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Jon Krohn

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Jon Krohn

From PhD Side Project to $500M ARR: Will Falcon’s PyTorch Lightning Story

Added on February 10, 2026 by Jon Krohn.

How did William Falcon grow a PhD side project into an open-source phenomenon with nearly 400 million downloads and a startup with over $500m (🤯) in ARR? Find out in today's episode!

In case you're not already familiar with Will, he's:

  • Creator of PyTorch Lightning (open-source framework for rapidly training and deploying A.I. models that has been downloaded nearly 400 million times).

  • Founder and CEO of Lightning AI.

  • Pursued PhD at New York University under Yann LeCun and KyungHyun Cho focused on biologically inspired deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques, involving pre-training models on 4,000+ GPUs.

  • Former U.S. Navy officer in SEAL training pipeline.

More on Lightning AI:

  • The only fullstack A.I. neocloud for enterprises and frontier labs.

  • $500m in ARR in under two years (hence the head-exploding emoji above!)

  • 3rd largest neocloud by GPUs (35,000+).

  • Serves 400,000+ developers and companies (e.g., Cursor, Cisco, Reflection AI).

This episode will especially appeal to hands-on practitioners like software engineers and data scientists but Will's fascinating story will be of interest to anyone involved in A.I.

And note that I hold a fellowship at Lightning AI so I am not an unbiased interviewer in this episode :)

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

In Data Science, Interview, Podcast, SuperDataScience, YouTube Tags superdatascience, ai, neocloud, LLM, LLMs, PyTorch, pytorch lightning
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