Latest Interviews
Showing 91–105 of 2,630 transcripts.
Clear all filters- 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.
- RAISE Summit39 min
The AI Gold Rush: Models Are Shovels, Data Is the Gold | RAISE Summit 2026
Gareth Davies, Will Bryk, Dmitry Panenkov, Mark Surman, Alex Bouzari, Akhil Ahuja
This panel features industry leaders from Okta, DDN, Mozilla, Emma, and Exa discussing the strategic pivot from model-centric AI to a data-driven economy where proprietary data quality and security determine competitive advantage. Experts highlighted critical infrastructure challenges, noting that 48% of enterprises fail to secure AI agents while emphasizing the urgent need for sovereign data solutions and fair data markets to unlock the exponential costs of agentic inference. The discussion concluded that future enterprise success relies on "data network effects" and robust governance frameworks, as organizations transition from experimental sandboxes to production environments driven by headless, agent-based architectures.
- 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.
- RAISE Summit39 min
The Trillion Dollar Question: Financing AI's Infrastructure | Modular, IREN & More | RAISE 2026
Tim Davis, Kent Draper, James B. Krellenstein, Wayne Nelms, Erwan Menard, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Jeremy, Tim Buckley, James Kallenstein
The AI infrastructure sector is undergoing a structural shift toward extreme capital intensity, prompting neoclouds like Iron and Crusoe to adopt complex financing models that blend investment-grade debt, Microsoft prepayments, and diverse revenue streams such as token sales. Simultaneously, industry leaders are addressing asset lifecycle mismatches and energy bottlenecks by leveraging software-driven fungibility for non-NVIDIA silicon and securing "behind-the-meter" nuclear uprates to bypass regulatory delays. This evolving landscape enables lenders to backstop sub-investment grade counterparts while hyperscalers vertically integrate to capture higher margins, ultimately transforming compute into a standardized, tradable commodity.
- RAISE Summit21 min
Energy and AI: Sustainable, Sovereign Industrial Campuses | Alain Wilmouth, 2CRSi | RAISE 2026
2CRSI advances its direct liquid cooling technology through the ITER consortium to power a French AI gigafactory while addressing energy mandates and carbon sovereignty via biomass gasification. The company plans to scale operations from 42 to 400 megawatts across 17 decentralized European sites by 2030, offering on-premise infrastructure that protects intellectual property against geopolitical restrictions. This strategy leverages unused agricultural land to generate jobs and targets space-deployable server models, positioning the firm as a leader in sustainable, sovereign high-performance computing.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Fireside Chat with William Falcon & Ozan Kaya of Lightning AI | RAISE Summit 2026
William Falcon, Ozan Kaya, Olivier Huez, Will
Following a rapid expansion to 160 employees, Voltage Park merged with Lightning.ai to transition from a GPU-as-a-service provider into a full-stack platform serving Gen AI enterprises. This combination integrates 24,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs across six data centers with Will's software tooling to help clients own their open-source models rather than relying on hyperscalers. The strategic alliance addresses the market gap for dedicated compute, prioritizing high-uptime infrastructure and digital sovereignty for customers like Cursor.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Why the Next Marketing Giant Will Be Hyperlocal, Not Global | HubKonnect | RAISE Summit 2026
Michael outlines a critical market shift where enterprise marketing transitions from national campaigns to hyperlocal activation driven by a centralized intelligence layer that compounds data across millions of location-specific points. This operational reset requires C-suite alignment to replace obsolete agency models with an "Ecosystem as a Service" approach, ensuring data reciprocity and transforming marketers into real-time profit center drivers using Hyperlocal Intelligence. Ultimately, the differentiator for future growth lies not in isolated SaaS tools but in "better operators" who leverage proprietary datasets to execute culture shifts that empower rapid, data-informed decision-making at the individual unit level.