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Lightcone Podcast

by Y Combinator

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Latest episodes

What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs

December 3, 2025 · 44 min

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…
AI Is Eating Logistics

November 14, 2025 · 34 min

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…
Inside The MIT AI Study Everyone Misunderstood (And What It Means For Startups)

October 30, 2025 · 22 min

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

October 17, 2025 · 38 min

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…
The 7 Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups

October 3, 2025 · 45 min

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…

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The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

September 12, 2025 · 51 min

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…
Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design

August 21, 2025 · 36 min

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…
How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era

July 8, 2025 · 39 min

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: Building Scale AI, Transforming Work with Agents & Competing With China

June 18, 2025 · 1 hr 1 min

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…
State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents

May 30, 2025 · 31 min

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…
Startups Ideas You Can Now Build With AI

May 16, 2025 · 41 min

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…
Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding

May 2, 2025 · 53 min

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…