Latest Interviews
Showing 391–405 of 892 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Goldman Sachs45 min
The future of real estate investing: Pretium’s Don Mullen on the rapidly changing asset class
Founded by former Goldman Sachs executive Don Mullen in 2012, Pretium has evolved into the largest private owner-operator of single-family homes in the United States by capitalizing on a projected long-term shift from homeownership to renting. The firm leverages its status as a leading non-qualified mortgage lender and distressed asset manager to address systemic housing shortages while expanding its operations into international markets like the UK and Canada. By integrating asset ownership with active management across approximately 150,000 units, Pretium aims to bridge the gap between institutional capital and the needs of self-employed borrowers and families seeking single-family rentals.
- Milken Institute31 min
Global Debt Levels: Opportunity to Innovate | Finance Forum 2025
Matthew Aleshire, Avinash Persaud, Stacy Swann, Heiko Thoms
A panel of international economists and policymakers convened to address the critical intersection of record-high global public debt and the urgent need for climate resilience financing, highlighting how current debt frameworks stifle essential green investments. The discussion examined structural reforms in Germany, such as new debt rules exempting defense spending, alongside the growing dominance of private creditors in developing nations which complicates traditional resolution mechanisms like the Paris Club. Experts concluded that effective solutions require MDBs to expand capital bases, greater Chinese creditor participation, and the design of shock-absorbing debt instruments that capture long-term fiscal savings from climate adaptation.
- Goldman Sachs39 min
Resilience and Change: Giles Duley & The Legacy of War Foundation
Former rock photographer Giles Dooley pivoted to humanitarian work in 2004 and became a triple amputee following a 2011 IED attack in Afghanistan. He subsequently founded the Legacy of War Foundation, which transitions from documentary photography to tangible aid projects such as the "Land for Women" initiative in Rwanda that transfers land ownership to female farmers. Dooley advocates for resilience as a gift born from suffering and critiques modern over-protection, emphasizing that sustainable peace requires removing barriers rather than simply telling stories.
- a16z26 min
The Future of Digital Workers
Level Next distinguishes itself in the AI sector by prioritizing customer outcomes over technology, recently re-architecting its Alice and Mike agents from basic prompting to fully agentic frameworks capable of planning and reasoning. The company supports this technical shift with a unique go-to-market strategy that offers free product access for validation and employs a vendor-agnostic architecture to rapidly swap model providers based on performance metrics. Underpinned by a "zero-to-one" pod structure and a hiring focus on chaos tolerance, Level Next aims to deliver anti-fragile revenue motions while educating clients on data-driven optimization over subjective perception.
- a16z32 min
Scaling Medicaid Innovation with Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, and Afia Asamoah
Rajaie Batniji, Sanjay Basu, Afia Asamoah, Vineeta Agarwala
Waymark, co-founded by Sanjay Rajagopal to address the under-resourced Medicaid population, operates as a Public Benefit Corporation that combines machine learning with community-based care to improve health outcomes. A 2023 study involving over 60,000 patients demonstrated a nearly 25% reduction in emergency room visits and hospitalizations by deploying a "Signal" risk model and intervention teams of community health workers. The company now seeks to scale its grant-funded model to health plans and primary care systems while navigating contract barriers that historically limit access to new care delivery resources.
- The Economist26 min
Not so delightful: Erdogan arrests rival
Erdogan, Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, Piotr Zalewski, Matt Yuki, Annie Crable, Kevin Torregrossa
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the arrest of opposition leader Ekrem Imamoglu and over 100 allies on politically motivated charges, a move that triggered a 12% collapse in the Turkish lira and a 9% drop in the BIST 100 index. Simultaneously, the Trump administration pressured Panama into accepting US immigration demands and infrastructure projects to safeguard the Panama Canal, while the US government faces a critical gap in exotic snake antivenom supplies that has turned the Bronx Zoo into a vital emergency medical hub for bite victims. These distinct geopolitical and domestic crises highlight the immediate economic fallout in Turkey, the strained sovereignty dynamics in Central America, and the systemic regulatory failures regarding exotic animal imports in the United States.
- a16z41 min
Why AI Voice Feels More Human Than Ever
The rapid advancement of AI voice technology has enabled near real-time, emotionally nuanced interactions that are replacing human agents in high-volume sectors such as customer service, recruiting, and logistics. Market dynamics are shifting toward specialized vertical SaaS products that leverage proprietary data moats to offer opinionated, culturally adapted conversational experiences while moving beyond simple per-minute pricing models. As latency drops and capabilities expand, voice is predicted to become the primary consumer AI interface within the next year, driving a transition from labor substitution to augmented efficiency across financial, healthcare, and operational domains.
- Y Combinator26 min
From A Pivot To Building A $9.6 Billion Payroll Company
Harj Taggar, Joshua Reeves, Hodge Tagger
Founded by three co-founders who pivoted from a failed expert advice marketplace, Gusto revolutionized the fragmented U.S. payroll industry by delivering a cloud-based, design-driven solution that replaced outdated manual processes used by major incumbents like ADP. The company initially targeted California startups with bare-bones tax filings before leveraging a landmark seed round from prominent tech founders to scale into benefits and compliance, ultimately positioning itself as an AI-powered back-office partner for small businesses. Today, Gusto continues to drive market growth by expanding its self-serve platform and launching a comprehensive compliance hub, aiming to increase the survival rate of new employers through proactive, pattern-matched operational guidance.
