Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Lightwork

Join us as Claire Zau and Josh Machiz discuss one of the most powerful AI model ever released to the public (now with brakes built in), Apple rebuilding Siri with help from Google's Gemini, and SpaceX opening for trading in the largest IPO in history. Plus a quiet milestone with loud implications, as AI agents now generate more web traffic than actual people.

Lightspeed co-founder Ravi Mhatre joins to talk founders, AI cycles, and what he looks for that typically won’t show up in a pitch deck. This week’s episode closes with three deals we believe are worth knowing. Beacon raised $225M to buy everyday software businesses and rebuild them with AI, Sandstone landed $30M to become the operating system for in-house legal teams, and A Security came out of stealth with $37M to take on weaponized AI.

Chapters

0:00 Welcome to Lightwork

3:30 This Week in AI & Tech Headlines

4:15 Claude Fable 5 Release

13:33 SpaceX: The Largest IPO in History

23:14 Apple's AI Reset at WWDC

30:39 Agent Traffic Passes Humans Online

40:45 Guest Interview: Lightspeed Co-Founder Ravi Mhatre

41:50 What Success Looks Like In A Founder?

44:29 Picking Winners On An Exponential Curve

48:44 Enterprise Trust Is The Moat

52:10 What Still Excites Him After 30 Years

53:43 Ravi on Lightspeed Entering New Media

56:37 Deal Breakdowns

58:47 Final Thoughts and What's Coming Next

Stay In Touch:

Website: https://lsvp.com/

X: https://x.com/lightspeedvp

LinkedIn:   / lightspeed-venture-partners 

Instagram:   / lightspeed  

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.

This week, Claire and Josh break down Snap's $2,195 bet on life after the smartphone, Jeff Bezos stepping back into an operator seat with Prometheus, a new AI company that raised $18B to build AI for the physical world, and SpaceX closing the largest IPO in history before turning around and acquiring Cursor for $60 billion.

Lightspeed growth partner James Ephrati joins to walk through his observations on venture scale, including why the biggest companies seem to be compounding faster not slower, what he believes venture returns look like at the top, and where durable value can accrue when models, compute, and distribution consolidate under one roof.

Plus they share updates from the Lightspeed universe, including Chainguard's new industry coalition Athena and Abridge's first-ever keynote in New York.

0:00 Welcome to Lightwork

4:00 Snap Specs: A Computer For Your Face

8:05 Can Specs Be Both Wearable and Powerful?

12:12 Bezos's Prometheus Bets On Physical AI

15:02 AI as the Next Industrial Revolution

20:50 SpaceX IPO: The Largest IPO Ever

24:49 SpaceX Buys Cursor

30:23 Guest Interview: James Ephrati

30:39 James Ephrati on SpaceX's Historic IPO

32:39 Why Are Big Companies Compounding Faster?

36:25 How Does This Change Lightspeed's Investing Strategy?

37:51 Do Mega Companies Change Venture Returns?

40:38 How Should Founders Think About Venture?

43:19 Updates From The Lightspeed Universe

Stay In Touch:

Website: ⁠https://lsvp.com/⁠

X: ⁠https://x.com/lightspeedvp⁠

LinkedIn: ⁠  / lightspeed-venture-partners ⁠

Instagram: ⁠  / lightspeed  ⁠

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 week's news starts inside a model's head. Anthropic published research on the J-space, a small zone of internal activity, less than a tenth of the total, where a model holds concepts it can report on and reason with, part of an industry-wide interpretability race that also includes DeepMind and OpenAI. Intercept, a $500 million nonprofit backed by Stripe, the OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, and Bill Gates, is aiming to radically reduce respiratory infections, which Intercept says cost about $600 billion a year in lost productivity. And Amazon Leo crossed roughly 390 satellites in orbit, enough to begin continuous service and give Starlink its first true rival at scale.

Then Lightspeed partners Galym Imanbayev and Faraz Fatemi join Claire Zau and Josh Machiz to map the AI-native patient journey and ask what happens when AI stops writing the doctor's notes and starts delivering the care. Doctronic reports nearly 30 million AI consults to date, and the first US clearance for autonomous AI prescription renewal. Neko has 7 clinics live, over 100,000 people on its waitlist, and its first US clinic coming soon in New York.

Chapters

0:00 Meta’s AI Privacy Controversy

3:04 Meta Muse & The Advertising Machine

8:08 This Week in AI

8:34 Anthropic's "J-Space" - Can We Read An AI's Mind?

17:27 Silicon Valley Wants To End The Common Cold

23:30 Amazon Takes On Starlink

28:33 Special Guest: Galym Imanbayev & Faraz Fatemi

29:13 Mapping AI Across The Patient Journey

34:04 AI: Unblocking Access To Healthcare

39:29 Friction In Implementing AI

42:52 The Rise Of The "Doctorprenuer"

45:36 Doctronic: Your Personal AI Doctor

48:09 Lightspeed: Investing in Doctronic

51:34 How Much Should AI Automate

53:33 Neko Health: Prevention, Not Just Treatment

57:15 The Unlock Of Preventive Healthcare

1:01:09 Opportunities In The Patient Journey

1:04:05 Final Thoughts & What’s Next

Claire Zau and Josh Machiz break down a week where AI pushed into two of the most consequential spaces yet: the human brain and the science lab. First, the AI infrastructure boom is now showing up in your shopping cart. Memory manufacturers are shifting production toward the high-bandwidth memory AI data centers need, and the result is a structural shortage driving up the price of consoles, laptops, and smartphones across the board.

From there, Meta's research lab released a system that reconstructs what you typed from brain signals alone with no implant required, jumping from 8% to 61% word accuracy over prior non-invasive methods. The near-term use case is medical, helping people with ALS and locked-in syndrome communicate, but the longer-term implications for wearables and advertising are already part of the conversation. Then Anthropic released Claude Science in beta, a workbench that pulls together 60-plus scientific tools so researchers stop switching between systems and start doing actual science. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind are all attacking this space differently, and the prize at the end is pharma. Lightspeed-backed Straiker and Pie close out the episode.

Chapters

0:00 Welcome to Lightwork

2:55 Brain2Qwerty: Meta Reads Your Mind

9:38 The Science Race: AI's Next Vertical

12:56 How The Big Labs Attack Science

15:58 Why Every Lab Wants Pharma

18:22 Welcome, Ion Stoica!

19:06 Why Ion Returned to Teaching

20:52 How Chatbot Arena Was Born

26:58 How Does Arena Actually Rank AI Models?

29:15 How Arena Prevents Vote Manipulation

31:11 Subjective vs Objective AI Quality

33:49 How Arena Evaluates AI Agents

37:54 How Does Arena Stay Neutral?

40:13 Choosing the Right AI Measurements

43:31 Can AI Become Unmeasurable?

47:41 How Arena Makes Money

50:58 What AI Still Needs to Improve

55:17 Updates from the Lightspeed Universe

Claire Zau and Josh Machiz dig into a week that put AI's biggest players under the microscope. Meta reshuffled thousands of engineers into new roles many described as soul-crushing, and the internal fallout went public fast. ChatGPT crossed a milestone nobody expected this soon, losing its majority share of the global AI assistant market for the first time ever. And in the same 48 hours, Google DeepMind lost a Nobel Prize winner and the co-author of the paper that started the modern AI era to competing labs.

Lightspeed Partner Guru Chahal also joins to pull back the curtain on the AI data center. From the seven-layer hardware stack to water and energy myths to the case for compute in orbit, Guru breaks down the physical infrastructure running every AI product you use and the startups building the next generation of it.