Latest Interviews

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: Why Venture Capital is Broken & How Great Companies Are Built

Roelof Botha, Jason Calacanis

Sequoia Capital, led by a third generation of partners, sustains its legacy by prioritizing long-term value creation and consensus decision-making over aggressive fee maximization. The firm counters industry capital overhang by deploying proprietary AI tools and maintaining a selective investment strategy that has historically generated trillions in public market value through companies like Apple and Nvidia. While navigating geopolitical shifts by separating its Chinese operations and adapting to a regulatory landscape that has drastically reduced startup formation there, Sequoia continues to back founders with exceptional curiosity despite unconventional profiles.

The Shutdown’s Economic Impact

Alec Phillips, Alison Nathan

A partisan role reversal has precipitated a broad federal government shutdown as Democrats withhold support for clean spending bills to demand the extension of ACA health insurance subsidies, a move that polling suggests is driving voter blame toward Republicans. The crisis faces a critical resolution pressure point on October 15 when active-duty military personnel miss a pay cycle, a deadline that historically compels congressional action to avoid widespread economic disruption. While the shutdown projects to reduce Q4 GDP by approximately 0.3 percentage points and delay key economic data releases, market analysts and the Federal Reserve anticipate the stalemate will resolve quickly through a targeted fiscal compromise.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on AI, Censorship & the Future of Creators

Neal Mohan, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Ari

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan outlined the platform's dominance with 2 billion monthly active users and over $70 billion paid to creators, while addressing tensions between its 55/45 revenue model and high-profile creators who opt for direct monetization. Mohan defended YouTube's algorithmic fragmentation as a driver of niche engagement while highlighting new AI initiatives that prioritize creator likeness rights and transparency labels over blanket bans. The discussion further detailed strategies to balance global moderation complexities with evolving regulations and a renewed focus on YouTube Premium and TV to reinvent the viewer experience.

Contentsquare & Eurazeo: From Data Rich to AI Smart Reinventing a Scale Up in Real Time

Anne-Charlotte Filbert, Ilan, Remy

Eurazeo's Anne-Charlotte Filbert and Content Square's Ilan analyzed the latter's strategic pivot from a traditional analytics provider to an AI-native platform following a 2023 acquisition of Heap. Driven by CEO John, the company restructured its organizational culture and product roadmap to prioritize agentic workflows, launching proactive "Sense" insights while implementing strict security protocols for tools like Gemini and Dust. The discussion concluded that future market survival hinges on the "velocity" of leadership to transform late-stage enterprises, contrasting Content Square's scale with the agility required for AI-native success.

A Fireside Chat with Sébastien Verger, CTO at Dell Technologies ft.The French Tech Journal

Sébastien Verger, Francois Beaufort

Dell positioned AI as a core strategic pillar through its "Dell AI Factory," addressing the critical challenge where 80% of proof-of-concepts fail to reach production by emphasizing data quality and secure on-premises deployment. The company highlighted its logistical prowess in rapidly scaling infrastructure for partners like XAI and Mistral AI while launching tools such as Dell Pro AI Studio to enable local model execution on AI PCs. Looking toward the next five years, Dell anticipates healthcare breakthroughs in personalized cancer treatments and champions sovereign European data strategies to ensure sustainable, responsible AI governance.

Adrian McDermott, CTO, Zendesk: What CX Teaches Us About AI And The Future Of Work

Adrian McDermott, Joseph

During a presentation on enterprise AI transformation, Zendesk representatives detailed how their platform now supports 15,000 generative AI users and redefines customer service as a critical revenue engine where 94% of value derives from support interactions. The company outlined a strategic shift toward outcome-based pricing and the development of voice-enabled agents, aiming to reduce the customer service market's dependence on human labor by the end of the decade. Data from 33 million analyzed tickets suggests that AI will primarily address upstream business failures and low-value queries, allowing human agents to focus on high-empathy tasks that prevent churn.

Windsurf, BUZZ HPC, Gnosis, ElevenLabs, Prosus & Bloomberg: The Agentic Economy AI’s Unseen Hand

Rachel Metz, Tim Cowley, Jero, Alex, Matty, Maria Zuber, Matias Niemelaer, Andrzej Baliczak

A diverse panel of industry leaders from BuzzHPC, Prozus, Windsurf, and 11 Labs defined AI agents as autonomous systems requiring multi-modal feedback loops to drive enterprise adoption. Real-world deployments at companies like DHL and Prozus have demonstrated significant operational gains, including 20% faster delivery times and a 1.7 million-hour productivity increase, while OpenAI's $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf validates the technology's strategic value in software engineering. Despite hurdles regarding data disambiguation and regulatory compliance, the panel predicts a shift toward a task-based internet where agents outperform human operators in efficiency and revenue generation.

Base Power Raises $1B led by Addition, with Trust Ventures, Lightspeed, a16z, Altimeter, Elad Gil

Elad Gil, Zach Dell, Justin Lopas, Molly O'Shea

Base secured an oversubscribed $1 billion Series C led by Addition, accelerating from its previous $200 million round to fund its "Speed to Power" product designed to bypass traditional grid interconnection delays for data centers. Backed by strategic investors like Lennar and Starwood alongside founders from SpaceX and Tesla, the company is deploying gigawatt-scale battery capacity from its Austin "Factory One" at a target rate of 100 megawatts per month. This capital infusion supports a strategic pivot to replace fossil fuels with cost-efficient solar and storage, aiming to solve critical energy bottlenecks for AI development while expanding operations into high-solar states like California and Florida.

