Latest Interviews
Showing 271–285 of 1,573 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Milken Institute26 min
Make the Deal Work: Rethinking USMCA for a Competitive Future | Global Investors' Symposium MX City
Julio Vaqueiro, Kimberly Breier, Cameron MacKay, Esteban Moctezuma
Three diplomatic and legal experts convened to anticipate the 2026 USMCA review, emphasizing a strategic shift toward a narrow modernization of the 2018 text rather than a full renegotiation driven by emerging challenges in AI, energy transition, and supply chain resilience. While U.S. political rhetoric frames the process as a high-stakes renegotiation, Mexico and Canada advocate for a targeted trilateral approach to address the "China factor" and stabilize bilateral trade dynamics amidst the U.S. election cycle. The panelists concluded that achieving predictable outcomes will require broad political buy-in to secure updated chapters on critical minerals and technology, ultimately strengthening North American competitiveness against global rivals.
- a16z32 min
"Is there an AI bubble?” Gavin Baker and David George
The analysis asserts that the current AI sector avoids a bubble compared to the 2000 telecom crash, citing zero unused GPU infrastructure, lower valuations at 40x earnings, and hyperscalers holding $500 billion in cash reserves. Major players like Nvidia and Google are engaging in an existential race for dominance that drives strategic investments and ecosystem consolidation, even as companies shift toward outcome-based pricing models that compress traditional gross margins. Looking forward, this trajectory predicts accelerated progress toward artificial general intelligence and autonomous robotics, fundamentally restructuring workforce dynamics and business distribution channels.
Sequoia’s Alfred Lin: Backing Founders Who Redefine Markets
Alfred Li and Sequoia Capital partners discuss the critical distinction between speed and velocity in navigating the rapid compression of AI relevance, while analyzing valuation premiums that justify trillion-dollar projections for leaders like OpenAI if they sustain decade-long growth. The firm contrasts this market dynamics analysis with Brian Chesky's 2020 crisis management at Airbnb, highlighting how prioritizing long-term purpose and strategic pivots enabled survival and accelerated recovery after an 80% revenue drop. Moving beyond historical case studies, the conversation outlines Sequoia's partnership strategy of backing category creators like Profound and Citadel Securities, urging founders to align organizational culture with continuous AI adoption to avoid obsolescence in a consolidating tech landscape.
- a16z33 min
Building the Real-World Infrastructure for AI, with Google, Cisco & a16z
Raghu Raghuram, Amin Vahdat, Jeetu Patel
Driven by a build-out 100 times larger than the late 1990s internet boom, the current infrastructure surge is constrained by three-to-five-year power and supply bottlenecks that are shifting data center locations and necessitating "scale across" architectures. As the industry enters a "golden age of specialization" through efficiency-focused accelerators and coherent cluster-wide networking, distinct geopolitical strategies are emerging that favor power-optimized hardware over cutting-edge process nodes. This environment compels Cisco to advocate for silicon diversity and full-stack innovation while internal enterprises like Google leverage AI to achieve significant productivity gains in code migration and operational workflows.
- Milken Institute41 min
Infrastructure, Investment, and Industrial Competitiveness | Global Investors' Symposium Mexico City
Alex González Ormerod, Gautam Bhandari, Ricardo Fernández-Mazarambroz, Carlos Garcia Moreno, Raul Martinez-Ostos Jaye
Panelists identified Mexico as a critical crossroads for global supply chain reconfiguration, emphasizing the urgent need to leverage decoupling from China through robust 5G infrastructure and a shift from mega-projects to mid-market logistics. While domestic pension funds (Afores) and emerging insurance capital offer significant financing potential, experts argue that attracting international investment requires standardized contracts, credit expertise, and state-level financial diagnoses to mitigate political risk. The consensus calls for immediate execution of 2–3 replicable "quick wins" within 12 months to validate the market, effectively bridging the gap between ambitious industrial policy and tangible private sector capital deployment.
- Y Combinator39 min
From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups
Case Text, led by a founder who pivoted the company to artificial intelligence in summer 2022, was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million following the successful launch of its Co-Counsel legal assistant. The speaker outlines a methodology for building reliable AI applications by combining domain expertise with granular workflow decomposition, rigorous evaluation metrics, and iterative prompt engineering to achieve near-human accuracy. Key strategic insights for scaling include adopting value-based pricing, prioritizing side-by-side human-AI pilots to build trust, and viewing proprietary data integration and evaluation frameworks as the primary sources of long-term defensibility.
- Sequoia Capital42 min
Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan: Scaling Beyond Moore's Law to Million-GPU Clusters
Michael Kagan, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady
Following NVIDIA's strategic acquisition of Mellanox in 2019, the combined entity transformed the AI landscape by shifting industry reliance from Moore's Law to a "scale-out" architecture that unifies thousands of GPUs through ultra-low latency interconnects. This integration enabled the development of specialized hardware, including Bluefield DPUs and Spectrum X switches, to overcome physical energy constraints and optimize distinct training versus inference workloads across gigawatt-scale data centers. Consequently, the partnership has driven a 45-fold increase in market capitalization while establishing a new philosophy where software-hardware co-design allows AI to function as a foundational utility for simulating complex scientific and historical phenomena.
