StarCraft
product on 18 shows · 8 statements across 8 episodes · said 97 times in 47 episodes since 2018
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 13 
TBPN 13 
How I Built This 10 
the a16z Podcast 10 
Big Technology 8 
My First Million 7 
the Knowledge Project 6 
Acquired 5 
Latent Space 5 
David Senra 5 
No Priors 4 
20VC 4 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 3 
American Optimist 2 
the MAD Podcast 1 
All-In 1 
Lenny's Podcast 
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the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 13TBPN 13the a16z Podcast 10How I Built This 10Big Technology 8My First Million 7the Knowledge Project 6Acquired 58 more shows
2026 26 mentions in 11 episodes 2 per episode
- How The AI Bet Pays Off + AI Lab Strategy Game — With David Cahn
- Tobi Lütke: 21 Years of Building Shopify
- The Most Important Founder You've Never Heard Of
- Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis: AI's Next Breakthroughs, AGI Timeline, Google's AI Glasses Bet
- Capital One Acquires Brex for $5B, Davos’s $500M business, Apple’s Siri rebuild | Diet TBPN
- How AI Changes the Economics of Innovation
- FPV Drones -The Next War Is Already Here — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Noah Smith, Noahpinion
- Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough · Y Combinator
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 19 mentions in 13 episodes 1 per episode
- Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- No Priors Ep. 123 | With ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin
- Weekly Recap - Elon Vs Trump, Ukraine's Drone Attack, Cluely Update & OpenAI CRO
- ⚡️Factorio Learning Environment: the ultimate Game Agent Eval — Jack Hopkins
- Project Stargate, The T Word, Ramp Treasury, Audience Ad Reads, See You at Davos
- [State of Code Evals] After SWE-bench, Code Clash & SOTA Coding Benchmarks recap — John Yang
- Inside the $50 Trillion AI Gold Rush | Episode 1
- Google DeepMind Lead Researchers on Genie 3 & the Future of World-Building
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 15 mentions in 7 episodes 2 per episode
- Why Founders Shouldn't Think Like Investors · Y Combinator
- Inside JD Vance's Portfolio (ep8)
- Trump's Secret Career (ep7)
- Jason Citron, Co-Founder/CEO @Discord: The Untold Story Behind Scaling to 200M Users | E1230 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The Mark Zuckerberg Interview · Acquired
- This AI Sea Drone Could Destroy A Submarine? · Joe Lonsdale
- No Priors Ep. 74 | With Google DeepMind VP of Research Oriol Vinyals
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2023 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Our 2020 Predictions For OpenAI Came True… Here’s What’s Next (#508)
- Guillaume Cabane: Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder | E1088 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Why AI Agents Don't Work (yet) - with Kanjun Qiu of Imbue
- Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming · Acquired
- No Priors Ep. 1 | With Noam Brown, Research Scientist at Meta
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2022 11 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
8 statements about StarCraft, every show
Cahn: AI competition is fundamentally a resource allocation game for Big Tech
“Starcraft is a resource allocation game and AI is a resource allocation game. And so I think as we get into it, what are your resources and how do you allocate those resources? That's the most important question facing every big tech company.”
Lütke: Attacking competitor attention is more effective than attacking their base
“Attacking other people's attention is much more profitable very often in a game of Starcraft than it is to actually attack the base. Because if you overtax their ability to pay attention to things, They will make mistakes.”
Sivulka hacked his public school tablets to play StarCraft
“I was the type of kid that would hack the school tablets to put StarCraft on everyone's computer, and then, you know, we'd all, like, not be paying attention in public school playing StarCraft”
Houston: Founders must simultaneously master micro, macro, and meta strategic layers
“You need to understand what game you're playing. And you need to get good at the micro. It's not that like the meta is more important than the, it's like you need to do all three at the same time. And so that's really the hard part.”
David Holz's StarCraft Parable Makes the Best Case for AI Safety
“It makes the case for these AI doomers that are like, guys, we need to stop fighting among ourselves. And it needs to be more of like the humans versus AI. And like, we need to take this seriously. And that was more convincing than any like essay that I've see…”
StarCraft reached 5 million registered players in South Korea at its peak
“The height of its popularity in Korea, StarCraft had five million registered players.”
Lütke learned the most about building businesses from playing StarCraft
“I think I actually learned most about building businesses from playing StarCraft.”
Brundage: AI will achieve superhuman performance in StarCraft within three years
“Yeah, I think there will be Superhuman, Starcraft and Dota too, probably in that time horizon. I said in, I think early 2017 that it would be the end of, that I gave like 50% chance by the end of 2018. So this gives me more runway. I'll say, yeah, like, 70% co…”