A fireside Chat with Mati Staniszewski, CEO & Co-Founder of Eleven Labs ft. Balderton Capital

Mati Staniszewski, James Wise

Founded by Mati Kovacs and Peter, Eleven Labs has evolved from addressing Polish film dubbing limitations into a global AI voice leader operating with offices in the US, Europe, India, and Japan. The company currently executes a dual strategy of frontier research and application development, delivering production-ready voice agents for healthcare scheduling and interactive entertainment while distinguishing itself through high-fidelity dialect recognition and a creator marketplace that has paid over $5 million. Looking forward, leadership is prioritizing a three-tier trust framework for safety and a technical pivot toward combining cascaded reliability with end-to-end Duplex models to achieve human-like latency in the coming year.

Scaleway & SemiAnalysis: Unlocking AI's Potential Insights from Deploying Europe's Most Advanced

Scaleway launched Europe's largest Hopper GPU cluster in 2023 to secure data sovereignty and prevent U.S. hyperscaler dominance, now hosting major AI players like Mistral for training and inference. The provider is advancing "Project ION," a consortium-backed initiative aiming to build capacity equivalent to 280,000 H100 chips with private capital while seeking government demand assurance rather than direct subsidies. Operating across five European regions, Scaleway positions itself as a full-stack public cloud solution that prioritizes legal immunity from U.S. laws over domestic hardware manufacturing, targeting a consolidated market of EU-based public and private AI consumers.

Poolside AI, IREN, Forbes: From 10x to 100x Building AI Systems for Real World Scale

Emma Allen, Dennis Skriniop, Isa Kent

Dennis Skriniop of Iron and Isa Kent of Poolside discuss the critical infrastructure and energy requirements for scaling foundation models toward human-level intelligence. Kent outlines Poolside's $500 million investment in automating a "model factory" that executes 1,800 monthly experiments, emphasizing that 80% of success relies on distributed systems engineering rather than algorithmic discovery. Skriniop and Kent further analyze the necessity of hybrid power grids, disaggregated storage architectures, and the emerging role of specialized "Neo-Clouds" to address the exponential complexity of operating clusters exceeding 10,000 GPUs.

Inception Fund & AI: From Inception to Exit Building AI Giants from Europe and the Nordics

Peter Sarlin, Oliver

Former professor Peter Sarlin founded the private AI lab Silo AI in 2017 and led the bootstrapped company to a $700 million exit when acquired by AMD in 2022, establishing the largest pure-play AI acquisition in Europe. Sarlin attributes this success to a contrarian philosophy that prioritized functional machine learning over hype while hiring primarily from academia, resulting in a workforce of over 220 AI scientists before the strategic sale. Beyond this specific case study, Sarlin highlights that the fragmentation of the European single market remains the primary barrier preventing regional startups from scaling into trillion-dollar enterprises, forcing founders to adopt a global-first strategy despite Europe's strengths in industrial AI applications.

Oege De Moor (XBOW) & Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter): Hackers with GPUs Offensive Security in the AI Era

Oege De Moor, Apoorv Agrawal, Uhey Dhimur

Altimeter Capital-backed startup Expo has deployed an autonomous AI agent that ranks as the world's top ethical hacker, identifying over 1,200 vulnerabilities including critical zero-days in enterprise giants like Palo Alto Networks and Salesforce within a single week. This superhuman capability forces a strategic industry shift toward AI-driven defense to combat a "skill shortage" in malicious actors that has enabled nation-states to automate attacks with unprecedented speed. While the market anticipates a major cyber incident within twelve months due to rising AI-generated code risks, human security roles are expected to evolve from technical execution to the strategic orchestration of these autonomous systems.

Anjney Midha of a16z: Algorithmic Independence The Next Frontier in National Infrastructure

Anjney Midha

The event defines Sovereign AI as a four-tiered strategy for achieving technical and cultural independence, utilizing methods like mid-training to correct deep-seated biases rather than simple fine-tuning. As nations transition from closed-source prototypes to open-source models, a geopolitical divide is emerging where "hypercenters" like the US and China face competition from Europe's "Mistral Compute" initiative while non-hypercent nations adopt joint-venture models to retain value. The discussion concludes with predictions that general-purpose robotics and universal computer use will mature within two years, leveraging Europe's specific strengths in computer vision to secure its strategic position in the global AI landscape.

Bruno Gagliardo, Global Head of Data & AI @ Sanofi : Molecule to Market, Driving AI Transformation

Bruno Gagliardo, Larry Orimoloe

Sanofi CEO Bruno Gagliardo unveiled a five-year strategy to transform the pharmaceutical giant into a "pharma tech" leader by migrating 85,000 employees to a cloud-based data mesh architecture powered by large-scale AI. The initiative integrates the RAISE governance framework and a $100 million impact barrier to mitigate hallucination risks while accelerating drug discovery and regulatory submissions from 19 weeks down to five. This cultural shift prioritizes AI augmentation over replacement, utilizing agentic systems and a hybrid build-or-buy approach to deliver substantial efficiency gains across research, manufacturing, and commercial operations.