Latest Interviews
Showing 16–30 of 1,573 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Goldman Sachs24 min
Arun Gupta on Bringing Silicon Valley’s Spirit to Public Service
Noble Reach establishes a "community of dual citizens" by placing private-sector innovators into 2-3 year federal rotations to address critical generational talent gaps within US government technology sectors. Supported by strategic partners like Goldman Sachs, the organization deploys scholars to solve complex problems in state, local, and federal agencies while leveraging bipartisan mentorship and technical training to decouple public service from political ideology. This "residency match" model aims to foster long-term career resilience and global competitiveness against adversaries practicing civil-military fusion, ultimately validating public service as both altruistic and professionally advantageous.
Lumentum CEO: How Lasers Are Transforming AI Data Centers
Michael Hurlston, Tony Kim, Molly O'Shea
Under CEO Michael Hurlston, Lumentum has transformed from a diversified manufacturer into a pure-play data center optical leader, tripling revenue and driving its stock price up to 12-fold by capitalizing on the industry's rapid shift from copper to fiber connectivity. This transition, necessitated by the physical limitations of copper in high-speed environments, is straining the specialized Indium Phosphide supply chain due to long lead times for dedicated fabrication facilities. Facing tens of millions in new hyperscaler orders, the company is simultaneously expanding into space-based internet infrastructure and navigating geopolitical dynamics that favor U.S. domestic suppliers over Chinese competitors.
- Goldman Sachs20 min
What the Surge in IPOs Means for Investors
Jay Ritter, Owen Lamont, Allison Nathan
Goldman Sachs Research reports that the U.S. IPO market reached record issuance levels in 2026 while maintaining average valuations that distinguish current activity from historical speculative bubbles. Analyst Jay Ritter and Owen Lamont offer diverging perspectives on this surge, with Ritter arguing deep capital markets can absorb new supply without overvaluation, whereas Lamont warns that a massive wave of issuance signals the early stages of a potential bubble. Both experts agree that structural shifts, including expanded private markets and industry consolidation, have permanently reduced the average annual IPO count to roughly 100, fundamentally altering the relationship between new listings and future market returns.
- a16z42 min
Fei-Fei Li is Solving the Hardest Problem in Robotics | World Labs with a16z
Fei-Fei Li, Martin Casado, Yunzhu Li
World Labs is acquiring Cynics to fuse its generative "Marble" spatial intelligence model with advanced robotics simulation, creating a scalable pipeline that replaces dangerous physical data collection with reliable digital environments. Led by CEO Fei-Fei Li alongside Cynics' leadership team, the merged entity will deploy this technology in semi-structured industrial settings to train multimodal "omni models" capable of counterfactual reasoning and efficient robot control. This strategic integration aims to validate a robust "real-to-sim-to-real" framework with early commercial customers before addressing the complexities of unstructured human environments.
- Y Combinator39 min
Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"
Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Garry Tan
Sam Altman and Y Combinator highlight an exponential shift in startup capabilities where coding agents reduce development time to mere seconds while hard tech representation in the portfolio surges to 25%. The organization positions itself as a decentralizing force to prevent single-entity control of AI power, explicitly rejecting the "live action role play" mindset in favor of heretical, high-conviction building. Altman warns of safety risks regarding surveillance and model concentration but maintains that widespread founder agency and distributed innovation will ultimately prevent economic collapse or catastrophic safety incidents.
- Y Combinator36 min
Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt
The Opus 5 model release demonstrates a 30% score on the ARC AGI benchmark and unprecedented autonomous endurance by eliminating over 80% of legacy system prompts through an empirical ablation methodology. This shift enabled dynamic workflows where thousands of agents autonomously rewrote complex software stacks like the Bunn runtime and Cloud Code desktop app in mere days. Strategic advice for developers emphasizes replacing rigid prompt engineering with context design and verification protocols to leverage these emergent agentic capabilities effectively.
Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition
Cognition has secured a $26 billion valuation and $500 million in revenue by deploying its autonomous AI engineer, Devon, to solve complex engineering tasks for major clients like Goldman Sachs and NASA. The company recently consolidated its operations by acquiring the 200-person Windsurf IDE team, creating a unified hybrid environment where local coding and remote cloud agents collaborate seamlessly. Founder Scott Wu emphasizes an immediate "abundance era" of software mass-creation over human obsolescence, while maintaining model neutrality and refusing integration into larger tech conglomerates as the firm prepares to demonstrate its self-driving software capabilities at the upcoming RAISE AI summit in Paris.
- Goldman Sachs20 min
Can Markets Withstand AI Risks, Fed Hikes, and Oil Shocks?
Tony Pasquariello, Josh Schiffrin, Dominic Wilson
Dominic and Josh analyze how supply shortages in AI infrastructure and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East are creating a complex investment environment driven by oil market friction and Federal Reserve policy shifts. While the S&P 500 remains near record highs, the duo warns that diverging market performance from lived economic reality, combined with intensifying inflation pressures and a move away from central bank guidance, signals potential volatility ahead. Consequently, they highlight a strategic pivot toward the long end of the yield curve and credit markets, suggesting that concentrated asset exposure is prudent as liquidity is expected to thin in the coming months.