Alfred Lin, Inside Sequoia: Launching $200M Seed Fund & $750M Venture Fund
Sequoia Partner Alfred Lin outlines a rigorous investment philosophy focused on identifying statistical "outlier" founders while providing bespoke support that functions as both crisis intervention and strategic sparring. The discussion details how successful ventures like Kaoshi and Zipline navigated long gestation periods and executed high-stakes pivots, emphasizing that capital should only fuel validated product-market fit rather than masking weak unit economics. Lin further critiques the industry's obsession with revenue velocity, arguing that sustainable growth depends on intellectual honesty regarding revenue quality and the ability to systematize operations in an increasingly competitive technological landscape.
- Milken Institute28 min
A Conversation with Carlos Slim Domit | Global Investors' Symposium Mexico City 2025
Carlos Slim Domit, Michael Milken
A strategic analysis highlights Mexico's unique investment case, driven by a young demographic, robust STEM workforce, and geographic proximity to the U.S. market to boost infrastructure and manufacturing capacity. This growth is underpinned by a national goal to raise the investment-to-GDP ratio to 28% while leveraging telecommunications networks to foster digital inclusion and a digital-first philanthropic model. Together, these factors position North America as a dominant global economic bloc, merging U.S. technological innovation with Mexico's demographic vitality for long-term stability and expansion.
- Milken Institute31 min
Private Equity's Next Move in Latin America | Global Investors' Symposium Mexico City 2025
Michael Milken, Martín Escobari, José E. Feliciano
Investment firms General Atlantic and Clear Lake are leveraging Mexico's young demographic, surplus of STEM graduates, and geopolitical decoupling from China to position the nation as a high-growth hub for nearshoring and capital deployment. With local valuations trading at a 50% discount to the U.S. and the entry of President Claudia Sheinbaum signaling reduced corruption, these organizations aim to scale operations by directing Mexican pension funds toward private equity and expanding supply chain infrastructure. This strategy seeks to transform Mexico into a $12 trillion economic zone by 2040, capitalizing on reshoring trends and a maturing financial ecosystem to double or triple employment within their portfolio companies.
- Goldman Sachs25 min
Navigating Year-End Risks: Tariffs, Credit, AI and More
Dominic Wilson, Josh Schifrin, Tom
Panelists Josh Schifrin and Dominic Wilson assessed that U.S. economic stability remains intact despite a peaked credit cycle, projecting Federal Reserve rate cuts to 3% or lower by the end of the year driven by soft labor indicators and benign inflation. While equity valuations for AI leaders and corporate debt levels warrant monitoring, the consensus holds that strong balance sheets prevent a bubble scenario and that market volatility remains largely idiosyncratic rather than systemic. The discussion further noted that fiscal sustainability concerns are currently offset by tariff revenue expectations, allowing the bond market to continue its drift toward lower yields.
- Goldman Sachs34 min
‘Culture is Everything’: Sixth Street’s Alan Waxman on Flexibility and Alpha
In the September 2025 Goldman Sachs Exchange "Great Investors" episode, 6th Street Co-CEO Alan Waxman details how the firm's $115 billion assets under management operate through a unified "one team" culture that avoids silos and prioritizes liquidity management over credit exposure. Waxman outlines strategic advantages including the $30 billion TAL cross-platform vehicle and major investments in affordable housing recapitalization, AI business model dispersion, and the global sports ecosystem. The discussion further emphasizes a rigorous hiring standard that removes high-performing individualists to maintain collective responsibility, ensuring the firm can "face the tiger" during crises while systematically identifying relative risk-reward across asset classes.
- Y Combinator39 min
Startup Advice: AI GTM, Pivoting & How To Hire
Founders entering legacy industries must select a go-to-market model—typically software-first, full-stack, or acquisition-based—while rigorously tracking automation trajectories to secure software valuations from investors. Strategic execution requires prioritizing mid-market segments for faster feedback loops and securing empowered early adopters, as AI sales tools and high-level marketing hires only succeed after founders have personally mastered their own product-market fit. Ultimately, successful scaling depends on treating hiring as a failure-prevention necessity, leveraging open-source components to build enterprise trust, and maintaining the conviction to pivot when customer conviction indicates a "great" idea is absent.
- a16z38 min
How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure
Augusto Marietti, Martin Casado, Aghi, Travis Kalanick, Sam Altman
Founders Auggie Azzurri and Marco pivoted MassShape to the open-source API gateway Kong after enduring a seven-year struggle with limited capital and visa restrictions, ultimately securing a Series B backed by Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt. This strategic shift from a failed marketplace to infrastructure allowed the company to scale to over $100 million ARR by dominating the microservices management space. Today, Kong is expanding its platform to address the emerging needs of AI agents, positioning itself as essential infrastructure for token management and LLM routing.
- Goldman Sachs30 min
Sixth Street CEO Alan Waxman on Sports Investing and Identifying Opportunities
Founded by former Goldman Sachs leaders to eliminate internal silos, Sixth Street operates as a $115 billion multi-strategy private capital firm utilizing its unique "TAO" vehicle to deploy bespoke solutions across 16 sector teams. The firm distinguishes itself by securing early-entry stakes in high-growth sectors like sports through rapid execution, while rigorously filtering personnel based on a culture of total collaboration rather than individual ego. This organizational model, which prioritizes long-term relationship building and agile risk assessment, allows the firm to navigate complex markets ranging from affordable housing to artificial intelligence without relying on traditional deployment factories.