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

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

There’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

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.

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 a year for AI and startups.

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.

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.

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.