- Y Combinator29 min
What Big Tech Missed And How Startups Can Still Win
Alexandre LeBrun, Zuckerberg, Jan, Alex
Ami Labs is raising approximately one billion euros in seed funding to develop foundational world models that train on sensory data rather than text, addressing the limitations of current large language models for robotics applications. Co-founded by Alex K. and Yann LeCun following their shared history at Meta and various startups, the Paris-based company aims to build general-purpose robots capable of operating safely in open environments by solving the compute bottlenecks and latency issues inherent in existing vision-language-action architectures. While the venture tackles the high capital demands of securing thousands of GPUs and top-tier talent, it operates under a strict strategic constraint where failure to deliver visible progress within two years could render the company unsustainable due to the intense external expectations created by the massive funding round.
- Y Combinator20 min
Why Physical AI Is the Next Platform Shift
Anchored, founded by former quantitative trader Eric Landau, constructs the data layer for physical AI by managing petabytes of multimodal data to power robotics and autonomous systems. After pivoting from healthcare vision to broader industrial applications, the company established a production-ready facility in the Bay Area and refined its sales culture through iterative hiring challenges. With the post-ChatGPT market accelerating demand for specialized physical AI infrastructure, Anchored now leads a crowded sector by offering scalable data collection that moves clients from proof-of-concept to enterprise production.
- Y Combinator30 min
What Top AI Labs Are Really Doing With Observability
Founded by IBM veterans Olivier Pomel and Alexi Laurent, Datadog disrupted the monitoring industry by merging Dev and Ops into a single platform, overcoming initial Y Combinator rejections and regional venture capital biases to achieve a 2019 IPO. Under a leadership philosophy that prioritizes direct customer engagement over written values, the company has expanded its product suite to serve top AI firms while executing a radical shift where engineers will primarily automate code generation within two quarters. This strategic pivot aims to drastically increase development velocity and reorganize the company around smaller, high-autonomy teams, even as it navigates post-lockup valuation volatility and the rapid evolution of AI-driven observability.
- Bank of America21 min
Global Rates & FX Views: Hyperscalers, credit, & rates
Mark Cabana, Yuri Seliger, Meghan Swiber, Yuri Sigler
U.S. credit markets remain resilient despite a 30% year-over-year supply surge, though hyperscaler bonds have uniquely widened due to Amazon's weak 2.5x subscription and shifting issuance dynamics. While net bond supply remains neutralized by a Treasury bill shift, investment funds are extending duration in IG spreads even as the Federal Reserve faces a 35% probability of an unexpected July rate hike to combat inflation. Future market stability hinges on upcoming hyperscaler earnings and whether issuers maintain aggressive capital raising despite emerging signs of investor demand fatigue.
- Y Combinator44 min
He Built the World's #1 Open-Source Coding Agent
Jay V, Gary Tan, Mark Mandelmann, Seth Vargoevic, Frank, Dax, Dylan Patel, Soyal, PG, Jay Poldinger
OpenCode, a sixteen-year-old platform founded by Jay Poldinger and Frank, has grown to 13 million monthly active users and processes 7 trillion daily tokens by serving as a neutral model harness that bypasses vendor lock-in. The company's strategy of supporting over 70 open-source models, which became critical after Anthropic restricted open usage, generated $160,000 in monthly subscription revenue and an estimated $33 million in inference revenue as of June. With significant adoption in China, Brazil, and the United States, OpenCode validates its product-market fit through enterprise organizations that proactively seek security agreements to integrate its agent loops into internal workflows.
- Y Combinator22 min
How Photoroom Trained Themselves To Dream Bigger
PhotoRoom, the largest Y Combinator company headquartered in Europe, leveraged a strategic pivot to e-commerce photography to achieve 300 million downloads and serve major clients like Amazon and Uber. Its founders attribute this exponential growth to a cultural shift fostered by YC, which replaced European risk aversion with a "failure-safe" mindset that treats a billion-dollar valuation as an attainable target. By enforcing English-only offices, prioritizing deep vertical focus, and utilizing aggressive resource constraints, the company instilled a mandatory ambition across its team to drive rapid scaling and execution speed.
- Y Combinator31 min
How Supabase Became One Of The Fastest Growing DevTool Companies In The World
Supabase founder Paul Copplestone recently secured a $500 million round at a valuation exceeding $10 billion, propelling the company to decacorn status with a 10 million developer base driven largely by AI agents launching 60-90% of new databases. The fully distributed organization leverages its open-source PostgreSQL strategy and a shift toward Infrastructure as Code to achieve exponential usage growth, reducing time-to-value from minutes to seconds while bypassing traditional marketing channels. Moving beyond standard user interfaces, Supabase is now building self-driving database capabilities and "Infrastructure for Platforms" to support enterprise labs managing millions of ephemeral instances autonomously.