It's time to build.

In this ep of the Lightcone, we dive deep into the major trends from the most recent batch of YC using data we've never shared publicly before.

It's a glimpse into what might be the most exciting moment to be a startup founder ever.

youtu.be/e1Yhs9BEOSw

Deadline is in ~7hrs, it should take ~1 hr to apply. It may change the trajectory of your life like it did for me to achieve the American dream. Let's work together on it

Last year when we came with Jared Friedman to Boston we funded 10% of the room attendees with our talk at MIT

During YC I push Hard Tech companies to think like a software company. That means moving fast and not spending much money to prove you're making something people want. We talk about how this works surprisingly well in our latestLightcone episode:

youtu.be/erDE2e69dlc?si…

How do you start a startup that's building a supersonic jet?

Blake Scholl 🛫 did, and his company Boom Supersonic just did their first flight.

Here's a breakdown of 8 hard-tech companies with crazy ambitious ideas, and how they got started.

Microsoft's latest credential leak is a stark reminder that companies, big and small, continue to face significant risks managing secrets across their development cycle 🧵

Finding high quality data lets you use both less data and compute to train a foundation model. Diana explains how metalware did this by scanning textbooks and using GPT2.5 to build a co-pilot for hardware design.

Biggest reflection from finishing YC is that there’s something very very powerful in being surrounded by people taking their co from 0->0.5

I’m convinced that the worst part about being an inexperienced founder is everything feels more daunting than it should be. Pivoting feels…

the IRL energy is special. There's something about the serendipitous hallway conversations between founders who help each other succeed

So excited to unveil W24 companies at demo day, so fun to work with everyone and see all their impressive progress

One of the most important problems to solve

really like the tech details on how they've reduced computation complexity to train their models

(0/25) Here's a list of 25 YC companies that have trained their own AI models. Reading through these will give you a good sense of what the near future will look like.

OpenAI's Sora is a combination of a transformer model and a diffusion model with an added temporal component. YC Partner Diana explains in detail how it works and why it's a huge breakthrough.