Latest Interviews

'Future of Search in the Age of AI' Perplexity CEO, Aravind Srinivas | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Aravind Srinivas, Irvine

Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas and his team have launched an answer engine that replaces traditional search link lists with sourced, direct responses to bypass the advertising incentives misaligning Google with user utility. Leveraging a model-agnostic orchestration architecture and a founding team spanning research and competitive programming, the platform prioritizes factual accuracy and source verification over open-ended creativity to minimize AI hallucinations. While currently operating on lower margins than incumbent search giants, the company aims to establish a new consumer-aligned monetization framework that transforms the web from a collection of links into a verified knowledge infrastructure.

Jared Cohen on US leaders finding purpose post-presidency

Jared Cohen, John F.W. Rogers

Jared's new #9 New York Times bestseller analyzes the historical trajectories of post-presidencies through four distinct case studies, including William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, George W. Bush, and Grover Cleveland. By examining how these leaders successfully deferred ambitions, recovered from defeat, detached from former power, or faced the limitations of a political comeback, the work illustrates that the institution's resilience relies on evolving norms rather than constitutional text alone. The author argues that longevity and fulfillment in retirement require abandoning the vanity of office to pursue new service or hobbies, offering a framework for navigating life after the presidency regardless of political affiliation.

Are inflation fears overblown? The outlook for inflation, US growth, and long-term rates

David Mericle, Alison Nathan

Goldman Sachs projects U.S. GDP growth of 2.5% in 2024, driven by labor supply expansions from immigration that prevent overheating despite disinflation from shelter rents. The firm argues the neutral interest rate has structurally shifted to 3.0%–3.5%, forecasting Federal Reserve rate cuts beginning in July 2024 as financial conditions remain accommodative. This outlook suggests a balanced labor market and mechanical rent adjustments will allow inflation to trend toward 2.5% without triggering wage-price spirals.

Advancing Inclusion Through Leadership with Boston Athletic Association’s Dr. Cheri Blauwet

Dr. Cheri Blauwet, Dean Athanasia

Dr. Sherry Blauwet, a Paralympic medalist and former Boston Athletic Association chair, leads the Boston Marathon bombing anniversary's expanded mission to prioritize year-round community health through the newly established Kelly Adaptive Sports Research Institute. Her strategy reframes adaptive sports as a public health solution for over 25% of U.S. adults by leveraging corporate partnerships and a small grants program to support diverse physical activity needs. Blauwet drives this initiative by challenging societal lowered expectations and promoting leadership intentionality, aiming to transform public perception of disability while maintaining a focus on fun and accessibility for all age groups.

Capital Group’s Rob Lovelace on long-term investing, succession planning, and leadership lessons

Rob Lovelace, Betsy Gorton

Capital Group leverages its unique multi-manager "Capital System" to manage $2.5 trillion in assets by utilizing five to six distinct portfolio managers per fund, a structure designed to smooth volatility and ensure continuity without relying on star manager branding. This private-ownership model, supported by custom proprietary software and an eight-year bonus cycle, enables the firm to withstand market cycles while advising on macro trends such as avoiding direct Chinese equity exposure in favor of multinationals and capitalizing on Japan's recovery from deflation. By prioritizing long-term style consistency over short-term client demands for single-point accountability, the firm maintains active equity leadership in public markets while cautiously exploring partnerships in alternative assets.

How To Build Generative AI Models Like OpenAI's Sora

The event analyzes OpenAI's Sora model, highlighting its breakthrough in text rendering and temporal consistency while noting persistent flaws in physical logic and immense computational demands. It details how YC startups like Infinity AI and Sonato are achieving comparable results through data efficiency, synthetic training, and optimized model architectures rather than massive scale. The discussion concludes by projecting how these physics-simulating AI techniques will accelerate scientific discovery in fields ranging from weather prediction to drug discovery.

How Vuori’s Joe Kudla went from accountant to fashion industry success

Joe Kudla, David Solomon

Viore founder and CEO Joe Kudla transformed a failed apparel background into building a $4 billion men's performance brand that secured a landmark SoftBank investment by pivoting from wholesale to a direct-to-consumer model. The company successfully expanded its revenue composition to include a women's line and entered international markets in China and Korea while maintaining profitability and avoiding unnecessary dilution through secondary offerings. Guided by a culture of strategic alignment, Kudla's leadership team navigated early industry skepticism to establish Viore as a premium lifestyle brand focused on versatile activewear rather than niche yoga apparel.

Related Companies’ Jeff Blau on Building Hudson Yards

Jeff Blau, John Waldron

Related Companies CEO Jeff Blau transformed a derelict railyard in New York City into the 15-million-square-foot Hudson Yards district by executing a resilient mixed-use strategy that navigated the 2008 financial crisis. To address the regulatory and environmental challenges posed by Local Law 97, Blau founded Energy Re, a subsidiary launching a historic $12 billion renewable energy initiative designed to supply 16% of the city's power through utility-scale wind and solar generation. This dual approach integrates large-scale affordable housing with massive infrastructure projects, proving that aligning corporate capital with public utility goals can drive both economic growth and decarbonization.