- The Economist20 min
In sickness and in stealth: threats to America’s CDC
Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Rebecca Jackson, Josh Roberts, David Benin
Following the inauguration of the Trump administration, the CDC has faced severe operational disruption through Executive Orders targeting DEI initiatives, a mass termination campaign involving 750 employees, and the imposition of restrictive communication protocols by the acting director and DOGE-affiliated entities. Simultaneously, silver market dynamics have shifted as institutional demand surged with Russia adding reserves to holdings and industrial requirements for solar manufacturing drove a 50% increase in consumption, outpacing gold in recent returns. In the entertainment sector, a resurgence of live album releases has emerged among major artists like Dua Lipa and The Cure, driven by post-pandemic appreciation for raw performance energy and a strategic pivot away from the studio-centric production models that dominated the late 20th century.
- The Economist25 min
Wheels of justice: the ICC gets Duterte at last
Duterte, Jason Palmer, Aaron Connolly, John Joe Devlin, Cassio de Gea, Tobias Adielson, Charmec Elmi, Anne Rowe
The International Criminal Court successfully transferred former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to The Hague for trial on crimes against humanity related to his "war on drugs," a move enabled by a political rift between his family and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Concurrently, Sweden confronts an unprecedented surge in gang violence involving coordinated bombings and the recruitment of vulnerable minors, prompting legislative changes regarding wiretapping and intensified debate over immigration policies. In a separate development, celebrated apartheid-era playwright Athol Fugard passed away at age 92, leaving a literary legacy that chronicled the moral complexities of South African oppression and the enduring resilience of its people.
- Y Combinator38 min
Figma's Dylan Field: Exploring the idea maze, vibe coding, and the power of “locking in”
Co-founded by Dylan Field, Figma evolved from a series of early pivots into a dominant collaborative design platform that successfully integrated engineers and product managers alongside traditional designers. The company's trajectory was shaped by a user-driven roadmap that birthed features like FigJam and an internal culture of "Maker Weeks," which emphasized rapid iteration over long-term planning. Field's current strategy leverages AI strictly as a capability-enhancing tool to lower participation barriers while acknowledging its inability to replicate human judgment in complex design contexts.
- a16z42 min
Agent Experience: Building an Open Web for the AI Era
Netlify is pivoting its strategy from Developer Experience to Agent Experience (AX) to ensure the open web remains the native environment for autonomous AI agents rather than content relegated to walled gardens. Driven by a surge where approximately 10,000 sites are generated daily by AI tools, the company advocates for new infrastructure primitives and formal standards to support ephemeral applications and direct machine-to-web interactions. This initiative aims to democratize high-fidelity creation while redefining the web's architectural future against a backdrop of rapidly converging creation costs and shifting developer roles.
- a16z27 min
DeepSeek, Reasoning Models, and the Future of LLMs
Guido Appenzeller, Marco Mascorro
DeepSeek R1 is an open-weight reasoning model from China that achieves top-tier performance by combining Multi-Head Latent Attention, Group Relative Policy Optimization, and a 256-expert MoE architecture to generate complex thought chains. The development team overcame early behavioral failures through a low-cost, self-supervised pipeline utilizing 800,000 verifiable traces and rule-based verification to produce responses up to 10,000 tokens long for roughly $5.5 million in base training costs. This breakthrough has shifted industry focus toward test-time compute and local deployment, enabling state-of-the-art reasoning on consumer hardware while bypassing traditional bottlenecks associated with human-labeled data.
- Milken Institute30 min
MacArthur Genius Raj Chetty Talks Economic Opportunity Creation | Global Conference 2024
Using anonymized tax data and social network analysis, researchers have identified that high-opportunity neighborhoods and "economic connectedness" between income groups are the primary drivers of upward mobility, contrasting sharply with the national decline where only 50% of children born in the mid-1980s now earn more than their parents. A randomized Seattle trial demonstrated that adding brokerage services to housing vouchers successfully moved over half of low-income families to these high-mobility areas, yielding an estimated $200,000 lifetime earnings increase per child for a mere 2% cost increase. While place-based investments and private sector partnerships in cities like Charlotte show promise, future policy efforts are expanding the voucher model to nine additional cities to systematically address the loss of talent and inequality affecting both social equity and innovation.
- The Economist23 min
Buck off: US pauses Ukraine aid
Rosie Bloor, Shashank Joshi, Carlos Superana, Alexandra Sewich Bass
The White House has suspended over $1 billion in US military aid to Ukraine as leverage to force President Zelensky into negotiations, threatening long-term logistical deficits in artillery, air defense, and intelligence sharing despite immediate front-line stability. Simultaneously, stablecoin adoption has surged in Turkey to 40% of global transactions for inflation hedging and commerce, prompting tightening global regulations and US legislative efforts to harness digital assets for dollar dominance while addressing audit risks. In a separate cultural pivot, the Louvre launched its first fashion gala to raise $800 million for renovations by pairing high-fashion designs with historical artifacts, distinguishing its revenue model from criticized commercial exhibitions.