Jay V is the founder and CEO of Opencode, an open-source alternative to Claude Code that works with any model you want. It's one of the fastest-growing products in AI: 13 million monthly active users, 20X growth this year, and more tokens processed daily than all of OpenRouter. But the overnight success took 16 years, one legal entity, and nine YC applications.

In this episode of the Lightcone, Jay explains how Anthropic's attempt to block Opencode accidentally fueled its rise, how 16 years of near-misses prepared him to catch lightning in a bottle, and why most of the world still hasn't experienced the magic of a coding agent.