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 chasing credentials.
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 Scale AI, valuing the company at $29 billion.Alexandr joined us on the Lightcone to share how Scale AI evolved from a scrappy YC startup into the backbone of some of the world's most advanced AI systems, how he thinks about competition with Chinese AI labs, and what it takes to build infrastructure that shapes the frontier.
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 testing for quality, and what the best teams are doing to make LLM outputs useful and predictable.
The prompt from Parahelp (S24) discussed in the episode: https://parahelp.com/blog/prompt-design
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.
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
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 we head into the holidays and the new year, the Lightcone hosts reflect on this year’s biggest startup trends, moments, and breakthroughs.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 decisions of the early days that would form the foundations of YC as we know it today.
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.
Apply to YC's first-ever Fall batch at ycombinator.com/apply.
