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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
Older: In Case You Missed It in January 2026 →
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