Lightwork

Lightspeed

There's more AI news than anyone can possibly consume. Lightwork is the filter. Every Monday, Lightspeed's Claire Zau and Josh Machiz break down the one development that mattered most that week — a model release, a funding round, a company structural shift — and work through what changes because of it. They also bring in a guest working at the front of AI to sharpen the picture. By the end of each episode, you'll have a clearer view of where things are going and why it matters to you. New episodes every Monday morning. Have something you want to hear? Email us at lightwork@lsvp.com.

  1. 2 hr ago

    Why 25,000+ New Yorkers Are Waiting for This Health Scan

    Hjalmar Nilsonne, CEO and co-founder of Neko Health, joins Lightwork to explain how a Twitter message from Spotify founder Daniel Ek ultimately led to a new approach to preventive healthcare.Hjalmar breaks down why Neko spent years building its own diagnostic technology, what happens during its $499, hour-long health scan, and why the company believes vertically integrating hardware, software, clinicians, and physical clinics can create a fundamentally different healthcare experience.They also discuss Neko’s expansion into the U.S., why New York was the first market, the challenges of scaling quality, and how AI and longitudinal health data could reshape personalized healthcare in the years ahead. 0:00 "The Most Important Hour You Can Spend On Your Health" 0:46 Growing Up In A Family Of Doctors And Daniel Ek's Direct Message 6:02 Five Years Building And The Vertically Integrated Approach 9:35 The Neko Scan Experience 11:24 Why Build Everything In-House And Neko As A Real Estate Company 17:47 Myth Busting Worried Well And Over-diagnosis 21:43 Do You Still Need A PCP And Why Pay Out Of Pocket 24:11 What Happens To Your Data And Why New York First 26:24 Adapting To The US Healthcare System And Landing On 499 Dollars 28:07 What Is Hardest To Scale And The Big Vision 30:58 The R&D Team And Why Longitudinal Data Matters 33:02 Thank You And Closing Stay in touch: www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.

  2. 2 days ago

    The $250B Business Expense Nobody's Been Managing Until Now | Ande on Lightwork

    Corporate entertainment is a massive category, but booking client dinners, team events, sports outings, catering, and merchandise is still fragmented across countless systems and vendors. Ande CEO and co-founder Lohit Sarma joins Lightwork to explain how the company is building an operating system for corporate entertainment. He breaks down why Ande spent more than two years building its network before coming out of stealth, how the company works with hospitality providers and enterprise procurement teams, and why AI is embedded across both its product and internal operations. Sarma also discusses Ande’s network of more than 1,600 hospitality groups, its rollout across 60 large enterprises, the company’s goal of routing roughly $400 million through the platform by year-end, and what he believes it will take to scale that network 10x. Chapters: 0:00 Ande Comes Out Of Stealth 2:17 Why Corporate Entertainment Has Stayed Fragmented 4:51 Lohit Sarma's Background (Lifion by ADP) 9:51 What CFOs Revealed About Fraud And Offshore Teams 10:47 Building The Supply Side First 16:44 Ande's Enterprise Customers And Rollout Strategy 18:40 How AI Is Built Into Ande's Ethos 22:58 The Future Of Ande 26:11 Hiring A Team To Build A Category 29:38 What Can Break At Ten Times The Size 31:50 Celebrating The Launch And Where To Find Ande The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see ⁠lsvp.com/legal⁠. The $250B Business Expense Nobody's Been Managing Until Now

  3. 3 days ago

    Inside the Tech Powering 500K+ Audio Drama Creators | Pocket FM on Lightwork

    Pocket FM co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak joins Claire Zau and Josh Machiz on Lightwork to explore how AI is changing the economics of entertainment and who gets to create it.Rohan breaks down Pocket FM’s approach to mobile-first audio dramas, why falling creation costs could unlock an entirely new generation of storytellers, and how Pocket’s AI fiction-writing tool, Sherpa, tackles some of the hardest problems in AI storytelling, including narrative memory, emotional prose, and long-form planning.They also discuss what makes a story compelling, how Pocket discovers breakout content, the creators building new careers on the platform, and Pocket Saga, the company’s expansion into AI-generated video microdramas. Rohan closes with his vision for a future of a billion creators producing a billion stories for a billion people.Chapters:0:00 Pocket FM’s $500M ARR milestone and massive creator vision1:13 What Pocket FM is and why audio dramas could work3:39 The shift from TV and streaming to AI entertainment8:30 Humans, AI and the creative spark behind hit stories10:20 How Pocket FM supports and trains creators12:12 How Sherpa turns an idea into a full series13:06 AI content creation explodes to 2.6M hours15:33 The $90M hit Hollywood might never have greenlit18:54 Why AI content quality and originality still matter20:34 How Pocket FM uses AI to find potential blockbusters23:42 Scaling the technology behind Pocket FM25:23 Why general purpose LLMs often struggle with long form fiction28:26 Training models with 5 billion hours of engagement data30:04 What can make a story addictive32:02 How Pocket FM has changed creators’ lives34:22 Global expansion, Sherpa and the launch of Pocket Saga38:11 Rohan’s competitive approach to building Pocket FM40:22 The vision for a billion creators and a billion storiesStay in touch: www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: generativenow.coThe content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.Inside the Tech Powering 500K+ Audio Drama Creators | Pocket FM on Lightworkhttps://youtu.be/9Z1lnlmVBN0

