Y Combinator

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チャンネル • 2個の番組

テクノロジー

テクノロジー

アップデート：毎週
テクノロジー

テクノロジー

アップデート：隔週

2025/12/03

What Founders Have To Unlearn To Become Great CEOs

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 founder to large-company CEO, the skepticism his team initially had toward AI, and the moment they realized the next wave of analytics would require a full reset.He walks through the hard reorganizations, the bottom-up experiments, and the mindset changes that let Amplitude move fast again.

2025/12/03

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44分
2025/10/17

Unpopular Ideas That Became Billion-Dollar Businesses

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 Safety, they share how founders find opportunity where others see dead ends.

2025/10/17

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38分
2017/05/15

#5 - An AI Primer with Wojciech Zaremba

Wojciech Zaremba is a cofounder of OpenAI (https://openai.com). OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company, focused on discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. Read the transcript here (http://blog.ycombinator.com/an-ai-primer-with-wojciech-zaremba).

2017/05/15

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55分
2025/08/21

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

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 off. Today, Anthropic's Claude is the go-to choice for developers, and his team is overseeing what he calls "humanity's largest infrastructure buildout ever." On this episode of The Lightcone, he discusses his unconventional path from YC founder to AI researcher, the discovery of scaling laws that changed everything, and his advice for young engineers entering AI today.

2025/08/21

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36分
2025/11/14

AI Is Eating Logistics

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 world: making shipping cheaper, speeding up global trade, and automating work that used to live inside emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls.

2025/11/14

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34分
2025/06/18

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

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.

2025/06/18

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1時間1分
2025/10/30

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

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, Diana, and Jared break down what the study really says, why in-house enterprise AI efforts keep stalling, and how startups are filling the gap with products that learn, integrate, and actually deliver value.

2025/10/30

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22分
2019/09/04

#142 - Startup School Week 1 Recap: Kevin Hale and Eric Migicovsky

We've cut down the first week of Startup School lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast. First, a lecture from Kevin Hale. Kevin is a YC partner and a cofounder of Wufoo. His lecture is about How to Evaluate Startup Ideas.Then, a lecture from Eric Migicovsky. Eric is a YC partner and the founder of Pebble. His lecture is about How to Talk to Users.Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/***Topics00:00 - Intro00:43 - Kevin Hale on How to Evaluate Startup Ideas2:04 - How can I predict if an investor will like my idea?2:50 - A startup idea is a hypothesis5:44 - Problem6:59 - Solution8:16 - Insight8:57 - Unfair advantages13:45 - Two beliefs about startups15:19 - Eric Migicovsky on How to Talk to Users17:36 - Three common errors people make when talking to users20:20 - Five questions to ask in a user interview20:28 - What's the hardest part about doing the thing you're trying to solve?21:02 - Tell me about the last time that you encountered this problem21:22 - Why was this hard?23:08 - What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?24:10 - What don't you love about the solutions you've already tried?25:21 - Three stages in which talking to users is extremely beneficial26:07 - Idea stage30:40 - Prototype stage33:41 - Iterating towards product market fit

2019/09/04

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39分
2025/05/16

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.

2025/05/16

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41分
2025/09/12

The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

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 development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 ,and the o1 reasoning model.During his time at Palantir, he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today. On this episode of The Lightcone, he explains how FDEs became central to today's startups, why "doing things that don't scale at scale" works, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for founders working in AI.

2025/09/12

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51分

Make something people want.