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On the show
From 10 epsHosts
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Recent episodes
What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs
Dec 3, 2025
44m 21s
AI Is Eating Logistics
Nov 14, 2025
33m 40s
Inside The MIT AI Study Everyone Misunderstood (And What It Means For Startups)
Oct 30, 2025
21m 43s
Unpopular Ideas That Became Billion-Dollar Businesses
Oct 17, 2025
37m 42s
The 7 Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups
Oct 3, 2025
45m 05s
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| Date | Episode | Topics | Guests | Brands | Places | Keywords | Sponsor | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12/3/25 |  What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs✨ | founder transitionCEO challenges+4 | Spenser Skates | AmplitudeY Combinator | — | founderCEO+5 | — | 44m 21s | |
| 11/14/25 |  AI Is Eating Logistics✨ | AIlogistics+3 | Ryan Petersen | FlexportY Combinator | — | AIlogistics+4 | — | 33m 40s | |
| 10/30/25 |  Inside The MIT AI Study Everyone Misunderstood (And What It Means For Startups)✨ | AI in Businessenterprise AI+4 | — | MITY Combinator | — | AI projectsenterprise AI+5 | — | 21m 43s | |
| 10/17/25 |  Unpopular Ideas That Became Billion-Dollar Businesses✨ | contrarian ideasbillion-dollar businesses+3 | — | UberCoinbase+2 | — | contrarian betsbillion-dollar businesses+3 | — | 37m 42s | |
| 10/3/25 |  The 7 Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups✨ | AI startupsbusiness strategy+3 | GarryHarj+2 | Hamilton Helmer | — | moatsAI+4 | — | 45m 05s | |
| 9/12/25 |  The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew✨ | AI startupsForward Deployed Engineer model+3 | Bob McGrew | ChatGPTGPT-4+4 | — | AIstartups+5 | — | 50m 42s | |
| 8/21/25 |  Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design✨ | AI researchscaling laws+4 | Tom Brown | ClaudeAnthropic+2 | — | Tom BrownAnthropic+5 | — | 35m 56s | |
| 7/8/25 |  How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era✨ | AIcareer development+4 | GarryDiana+2 | AI Startup SchoolY Combinator | CS | AIcomputer science+5 | — | 38m 55s | |
| 6/18/25 |  Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI, Transforming Work with Agents & Competing With China✨ | AI infrastructuremachine learning+3 | Alexandr Wang | Scale AIMeta+1 | ChinaAmerica | Scale AIAlexandr Wang+5 | — | 1h 01m 12s | |
| 5/30/25 |  State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents✨ | promptingAI agents+3 | — | ParahelpY Combinator | — | promptingAI+5 | — | 31m 26s | |
Want analysis for the episodes below?Free for Pro Submit a request, we'll have your selected episodes analyzed within an hour. Free, at no cost to you, for Pro users. | |||||||||
| 5/16/25 |  Startups Ideas You Can Now Build 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.On the Lightcone, Garry, Harj, Diana, and Jared talk through the kinds of startups that are suddenly viable thanks to LLMs—from full-stack law firms to personalized tutors to recruiting platforms that can finally scale. They share the patterns they're seeing, the ideas they're excited about, and what it means to live at the edge of the future, where breakthroughs often look like second chances.If you've been waiting for the right moment to build, this is it. | — | ||||||
| 5/2/25 |  Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding | 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 be at the AI application layer, not infra. Over a single weekend, he and his team pivoted to building Windsurf— a tool to help everyone, both technical and non-technical, write code faster and smarter.In this conversation, Varun shares the inside story of how they pivoted at the edge of failure, trained new models from scratch, outpaced giants like GitHub Copilot, and what the future of building with AI looks like.Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https:/workatastartup.com | — | ||||||
| 3/21/25 |  How To Navigate Co-Founder Disputes | 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 these critical, yet often overlooked challenges, offering advice on how to handle the messy realities that go beyond building. | — | ||||||
| 3/5/25 |  Vibe Coding Is The Future | 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 this new method of programming and what it means for builders in the AI age.Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply | — | ||||||
| 2/19/25 |  How AI Is Changing Enterprise | 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. | — | ||||||
| 2/7/25 | How To Get AI Startup Ideas | 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 prospective founders find themselves stuck when it comes to thinking of a good idea. In this episode, the Lightcone hosts look at different ways breakthroughs can be discovered.Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply | — | ||||||
| 1/24/25 |  AI Revolution: Why This Is The Best Time To Start A Startup | 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 founders in the world gathered to share expertise and make predictions about how this technology will shape our future. In the discussion, we cover a wide range of topics, including the future of work, the power of agency and taste in an AI world, and why this is the absolute best time to be building a startup. | — | ||||||
| 1/1/25 |  The Lightcone 2025 Forecast | Happy New Year! In this mini-episode, the Lightcone hosts ring in 2025 with their predictions for startups, AI, crypto, and more. | — | ||||||
| 12/13/24 |  2024’s Biggest Startup Trends | 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. | — | ||||||
| 11/22/24 |  Vertical AI Agents Could Be 10X Bigger Than SaaS | 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 companies, what use cases make the most sense, and how there could be 300 billion-dollar companies in this category alone. | — | ||||||
| 11/14/24 |  Why The Next AI Breakthroughs Will Be In Reasoning, Not Scaling | 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 even a few years ago. In this episode of the Lightcone, we dig into the results of a recent o1 hackathon hosted by YC to find out what can be unlocked when founders leverage a SOTA reasoning model. | — | ||||||
| 11/1/24 |  The 10 Trillion Parameter AI Model With 300 IQ | 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 of the Lightcone, the hosts consider what a world with ultra-intelligent models would look like, and what potential unlocks could be made possible. | — | ||||||
| 10/18/24 |  Now Anyone Can Code: How AI Agents Can Build Your Whole App | With rapid advancements in LLMs, AI can now follow prompts to generate code and build functional custom software. So, how does the tech landscape change when coding becomes accessible to everyone? In this episode of Lightcone, we sat down with Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit—an AI-powered platform for software development and deployment—to explore how anyone can now tap into the power of coding. | — | ||||||
| 10/4/24 |  Why Vertical LLM Agents Are The New $1 Billion SaaS Opportunities | 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 of the Lightcone, we sat down with Jake Heller, the co-founder and CEO of Castext— which sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million in 2023— to discuss what it takes to build a successful vertical AI company. | — | ||||||
| 9/19/24 |  The Hunt for State of the Art (with Suhail Doshi) | 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 text for a wide variety of use cases. In this episode of Lightcone, Suhail sits down with the hosts to talk about his experience building Playground with his team and what it takes to make a SOTA model. Try Playground: https://playground.com/design Read Playground V3 Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10695 | — | ||||||
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2 placements across 2 markets.