Lightcone Podcast

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-figure revenue in months.In a special Lightcone Live at AI Startup School, Garry, Diana, Harj, and Jared discuss why it's now more important than ever to focus on building real skills, domain expertise, and agency rather than just chasin...

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. Today, that early idea powers a multi-hundred-million-dollar engine behind America's AI infrastructure—fueling everything from Fortune 500 workflows to real-time military planning. Just last week, Meta agreed to invest over $14 billion in ...

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 from working with hundreds of founders building with LLMs: why prompting still matters, where it breaks down, and how teams are making it more reliable in production.They share real examples of prompts that failed, how companies are testi...

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, w...

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...

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.

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