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What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs
Spenser Skates has spent more than a decade building Amplitude from a YC startup into a public company, and in that time, he's had to reinvent himself just as much as the product.Joining the Lightcone pod, he talks through the shift from fo
AI Is Eating Logistics
Logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that quietly powers the entire global economy — and it's shockingly manual.Ryan Petersen, founder & CEO of Flexport, joins the Lightcone to break down how AI is finally touching the physical wor
Inside The MIT AI Study Everyone Misunderstood (And What It Means For Startups)
MIT's new State of AI in Business report went viral for claiming that 95% of enterprise AI projects fail. But the real story isn't that AI doesn't work — it's just big companies can't build it.In this episode of the Lightcone, Garry, Harj,
Unpopular Ideas That Became Billion-Dollar Businesses
Nine out of ten people might tell you you're crazy. The tenth might see what you see.Garry, Harj, Jared, and Diana talk about contrarian bets — the ideas that look impossible until they work. From Uber and Coinbase to DoorDash and Flock Saf
The 7 Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups
In the early days, the only moat that startups have is speed. Once you make something people want, the question becomes what deeper moats can you build on to defend against the competition?Garry, Harj, Diana, and Jared dive into Hamilton He
The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew
Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir, and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development
Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design
Tom Brown co-founded Anthropic after helping build GPT-3 at OpenAI. A self-taught engineer, he went from getting a B-minus in linear algebra to becoming one of the key people behind AI's scaling breakthroughs. And his work is paying off. To
How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era
AI has upended the once "safe" CS career path. New grads are facing unemployment rates twice those of art history majors, and a CS degree is no longer a surefire ticket to wealth. At the same time, small, focused teams are scaling from zero
Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI, Transforming Work with Agents & Competing With China
Alexandr Wang started Scale AI to help machine learning teams label data faster.It started as a simple API for human labor, but behind the scenes, he was tackling a much bigger problem: how to turn messy, real-world data into something AI c
State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents
At first, prompting seemed to be a temporary workaround for getting the most out of large language models. But over time, it's become critical to the way we interact with AI. On the Lightcone, Garry, Harj, Diana, and Jared break down what t
Startups Ideas You Can Now Build With AI
There's never been a better time to start an AI company. Not just because there are new ideas, but because the tech finally makes old ones actually work.On the Lightcone, Garry, Harj, Diana, and Jared talk through the kinds of startups that
Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding
Varun Mohan didn't set out to build one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools. He just knew his company had to change, or die.After initially betting on GPU virtualization, he saw the writing on the wall: if there was a future for his c
How To Navigate Co-Founder Disputes
Technical skills build startups—but oftentimes, people skills can save them. So how do you navigate the disagreements and conflict that inevitably arise with a co-founder? In this episode of the Lightcone, our hosts share what they've learn
Vibe Coding Is The Future
Andrej Karpathy recently coined the term “vibe coding” to describe how LLMs are getting so good that devs can simply “give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” In this episode of the Lightcone, the h
How AI Is Changing Enterprise
The Lightcone hosts sit down with Aaron Levie, the co-founder & CEO of Box, to hear reports from the front of how large enterprise and Fortune 500 companies are adapting to the AI age.
How To Get AI Startup Ideas
Apply to AI Startup School in SF: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus There’s never been a better time to launch an AI startup, but many prospective founders find themselves stuck when it comes to thinking of a good idea. In this episode,
AI Revolution: Why This Is The Best Time To Start A Startup
In this special episode of Lightcone, we’re joined by YC partner and creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, to dig into some of the latest trends in the world of AI and startups. We recorded our conversation at a recent retreat where 300 of the t
The Lightcone 2025 Forecast
Happy New Year! In this mini-episode, the Lightcone hosts ring in 2025 with their predictions for startups, AI, crypto, and more.
2024’s Biggest Startup Trends
2024 has been quite a year for AI and startups. As we head into the holidays and the new year, the Lightcone hosts reflect on this year’s biggest startup trends, moments, and breakthroughs.
Vertical AI Agents Could Be 10X Bigger Than SaaS
As AI models continue to rapidly improve and compete with one another, a new business model is coming into view: vertical AI agents. In this episode of the Lightcone, the hosts consider what effect vertical AI agents will have on incumbent
Why The Next AI Breakthroughs Will Be In Reasoning, Not Scaling
There's an ongoing debate about whether AI scaling laws will hold or hit a wall in the near future. However, what's clear now is today's models already have the power to increase productivity in ways that would have been unimaginable even a
The 10 Trillion Parameter AI Model With 300 IQ
Earlier this month, OpenAI raised the largest venture round ever at $6.6 billion. The company’s CFO says AI is now at the point where orders of magnitude matter and the next generation of models will be capital intensive. In this episode of
Now Anyone Can Code: How AI Agents Can Build Your Whole App
With rapid advancements in LLMs, AI can now follow prompts to generate code and build functional custom software. So, how does the tech landscape change when coding becomes accessible to everyone? In this episode of Lightcone, we sat down w
Why Vertical LLM Agents Are The New $1 Billion SaaS Opportunities
As LLMs continue to improve, it's clear that vertical AI agents are key to the next generation of billion-dollar SaaS opportunities. In this episode of the Lightcone, we sat down with Jake Heller, the co-founder and CEO of Castext— which so
The Hunt for State of the Art (with Suhail Doshi)
Suhail Doshi, a YC alumni who previously founded Mixpanel and Mighty, has created a state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI image diffusion model with Playground. The app allows you to talk to it like a graphic designer and helps you create imagery and
How YC Was Created With Jessica Livingston
Familiar with the lore of Y Combinator? Then you'll know Jessica Livingston — one of the original co-founders who started YC back in 2005. On a recent visit to our SF headquarters, she shared with the Lightcone hosts the stories and decisio
Are We In An AI Hype Cycle?
Is the latest excitement around AI just another round of dot-com or crypto-style hype? The Lightcone hosts discuss where AI might be if the hype cycle is real, and what may remain once the buzz wears off. Apply to YC's first-ever Fall batch
Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit On AGI, Open Source Models, Freedom
It’s the first guest episode of Lightcone! The hosts sit down with Paul Buchheit, one of Google’s earliest employees, the creator of Gmail and current YC Group Partner. (He also came up with Google’s famous tagline “Don’t be evil.”) This di
10 People + AI = Billion Dollar Company?
As AI continues to evolve and advance, a line of thinking has emerged that humans will no longer need to learn how to write code in the future. If so, could this mean that a staff of ten or less could create a unicorn? The hosts of Lightcon
Better AI Models, Better Startups
There's been a lot of news lately about the updates to some of the largest foundational AI models. But what does this mean for startups? How will future product releases from the AI giants effect the companies built on top of them? The host
