Latest Interviews

Building Economic Prosperity: Conversation with US Senator Angela Alsobrooks | Future of Finance

Angela Alsobrooks, Rachel Reilly

Freshman Senator Alison Brooks leverages her executive background to champion bipartisan legislation like the Genius Act and the Tariffs Transparency Act, addressing digital asset regulation and economic uncertainty. Her agenda targets generational wealth through housing reforms, targeted small business tax credits, and sustained funding for Maryland's HBCUs. By bridging ideological divides to overcome gridlock, Brooks aims to mitigate structural barriers to economic mobility for the sandwich generation and future workforce.

Inside a16z’s Top 100 AI Apps Report with Olivia Moore

Olivia Moore, Anish Acharya

The 2024 Top 100 AI Report, the sixth edition of its series, documents exponential market growth and the integration of AI into non-native products like Canva and Notion while noting that global weekly active usage remains at only 10%. ChatGPT retains a dominant market position with usage significantly outpacing competitors, yet the ecosystem is bifurcating as specialized players like Claude target enterprise coding and Gemini focuses on creative tools. The report further highlights a strategic shift toward autonomous agents, desktop-local workflows, and voice interfaces, predicting that future utility will depend on a platform's ability to leverage personalized memory and cross-application identity.

Conversation with DFC CEO Ben Black and EXIM Bank President John Jovanovic | Future of Finance 2026

Ben Black, John Jovanovic, Matthew Aleshire

John Yovanovitch of the Export-Import Bank and Ben of the Development Finance Corporation are leading a coordinated push to reindustrialize the U.S. economy by deploying over $160 billion in authorized capital to secure supply chains and counter Chinese influence. Their agencies are prioritizing strategic sectors such as critical minerals, energy, and advanced mobility while removing investment barriers in high-income allies to mobilize private capital globally. This bipartisan initiative aims to create domestic manufacturing jobs and establish long-term market stability by exporting American financial services alongside physical infrastructure projects.

Sequoia’s Alfred Lin: $10T Companies Are Coming

Alfred Lin, Molly O'Shea

Sequoia Capital partners discuss a critical shift from legacy strategies to an AI-driven future, emphasizing that companies failing to recognize this paradigm shift face existential risk while their own portfolio valuations have surged to billion-dollar benchmarks. The firm reports distributing $43 billion to limited partners since 2020 and highlights how AI tools have enabled top engineers to triple output, fundamentally altering development cycles from years to days. Ultimately, Sequoia remains optimistic about automating mundane tasks to free human capital for strategic work, while refining its investment thesis to target founders with unique "spikes" capable of leveraging these new technological efficiencies.

Thomas Laffont, Coatue - Anthropic, Citrini Paper, AI Volatility & Next Mag 7

Thomas Laffont, Molly O'Shea

Thomas Lafont and the Kotu firm, managing over $100 billion in assets, predict that private AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic will dominate the next major market indices as SaaS valuations face re-rating pressures from decelerating growth. While anticipating significant IPOs within 24 months and a shift toward "Big Fucking Ideas" that expand total addressable markets, Lafont argues that AI will enhance engineering productivity rather than reduce headcount, following a historical model of market expansion similar to the introduction of ATMs. The firm actively applies these insights by integrating coding-first AI tools into their due diligence while advocating for democratized access to private equity to capture the exponential growth of early adopters like Clock Code.

Lloyd Blankfein on His Memoir, Risk Management and Leadership

Lloyd Blankfein, David Solomon

Former Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein details his tenure from 2006 to 2018, contrasting the firm's unique partnership culture with post-IPO public market pressures while outlining specific strategies that enabled survival during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. He attributes this resilience to rigorous mark-to-market accounting and a proactive risk-management focus on tail events, rather than predictive foresight, alongside a leadership philosophy centered on "managing down" to foster collective ownership. Blankfein's memoir, "Streetwise," further examines his journey from Brooklyn public housing to Wall Street, the firm's expansion into philanthropy through 10,000 Women, and the deliberate preservation of Goldman Sachs' distinctive internal culture amidst structural evolution.

Conversation with SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Chairman Michael Selig | Future of Finance 2026

Paul Atkins, Michael Selig, Michael Piwowar

SEC Chairman Atkins and CFTC Chairman Selig are dismantling a fragmented regulatory landscape by establishing a joint taxonomy and "truce" to clearly distinguish tokenized securities from digital commodities while preventing duplicative enforcement. The agencies are simultaneously modernizing capital formation through disclosure streamlining, approving perpetual crypto futures, and accelerating on-chain settlement to reverse declining IPO trends. These collaborative initiatives aim to provide statutory durability in a post-Loper Bright environment by fostering a single primary regulator framework that retains global liquidity and innovation.

Sentiment Shifts on AI Capex Spend

Tony Pasquariello, Joshua Schiffrin, Dominic Wilson, Josh

Global equity markets are diverging as overseas regions, particularly Japan and South Korea, surge to new highs while U.S. indices trade sideways amid intense skepticism regarding AI profitability and debt-fueled capital expenditure. This rally is driven by a structural expectation that artificial intelligence will ultimately induce disinflation, prompting investors to reallocate capital into non-U.S. assets even as the Federal Reserve holds rates steady through mid-year. Currency and bond markets are simultaneously adjusting to anticipated policy normalization, with a weakening U.S. dollar and steepening yield curves reflecting a consensus that growth in Asia will dominate the coming macro regime.

