Techno optimism for technical founders
Showing all 57 episodes · Only those about AI
YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and…
Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing.
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space. In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space. They've since…
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…
Bryant Chou co-founded Webflow, which today powers around 1% of all websites on the internet. Now he's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI-powered website and marketing platform that doesn't just build your site — it connects to…
Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn't just another tool, it's a new foundation for building products, teams, and companies.
Building superintelligence inside a company isn't about adding AI as a feature. It's about making it the operating system the whole organization runs on. In this episode of the Lightcone, we sat down with YC's Pete Koomen to talk for the…
We're entering a new era of software where a single person, working with AI agents, can build products that previously required entire teams.
Physical Intelligence is building a foundation model that can control any robot to do any task — what the team describes as the GPT-1 moment for robotics. The company's cross-embodiment approach trains across many different robot…
François Chollet has spent years asking a different question than most of the AI world. Instead of scaling what already works, he’s trying to understand what intelligence actually is—and how to build it from first principles. In this…
In this episode of The Lightcone, we talk with Mukund and Madhav Jha, the founders of Emergent - an AI platform that lets anyone build and ship production-ready software. In just eight months, users have created more than 7 million apps on…
With the takeoff of OpenClaw and MoltBook, a new agent-driven economy is taking shape. In this episode of the Lightcone, the hosts take a look at the explosive growth of AI dev tools and whether the time has come for builders to make…
A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, sits down to share the incredible journey of developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era.
Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings? Maybe they're addicted to coding agents! In this episode of Lightcone, Calvin French-Owen — a co-founder of Segment and former engineer on OpenAI's Codex team…
2025 was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode, the YC partners break down the surprises of the year, from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the…
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.
Logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that quietly powers the entire global economy — and it's shockingly manual.
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.
Nine out of ten people might tell you you're crazy. The tenth might see what you see.
In the early days of a startup, speed is the best moat. But once you build something people want, how do you maintain your position and defend against the competition? In this episode of Lightcone, we dive into Hamilton Helmer’s Seven…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
Alexandr Wang started Scale AI to help machine learning teams label data faster.
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.
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.
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.
Apply for a YC Summer Fellows Grant: https://events.ycombinator.com/summer-fellows
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.” We dive into this new way of…
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
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 startups. We recorded our conversation at a recent retreat where 300 of the top AI…
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 the year to be part of the startup ecosystem! As we wind down and get ready for the holidays and the new year, the Lightcone hosts reflect on this year’s biggest startup trends, moments and setbacks.
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…
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 just…
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…
Thanks to rapid development in LLM’s, we are now at the point where AI is able to follow prompts and generate code to build functional custom software. So how does the tech landscape change when the ability to code is democratized? In this…
As LLM’s become exponentially better it is clear that vertical AI agents are key to the next generation of billion dollar SaaS companies. In this episode of the Lightcone, the hosts sit down with YC alum Jake Heller, the co-founder and CEO…
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…
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…
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.
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 a YC Group Partner. (He also came up with Google’s famous tagline “Don’t be evil.”) This…
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…
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…
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 first live stage recording specifically tailored for the students.
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 major trends we're seeing from the most recent batch of YC using data we've never shared…
YC has become a surprising force in the hard tech world, funding startups building physical products from satellites to rockets to electric planes. In this episode of Lightcone, we go behind the scenes to explore how YC advises founders on…
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 billion dollars or the resources of a large company, you can’t train your own foundational…
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 brought everyone back to the city.
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 startups. This is a deep dive into the technical innovations Apple has made for this…
In the first episode of the Lightcone Podcast, YC Group Partners dig into everything they have learned working with the top founders building AI startups today. They share the ideas that are working particularly well, mistakes to avoid…
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 major trends we're seeing from the most recent batch of YC using data we've never shared…
YC has become a surprising force in the hard tech world, funding startups building physical products from satellites to rockets to electric planes. In this episode of Lightcone, we go behind the scenes to explore how YC advises founders…
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 billion dollars or the resources of a large company, you can’t train your own foundational…
