Nine out of ten people might tell you you're crazy. The tenth might see what you see.
This week on the Lightcone, @garrytan, @harjtaggar, @snowmaker, and @sdianahu discuss 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.
0:00 - Intro
2:00 - AI verticals are becoming more crowded
6:22 - Non-obvious successes
9:50 - End users can get regulations changed
18:05 - Finding contrarian ideas, what founders should look for
25:10 - Flock Safety and selling to local governments
33:40 - The sci-fi founder and "impossible" big ideas
36:42 - Outro
Sourcebot (@sourcebot_dev) helps developers and AI agents understand massive codebases.
It's used daily by engineers at some of the largest companies in the world, including NVIDIA, Red Hat, and Arista Networks.
Congrats on the launch, @msukkarieh1 & @bshizzle28!
Congrats to @centralhq on their $8.6M seed!
Central is the AI-native platform that eliminates back-office work for startups.
While HR/payroll platforms give you software to figure it out, Central actually does all the work using agents and human experts across payroll, benefits, compliance, accounting, taxes, and more.
They've already processed $100M+ in payroll and 30% of customers have switched from traditional HR/payroll platforms.