Demystifying Korea and Japan: Parallel Paths and Practical Partnerships | Asia Summit 2025

Avril Hong, Chee Kong Choun, James Kim, Kenji Kobayashi, John-Paul (Jaeho) Yun

Amidst shared demographic challenges and intense competition from China, Japanese and South Korean firms are forging strategic alliances to leverage complementary strengths in manufacturing and soft power. These cross-border partnerships prioritize deploying AI within localized vertical industries rather than competing in foundational models, while simultaneously pursuing M&A consolidation and expansion into the US, ASEAN, and European markets to secure global capital and growth. Private sector leaders are driving this transformation to bypass domestic stagnation, aiming to monetize decades of accumulated industrial data and establish a unified front against US and Chinese tech dominance.

Revel: The $1B Startup Rewriting Hardware Control

Scott Morton, Dylan Field, Molly O'Shea

Founded by former SpaceX engineer Scott Morton, Revel is a platform that replaces obsolete legacy control software with modern tools to accelerate hardware testing frequency by up to tenfold. The 15-month-old company recently closed a $150 million Series A led by Index Ventures and Redpoint, achieving a billion-dollar valuation after securing high-conversion pilots with clients like Impulse and Astromechanica. Revel aims to democratize hardware engineering by enabling generalists to manage critical systems in aerospace and energy sectors while expanding into wastewater infrastructure and major industrial partnerships.

Inside Opendoor HQ on Earnings Day (Office Tour + Live Stream)

Kaz Nejatian, Michael Judd, Molly O'Shea

Opendoor is reshaping its corporate identity under CEO Kaz Nejatian and former CEO Keith Raziani by adopting a militant "Open Army" culture and pioneering live, digital-first investor relations on platforms like Robinhood. This strategic pivot accompanies a technical overhaul where leadership prioritizes core stability over cosmetic improvements, resulting in a ten-week mortgage product launch and a hybrid design system strategy. By expanding from simple transactions into a comprehensive home-moving ecosystem, the company aims to empower average Americans through high transparency and merchant services that mimic Shopify's model.

Global Real Estate: Repricing Risk, Rethinking Strategy | Asia Summit 2025

Curtis S. Chin, Michelle Martin, Stuart Crow, Goodwin Gaw, Kishore Moorjani, Hsueh Ling Ng

Global real estate capital is rapidly migrating from traditional office space to invisible infrastructure like data centers and battery storage, driven by AI compute demands and supply chain regionalization strategies. While distress in the office sector and record interest rates are forcing asset re-purposing and wealth consolidation, innovative financing models including private credit and tokenization are unlocking new liquidity for investors. Market experts highlight specific opportunities in Asia-Pacific hubs, Hong Kong's gateway role, and the residential living sector as the primary engines for future yield and resilience amidst shifting geopolitical and technological landscapes.

Board Governance in 2026: AI Oversight, Activism, and Delaware’s Edge

Larry Cunningham, John F.W. Rogers

The University of Delaware's John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance marked its 25th anniversary by unveiling the book *Boardroom Legacy*, which contextualizes John L. Weinberg's 1948 thesis on board stewardship through contributions from fifteen scholars and support from Goldman Sachs. Symposium speakers highlighted Weinberg's prescient advocacy for independent audit committees and CEO oversight while discussing modern governance challenges, including SEC Chair Paul Atkins' intent to reform shareholder proposal processes and the persistent market dominance of Delaware's legal infrastructure. Additionally, the event explored Warren Buffett's enduring influence on corporate succession planning and capital allocation strategies, cementing the center's role as a hub for bridging historical governance principles with contemporary regulatory and strategic realities.

A Conversation with BTG Chairman, André Esteves | Global Investors' Symposium São Paulo 2025

André Esteves, Christiane Pelajo, Cris

Global market volatility driven by US policy shifts and a K-shaped economic divergence has elevated Brazil's strategic position as a neutral food and data hub leveraging its clean energy matrix. While AI capital expenditures are reshaping the industrial landscape, the speaker projects Brazilian interest rates to fall from 15% to a 7–11% range provided the government implements a 2% of GDP fiscal adjustment to resolve macroeconomic contradictions. Ultimately, the nation's future prosperity hinges on replacing social aid with formal labor incentives and utilizing deep capital markets to fund infrastructure independent of external geopolitical luck.

The AI Agent Economy Is Here

Founders and non-technical CEOs are rapidly adopting autonomous AI workflows, creating a parallel "agent economy" where software selection is driven by swarm intelligence rather than human developers. This shift forces a strategic pivot for developers, requiring tools to offer superior, structured documentation and open APIs to be chosen by autonomous agents as primary decision-makers. Industry leaders like Maltbook and Supabase are capitalizing on this transition, while institutions like Y Combinator begin redefining their frameworks to support a future where agents act as the primary economic actors choosing infrastructure.