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AI Is Unlocking Millions Of New Builders

AI Is Unlocking Millions Of New Builders

12 segments available

In this episode of The Lightcone, we talk with Mukund and Madhav Jha, the founders of Emergent - an AI platform that lets anyone build and ship production-ready software. In just eight months, users have created more than 7 million apps on Emergent, with the number doubling in just the last 45 days. We discuss how they built one of the most powerful AI coding agents, why they focused on non-technical users and what it's like building for a global audience from India. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:06 - What Is Emergent? 01:18 - Founder Backstory 02:09 - From AI Testing to General Coding Agents 02:52 - Getting Ahead of the Market 04:18 - The Pivot to Non-Technical Users 05:22 - Why Second Movers Can Win in AI 09:04 - Building for Production, Not Just Prototypes 18:21 - Live Demo: Building Apps with Emergent 24:40 - How Emergent Hires and Runs a Lean Team 29:04 - Is SaaS Dead? The Rise of Personalized Software 34:04 - The Future: Niche Apps, Solo Builders and AI Agency

Segments Timeline

1
0:00 - 1:06
1:06 duration212 words

Intro

"So I think now we are just truly seeing this unlock where people who who were like really close to problem domain expert and but have been blocked by you know technology barrier to sort of really expr..."

2
1:06 - 1:20
0:14 duration49 words

What Is Emergent?

"you have in 8 months since launch 7 million apps have been built with emergent. Walk us through this like incredible growth you're seeing actually when did that hit a real inflection point and how did..."

3
1:20 - 2:09
0:48 duration214 words

Founder Backstory

"actually uh you know started programming when we were age 12. Both of us came to us to do our PhDs. I dropped out of the PhD program joined Google and Maddie went on to uh was in Zenz then went on uh ..."

4
2:09 - 2:52
0:43 duration178 words

From AI Testing to General Coding Agents

">> what year was this? >> This was 23 end. Yeah. And and so when we applied to YC like we applied with this idea of automating software testing. Uh that was the first idea. In fact we went to a lot of..."

5
2:52 - 4:18
1:25 duration377 words

Getting Ahead of the Market

">> yeah tell us what the landscape looked like like how big was lovable at this point and just >> I mean nobody had started lovable had not started I think kurs was just just getting getting started u..."

6
4:18 - 5:22
1:04 duration254 words

The Pivot to Non-Technical Users

"users? >> Yeah. So we actually like once we had this coding agent uh we actually went the enterprise route. That was the common wisdom at that point that hey like go to enterprise build for enterprise..."

7
5:22 - 9:04
3:42 duration863 words

Why Second Movers Can Win in AI

"that we have talked a bunch about at YC internally is just um how does first mover advantage versus second mover advantage play out in the AI world. Certainly something that we've noticed like if we l..."

8
9:04 - 18:21
9:16 duration2192 words

Building for Production, Not Just Prototypes

"insight for you. Basically, you went very hardcore in terms of being maximalists in engineering from your experience having run large engineering teams of 300 engineers, having worked on deep learning..."

9
18:21 - 24:40
6:19 duration1547 words

Live Demo: Building Apps with Emergent

">> Could we see a demo of emergent? >> Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. So, this is how what emergent interface looks like and uh I'm going to like put a prompt where like because we were coming for this podcast,..."

10
24:40 - 29:04
4:24 duration1111 words

How Emergent Hires and Runs a Lean Team

">> So talking about how you run your team, the way you hire must be very different. I mean you're a very lean and small team. How do you hire for engineering? >> Yeah. So we we actually from from day ..."

11
29:04 - 34:04
5:00 duration1218 words

Is SaaS Dead? The Rise of Personalized Software

">> I'd love to go back to what we were talking about regarding personalized software and what do you think the implications are for SAS in general? Yeah, I guess the provocative question is is SAS dea..."

12
34:04 - 39:22
5:17 duration1283 words

The Future: Niche Apps, Solo Builders and AI Agency

">> has built 7 million apps with emergent what are all these apps who who are the users and what surprised you seeing what people do with it >> the users who are coming to platform for us are generall..."