Lightcone Podcast
Episodes
What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 him...
AI Is Eating Logistics
14 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that quietly powers the entire global economy — and it's shockingly manual.Ryan Petersen, founder ...
Inside The MIT AI Study Everyone Misunderstood (And What It Means For Startups)
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 doe...
Unpopular Ideas That Became Billion-Dollar Businesses
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The 7 Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 buil...
The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 becomi...
How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI, Transforming Work with Agents & Competing With China
18 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Startups Ideas You Can Now Build With AI
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 wo...
Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
How To Navigate Co-Founder Disputes
21 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Technical skills build startups—but oftentimes, people skills can save them. So how do you navigate the disagreements and conflict that inevitably a...
Vibe Coding Is The Future
05 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, embr...
How AI Is Changing Enterprise
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
How To Get AI Startup Ideas
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Apply to AI Startup School in SF: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-susThere’s never been a better time to launch an AI startup, but many prospectiv...
AI Revolution: Why This Is The Best Time To Start A Startup
24 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
The Lightcone 2025 Forecast
01 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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
13 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 s...
Vertical AI Agents Could Be 10X Bigger Than SaaS
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Why The Next AI Breakthroughs Will Be In Reasoning, Not Scaling
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 alrea...
The 10 Trillion Parameter AI Model With 300 IQ
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 magn...
Now Anyone Can Code: How AI Agents Can Build Your Whole App
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With rapid advancements in LLMs, AI can now follow prompts to generate code and build functional custom software. So, how does the tech landscape chan...
Why Vertical LLM Agents Are The New $1 Billion SaaS Opportunities
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The Hunt for State of the Art (with Suhail Doshi)
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
How YC Was Created With Jessica Livingston
06 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Are We In An AI Hype Cycle?
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit On AGI, Open Source Models, Freedom
09 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 cur...
10 People + AI = Billion Dollar Company?
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
Better AI Models, Better Startups
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Why This Is The Perfect Time To Start A Startup
17 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, YC hosted Startup School East, a one-day event in Boston for university students. As part of the event, the Lightcone Podcast did their fi...
Consumer is back, What’s getting funded now, Immaculate vibes
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What's happening in startups right now and how can you get ahead of the curve? In this episode of the Lightcone podcast, we dive deep into the maj...
Inside The Hard Tech Startups Turning Sci-Fi Into Reality
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
YC has become a surprising force in the hard tech world, funding startups building physical products from satellites to rockets to electric planes. In...
How To Build Generative AI Models Like OpenAI's Sora
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you read articles about companies like OpenAI and Anthropic training foundation models, it would be natural to assume that if you don’t have a bi...
Where Is The REAL Cerebral Valley?
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, YC Group Partners chart the evolution of San Francisco as the center of the startup world and how AI has bro...
Apple Vision Pro: Startup Platform Of The Future?
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, YC Group Partners discuss the launch of the Apple Vision Pro and the potential of this new platform for new ...
The Truth About Building AI Startups Today
29 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the first episode of the Lightcone Podcast, YC Group Partners dig into everything they have learned working with the top founders building AI start...