Lightcone Podcast Y Combinator

There's been a lot of news lately about the updates to some of the largest foundational AI models. But what does this mean for startups? How will future product releases from the AI giants effect the companies built on top of them? The hosts of Lightcone discuss how founders can take advantage of these developments and avoid being steamrolled by the competition.

Last month, YC hosted Startup School East, a one-day event in Boston for university students. As part of the event, the Lightcone Podcast did their first live stage recording specifically tailored for the students.

When you're young and there are seemingly endless directions you could pursue in life, the hosts of the Lightcone Podcast make the case for why right now is the perfect time to start a start up.

What's happening in startups right now and how can you get ahead of the curve? In this episode of the Lightcone podcast, we dive deep into the major trends we're seeing from the most recent batch of YC using data we've never shared publicly before. This is a glimpse into what might be the most exciting moment to be a startup founder ever. It's time to build.

YC has become a surprising force in the hard tech world, funding startups building physical products from satellites to rockets to electric planes. In this episode of Lightcone, we go behind the scenes to explore how YC advises founders on their ambitious startups. We also take a look at a number of YC's hard tech companies and how they got started with little time or money.

If you read articles about companies like OpenAI and Anthropic training foundation models, it would be natural to assume that if you don’t have a billion dollars or the resources of a large company, you can’t train your own foundational models. But the opposite is true.

In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, we discuss the strategies to build a foundational model from scratch in less than 3 months with examples of YC companies doing just that. We also get an exclusive look at Open AI's Sora!

Read more about the YC AI companies from this episode on our blog: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/building-ai-models

In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, YC Group Partners chart the evolution of San Francisco as the center of the startup world and how AI has brought everyone back to the city.

They also talk about why YC chose to open our new HQ in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco and share their advice for new founders moving to the city for the first time.