  4. 6 days ago

    AI Labs Debate Safety, Suno V6 Arrives & Bending Spoons’ Miro Deal | Lightwork

    Claire and Josh break down the growing push to “pace the frontier” as Dario Amodei and other AI leaders debate how quickly AI should advance and what new safety guardrails could look like. They also unpack Suno V6’s new licensed approach to AI-generated music and what it could mean for artists, before diving into Bending Spoons’ agreement to acquire Miro and what the deal signals for the next generation of software companies. Chapters: 00:00 Welcome to Lightwork 0:58 AI Safety Goes Mainstream 04:47 What Does “Pacing the Frontier” Actually Mean? 05:32 Dario Amodei’s Call for a Coordinated AI Slowdown 07:59 Are AI Models Optimizing for Human Intent? 10:48 Microsoft’s Rules for Safer AI 12:30 Who Should Regulate Frontier AI? 16:02 Is AI Safety Just Fear-Mongering? 18:53 Suno Ships the Licensed Models 20:26 How Suno V6 Handles Copyright & Artist Rights 23:43 Bending Spoons Buys Miro 27:17 What Is Bending Spoons’ Bigger Strategy? 29:21 The Future of AI, Music & Software Stay in touch: www.lsvp.com X: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/ Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: generativenow.co The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.

    AI Labs Debate Safety, Suno V6 Arrives & Bending Spoons’ Miro Deal | Lightwork

  5. 15 Sept

    What Happens When AI Becomes Your Marketing Team? | Profound on Lightwork

    Profound co-founder and CEO, James Cadwallader, joins Lightspeed’s Claire Zau following the company’s $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation. They discuss how AI agents are changing the way consumers discover brands, Profound’s evolution from AI visibility analytics into an always-on AI marketing teammate, and why enterprise marketers need a unified context layer to create high-quality, on-brand work at scale. James also breaks down the emerging role of the marketing engineer, Profound’s work to build a comprehensive marketing benchmark, what the new funding could help the company build, and why he believes the future of marketing will be AI-driven and human-supervised. Timestamps: 0:00 What Does Profound Do and What Is AEO? 3:16 What Does Profound Unlock Today? 4:59 Where Does AI Marketing Still Need Human Judgment? 7:20 What Is a Marketing Engineer and How Will the Role Evolve? 9:27 How Do You Benchmark Marketing? 11:45 What Drove Profound to Raise Its Series D? 13:10 What Could Marketing Look Like in Five Years?

  6. 14 Sept

    Skipping Two Generations of Accounting Software | DualEntry on Lightwork

    Santi Nestares joins Claire Zau and Sam Eisler to explain why he rebuilt the ERP from scratch. Santi ran a previous company to about a hundred million, then lost nine months to a legacy ERP migration that left him staring at a blank screen while lenders and investors waited on numbers. His argument is that the ERP looks too big to attack directly, so startups go after an adjacent wedge instead, get good at it, and end up dependent on the system they meant to replace. DualEntry went at the hard thing first. Santi calls it the first ERP created after ChatGPT-3. Sam explains why this was a team Lightspeed wanted to back, and Santi tells the story of a negotiation that ran from a car to JFK and ended with him arguing millions on the phone in front of a TSA agent, then tearing up his ticket and heading back into the city. He also describes the team he put in what they call the basement, kept from talking to the rest of the company, and tasked with collapsing the product onto a single Kanban board where agents draft the work and a human approves it. Along the way, a customer who took one discovery call, went quiet for a month, spent 36 hours in the sandbox and came back ready to sign. A team of close to a hundred that includes a top 150 tennis player and a professional poker player. And a migration Santi ran from his plane over a Starlink propped in the window, books reconciled to the penny before landing. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome to Lightwork 1:41 What Is DualEntry and What Is an ERP 2:20 Why Build a New ERP 3:50 How AI Made Next-Generation ERP Possible 5:44 Leaving a Successful Company 7:58 Finding the Right Way to Tackle ERP 12:23 Which DualEntry Customer Stories Stand Out? 14:03 How Lightseed and DualEntry First Connected 18:12 How DualEntry Has Evolved Since the Partnership 20:40 Inside Project Helios 24:59 Building Fast-Moving Teams at DualEntry 26:09 What Makes a Great DualEntry Hire 30:02 The Future of AI, Fintech, and Organizations