The Electric Grid, Explained

Ryan McEntush

Amidst a critical transformer leak and record heat that threatens Texas's independent grid, the event details systemic vulnerabilities in the U.S. power infrastructure, including three-interconnection limits and severe supply chain bottlenecks that delay critical upgrades. Experts highlight an impending energy gap driven by data center expansion and electrification, which current storage and generation models struggle to balance without massive investment in long-duration solutions and nuclear technology. Consequently, policymakers face urgent decisions to modernize aging lines and reform interconnection queues to prevent reliability failures reminiscent of past blackouts or the South African energy crisis.

Trust, reliability, and safety in AI ft. Daniela Amodei of Anthropic and Sonya Huang

Daniela Amodei, Sonya Huang

Anthropic, a Public Benefit Corporation founded three years ago to prioritize trustworthy generative AI, recently launched its Claude 3 model family featuring the high-complexity Opus, the cost-efficient Haiku, and the enterprise-focused Sonnet. These models deliver state-of-the-art coding proficiency and reduced hallucination rates, enabling adoption across sectors from healthcare's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to financial firms like Bridgewater. Despite ongoing challenges in fully autonomous agent behavior, the company continues to advance safety through its pioneering Constitutional AI techniques and proactive Responsible Scaling Policy to align technical capability with human values.

Open sourcing the AI ecosystem ft. Arthur Mensch of Mistral AI and Matt Miller

Arthur Mensch, Matt Miller

Founded in April 2023 by Arthur Conch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée, Mistral AI accelerates global AI adoption through a dual strategy of rapid open-source releases and high-performance commercial models like Mistral Large. The company leverages its French headquarters to access cost-efficient engineering talent while forging strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Snowflake, and Databricks to deploy stateful AI directly within enterprise data clouds. Looking ahead, Mistral plans to expand its European language dominance and introduce multimodal capabilities, aiming to evolve from serverless APIs into a comprehensive ecosystem of customizable, autonomous agents.

Nick Abouzeid, Rivet: Growth "Hacking" Myths, What Worked at Ramp, & Better Tax Services

Nick Abouzeid, Molly O'Shea

Former Ramp Growth Lead Nick Abouzaid and co-founder Kyle launched Rivet, a venture-backed tax preparation firm designed to combine human expertise with technology to address fragmentation in the industry. Backed by a pre-seed round from XYZ Ventures and supported by over 40 executives from top firms, the company utilizes existing tax platforms like Drake while developing proprietary front-end tools to improve client responsiveness and automate manual data entry. The founders emphasize a strict operational framework where growth is driven by singular metric ownership and high-impact testing rather than complex experiments, aiming to build a long-term, multi-billion dollar service firm.

Why Founders Shouldn't Think Like Investors

Dalton, Michael

Dalton and Michael argue that early-stage founders trained in venture capital or corporate consulting often fail by applying large-company frameworks like extensive market analysis and exit planning to pre-product startups. This "VC mindset" creates analysis paralysis and a detachment from the critical "micro" work of manually acquiring the first customer, whereas successful execution requires a "beginner's mind" focused on deep user immersion and domain expertise. The speakers conclude that founders must unlearn these counterproductive habits to embrace the uncertainty of the zero-to-one phase and leverage the flexibility needed to navigate early business failure.

Bringing AI to the Masses with Adam D'Angelo, CEO of Quora

Adam D'Angelo, David George, Sarah Wang, Max Wiethe, Dan Morehead, Matt Rowe

Former Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo launched Poe as a multi-platform aggregator to navigate the shift from human-centric knowledge publishing to an instant, multi-model chat paradigm driven by generative AI. The platform differentiates itself by supporting diverse fine-tuned models and an open API that enables independent creators to deploy specialized tools while sharing revenue to offset high inference costs. D'Angelo anticipates a bifurcated market where Poe serves the downstream application layer of accessible AI, eventually evolving into a symbiotic network that complements Quora's human expertise with scalable automated agents.

Global transit & trade: in rough waters

Admiral James Stavridis, Tobias Meyer, Alison Nathan, James Stavridis

Admiral James Stavridis warns that maritime risks have reached unprecedented levels due to great power competition, state-sponsored terrorism, and vulnerabilities in undersea internet infrastructure, while Tobias Mayer analyzes supply chain shifts driven by regulatory complexity rather than physical disruptions. Despite Houthi attacks in the Red Sea causing a 10–20% rise in logistics costs, the global shipping fleet remains resilient enough to absorb reroutes without systemic failure as companies adopt omnishoring strategies to diversify assembly locations. Ultimately, the convergence of these geopolitical tensions and evolving trade patterns suggests a future where security coalitions must balance military deterrence against China and Russia while adapting commercial networks to manage increased operational costs and regulatory fragmentation.