Since the start of the year, OpenCode (YC W21) — an open source alternative to Claude Code and Codex that works with any model — exploded to 4.6 million weekly active users, 13 million monthly actives, and roughly $40M in annualized revenue. In this episode of The Lightcone, Harj... Taggar, Jared Friedman, and Diana talk with Jay V (Jay), OpenCode’s CEO, about what’s driving this wild growth, the Anthropic clampdown that inadvertently fueled it, and the almost 20 year founder journey that led him here. 00:44 — OpenCode’s Explosive Growth 01:16 — 20x Growth, 13M Users, and 7 Trillion Tokens 03:39 — The Anthropic Controversy That Changed Everything 05:43 — Bringing AI Coding Agents to the World 06:39 — When Open Source Models Became Good Enough 08:56 — What Millions of Developers Are Actually Using 13:31 — Why OpenCode Is Huge Outside the US 15:27 — Why Fortune 500 Companies Choose OpenCode 16:36 — The Economics of AI Tokens 20:02 — How Enterprises Are Using Coding Agents 22:58 — AI’s New Unit Economics 24:56 — Why Model Choice Matters 29:55 — The Product Decisions Behind OpenCode 34:21 — A 16-Year Overnight Success 41:16 — Why Jay Never Gave Upshow more

@opencode NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES NO SLEEVES

@thdxr @opencode Yo I thought that bald guy was the ceo

@MichelleBakels @opencode jay is severely underdressed

@opencode I don't care who you are it's unprofessional to do an interview in a fucking wifebeater.

@opencode Call me old-fashioned, but could he not have stretched to at least a T-shirt for the interview? Or has San Francisco finally adopted Europe’s suspicion of air conditioning? 😅

Tune in: Full Transcript:

@opencode he is NOT the ceo. where's the bald man

Anomaly (Opencode/SST) 🪳🪳🪳 Some of the most successful startups are companies that have some superhuman power to just never give up and keep going. Opencode is like the king of this category, I don't think even this video does justice to the levels of pain Jay and Frank endured getting where they are. They turned down soft landings, they moved back home to Canada to stretch their money, they kept driving the car on fumes for 15 years before finally hitting it big. On my list of investments I stick a unicorn emoji next to the companies that achieve that, but I also stick a cockroach emoji next to companies that refuse to die and take 5+ years to find PMF. Opencode has 3 cockroaches. Not entirely surprising, the cockroach investments often end up unicorns. One could argue this is just survivor bias, but I would put money on there being causality. Unicorns are great but really we should emphasize celebrating the ones that were also cockroaches.

@opencode there must be some mistake that doesn't look like @thdxr at all

@opencode no shirt till series B

@opencode Why he is half naked ?

@opencode Uhh, someone put a shirt over jay please

@opencode Everyone obsessed with the lack of sleeves and ignoring that he showed up for an interview wet.

@opencode lol think the 3 other guests are a bit overdressed

@opencode OpenCode is complicated. I thought the video was from 2021, and this is Dax before he went bald.

@opencode I like to think of Claude Code and Codex as closed-source alternatives to OpenCode.

@opencode Who is this fake Alex Hormozi

@opencode @thdxr get this man a shirt ffs

@opencode he had to flex those muscles

@thdxr @opencode Started 4 years after yc w21 though? Would you call this a yc startup?

@opencode Want to dig into how OpenCode reached 13M monthly users? We turned the full episode into a searchable, AI-citable Brief—with the transcript, chapters, key moments, and every insight linked to the exact second 👇

@opencode Awesome Lightcone. Have been following OpenCode. thanks for bringing him on. Best shirt too.

@opencode Did he just come straight from the gym?

@opencode Chat is this the guy who can punch me in the stomach?

@opencode Bullish on open code after seeing the tank top

@opencode Open sleeves >> open source

@opencode Open source agent. Open model choice. @OpenCode is taking off because developers don’t want to be locked into one model. With AIHubMix built in as a provider, you can switch between GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and more. Get started:

@opencode as a daily user of opencode I'm super proud.

@opencode Should use some of that money to buy a shirt

@opencode Did you all get punched in the stomach?

@opencode wow, didn’t expect their Chief Exercise Officer to know so many details about the company

@opencode 4.6M weekly users and $40M ARR is wild for an open source devtool. distribution is easier when the product rides a daily workflow

@opencode This is exactly why the open ecosystem wins. Developers don't want to be permanently locked into a single provider's API. Being able to plug OpenCode into any model is a massive game-changer. 💻

@opencode Did not know @opencode was a yc company

@opencode 4.6m weekly users pointing agents at their codebases and the metrics are all growth — tokens, revenue, MAUs. nobody's publishing the number that matters: how much of that code actually gets read before it ships.