greg Isenberg runs through specific product ideas with builders, usually AI tools and small internet businesses, with an estimate of who'd pay and how you'd get the first customers. Episodes are short and idea-dense.

Closest to how indie hackers actually work in 2026: find a narrow problem, ship a tool, sell it.

One warning: podcasts are easy to confuse with work. Listening to 5 hours of founder interviews a week doesn't move your product forward. Pick 2 shows, listen while you commute or walk, and get back to shipping.

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