Lightwork

Claire Zau sits down with Bryce Strauss, co-founder of Nominal, on the day the company announced a $240 million Series C. Bryce is a trained aerospace engineer who has spent four years building software for hardware teams. Not software engineers, but the mechanical, electrical, aerospace and chemical engineers behind airplanes, rockets, cars, and the systems that get water to your house. Nominal started in aerospace, helping teams make sense of their test data, then moved into real time as those systems went into the field. It now works across energy, automotive and manufacturing, and has shipped the Analyst, its first in-platform agent.The executives buying this came up through engineering. They signed their names to decisions, and some have been deposed over calls their teams made. So the pitch isn’t automate everything, it’s move faster while being able to audit what the agent tells you. Bryce also gets into who Nominal hires, what re-industrialization actually demands once a prototype has to become a thousand units, and his argument about physical AI. Search the term and you get robots folding laundry. He thinks the version that matters is the car you get into and the plane you put your kids on.Stay in touch: www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeed/?hl=enThe 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.

Claire Zau and Josh Machiz open with news that almost sounds made up. Google sent a prompt to a satellite, a model running on chips in orbit answered it, and the answer came back as a haiku. Claire walks through Project Suncatcher, how the hardware got up there on a rideshare launch with SpaceX, what the test actually proved, and why Google’s longer term vision looks different from everyone else putting a computer in space. The next milestone is smaller than you’d think and more important than it sounds.Later, Binance was reached not through some new AI attack but through a hiring process that never existed, ending in a file somebody downloaded onto a work laptop. Across Europe, attackers went after supermarket freezer controllers, many of them past end of life and still running default passwords, and the targets have since moved beyond food. Finally, is the internet dying? Reddit’s latest numbers put a real figure on what happens when Google answers the question instead of sending you the link, and Josh and Claire get into AI slop, what Andrej Karpathy built to escape it, and whether the value is shifting from publishing information to curating it.Chapters:0:00 Welcome to Lightwork1:09 Google's AI Breakthrough in Space1:45 Project Star Catcher and Space Data Centers6:01 Google's Next Steps for Space Data Centers7:27 Binance's $6.3 Billion Crypto Theft10:56 Cyberattacks Target Supermarket Freezers14:27 Is the Internet Dying?15:57 Andrej Karpathy's Answer to AI Slop16:58 Reddit Loses Traffic to Google's AI Search20:02 AI Reviews vs. Human Commentary21:40 How Marketers Can Leverage Reddit in the AI Era23:31 Why Content Curation Matters in the AI EraStay in touch: www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/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.

Claire Zau and Josh Machiz are at the New York Stock Exchange for the Fortune Cyber60, in the middle of the stretch people have started calling Black October. Claire explains the PHP vulnerability behind it and the detail that makes this one different from the attacks everyone is used to. No click, no password, no human needed. Most of it is patched now. The thing that isn’t patched is what one person with a swarm of agents does to the entire idea of defending a company, and Claire thinks it ends an era in cybersecurity.Then OpenAI reported results in math, computer science and physics in one week, and the reaction from mathematicians wasn’t what you’d expect. Josh and Claire also get into reports that DoorDash is looking at Instacart, with nothing confirmed, and why groceries might be the most natural job an agent has been handed yet. Plus Google’s Genie 4, what actually separates a world model from a video model, and the strange thing a robot needs in order to learn.Chapters:0:00 Is The Internet Broken0:39 The New York Stock Exchange1:55 Is The Internet Broken And What Is Black October?3:20 The PHP Vulnerability And 70 Percent Of Websites Exposed5:38 Dystopian Scenarios And Why Now7:29 The End Of Event Based Cybersecurity And The CISO Survey8:41 Advice For Regular People And Vibe Coding Security10:08 Cybersecurity As A Line Item And The CISO Job11:29 AI Math Breakthroughs Solution Slop And Mathematician Backlash17:44 DoorDash Buying Instacart And The AI Agent Threat24:10 Google Genie 4 World Models And Real Time Control27:36 World Models For Robotics And Real Time ControlStay in touch: https://www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeed/?hl=enThe 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.

Josh Machiz is joined by Lightspeed partner Amber Yang for a week where agents turned up on both sides of the security line. A security researcher reported that one hacker used AI agents to break into more than a hundred company websites, including John Deere, by running a single prompt across thousands of agents at once. Amber explains what makes that approach work now, and how it differs from an agent swarm. Attackers also forced refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets to defrost, and a developer used Claude Code to strip preinstalled software off his parents’ TV. Then, Goodfire, a Lightspeed portfolio company, published an essay by researcher Nick Cammarata arguing that neural networks are far more readable than the field has assumed. Amber breaks down what he’s claiming, why it would matter for AI safety, and why it’s still a working hypothesis rather than a finding. DeepSeek and MiniMax both shipped efficiency updates the same week the US moved to remove DeepSeek from civilian federal systems, and Josh and Amber get into what that means for American companies choosing models on cost. They close on the personal agent race, including Claude Duet’s research preview.Chapters0:00 Welcome to Lightwork1:03 AI Agents Hack 100+ Websites4:09 Hackers Sabotage Supermarket Refrigeration Systems5:16 Using AI to Make Smart TVs Dumb Again7:01 Goodfire: Are Neural Networks Easier to Read?13:29 DeepSeek & MiniMax Race on Cost18:00 The Personal Agent Race: Duet, Muse, Instinct22:59 Amber Yang’s Request for StartupsStay in touch: https://www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeed/?hl=enThe 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.

Meta and Google are making their next moves in the race for frontier AI, Apple is pushing deeper into the smart home, and SpaceX wants to become a major player in mobile. Claire and Josh discuss Meta’s Muse Wonder and Wonder Full models, including the company’s focus on active memory, persistent agents, and keeping its most capable model inside the Muse ecosystem. They also examine Google’s Gemini 4 Argon and its strengths across professional workflows, vision, coding, spatial reasoning, and long-running tasks.Then, they look at Apple’s HomeView and why privacy, personalization, and ambient intelligence could give Apple an opening in the AI-powered home. Plus, they unpack what SpaceX would actually need to become a major U.S. wireless carrier and how a company that controls satellites, spectrum, and broadband could reshape the telecom market.Chapters:0:00 Welcome to Lightwork1:04 Meta Muse Wonder vs. Google Gemini 45:00 Why AI Agents Need Memory and Focus6:23 Gemini’s Advanced Reasoning and Task Automation8:37 Apple HomeView: Siri Comes Home11:33 AI Privacy and Smart Homes16:52 SpaceX’s Plans To Be a Carrier22:12 Zaria $5.2M Seed Round Led By Lightspeed22:45 Zenzap Comes Out of StealthStay in touch: www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/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.