  7. 14 Sept

    Why AI Agents Fail in the Real World | Temporal on Lightwork

    Samar Abbas, co-founder and CEO of Temporal, joins Claire Zau and Lightspeed partner Anoushka Vaswani to break down a $550 million Series E at a $12.55 billion valuation, seven months after a round that valued the company at $5 billion. Temporal is an open source platform for durable execution, the guarantee that code runs to completion no matter what fails underneath it. Samar explains why that matters more in the agent era. The longer an agent runs and the more tools it touches, the more the chances of failure compound, and the real world is full of cases where a retry means refunding a customer twice. Anoushka makes the case that reliability and long running execution are the two things every useful agent needs, which puts Temporal in the path of token flow as agents do more work. Samar walks through the subscription workflow that can take “four lines of code” instead of a stack of queues and timers, and the nearly twenty year arc from Simple Workflow at Amazon through Cadence at Uber. They close on Temporal Nexus and what it would take to extend the same guarantees across company boundaries, so one business's agent can reliably call another's. Chapters: 0:00 Temporal’s $550M Series E and $12.55B Valuation 0:45 What Temporal Does and How It Works 3:00 How Temporal Can Solve a Critical AI Infrastructure Problem 4:16 Where AI Models Fail in Real-World Execution 7:04 How Temporal Changes the Developer Experience 8:43 Temporal’s “Aha Moment” for AI Teams 9:43 Interesting Temporal Use Cases 11:44 From Simple Workflow at Amazon to Cadence at Uber 14:11 Temporal's Partnership with Lightspeed 17:59 How Temporal Will Use the New Funding 19:13 The Future of Agents Communicating With Each Other 22:38 What Will Become Obvious About AI in the Future

  8. 11 Sept

    OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, Meta Muse & ByteDance Enters the World Model Race | Lightwork

    Claire Zau and Josh Machiz are joined by Lightspeed partner Bucky Moore for a week about how much control we are handing over to AI. OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, its most capable model and, by OpenAI's own account, a harder one to monitor. Bucky explains why looping inference compresses the chain of thought that used to make these models readable, and why the near term answer may be tighter permissions and access controls rather than interpretability research. Then to the agents people are actually running. Bucky has given Instinct his personal email and credit card and let it book flights and hotels, and he argues the ChatGPT moment for personal assistants came from a startup rather than an incumbent. Meta launched Muse the same week. Claire and Josh weigh where they still want a person reviewing the work, and the group gets into what the web does when booking sites cannot tell an agent from a customer. Bloomberg also reported that ByteDance is building a real time world model, and Bucky explains why serving those models is a hard problem of its own. Reactor is a Lightspeed portfolio company. Lightspeed co-led the seed round and led the Series A. Chapters 0:00 Welcome, Bucky Moore! 1:12 OpenAI's Astra 3:50 The New AI Model’s Architecture 4:40 AI Safety and Guardrails 8:01 Trusting AI Agents 11:09 The Future of AI Models 12:06 The AI Agent Land Grab 17:09 AI, Trust, and Personal Data 20:12 Improving AI Agent Capabilities 22:11 Enterprise AI Assistants and Personal Context 24:05 AI Agents and the Future of the Web 25:50 ByteDance and World Models 28:19 World Models and Consumer Content 30:56 Reactor and World Model Infrastructure 34:13 Real-Time Video Models and Scaling

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About

There's more AI news than anyone can possibly consume. Lightwork is the filter. Every Monday, Lightspeed's Claire Zau and Josh Machiz break down the one development that mattered most that week — a model release, a funding round, a company structural shift — and work through what changes because of it. They also bring in a guest working at the front of AI to sharpen the picture. By the end of each episode, you'll have a clearer view of where things are going and why it matters to you. New episodes every Monday morning. Have something you want to hear? Email us at lightwork@lsvp.com.

Information

  • Creator
    Lightspeed
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Lightspeed
  • Show Website
    Lightwork

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