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 founder to large-c...

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 world: making shipp...

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, Diana, and Jared...

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 Safety, they share ...

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 Helmer’s Seven Pow...

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 of ChatGPT, GPT...

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. Today, Anthrop...

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 to eight-fi...

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 could learn from....

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 they've learned ...

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 are suddenly vi...

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 company, it would...

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 learned for managing ...

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 hosts discuss thi...

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.

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, the Lightco...

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 top AI founde...

Happy New Year! In this mini-episode, the Lightcone hosts ring in 2025 with their predictions for startups, AI, crypto, and more.

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.

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 SaaS compani...