Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 63 transcripts.
Clear all filtersInside the Factory Behind Base Power's $1B Series D
Base Power recently secured a $1 billion Series D funding round led by Ribbit and JPMorgan Chase, establishing a $13 billion valuation to accelerate production of its high-capacity BaseCore home battery system. The vertically integrated manufacturer is scaling operations at its Austin facility to 4,000 units weekly, featuring a modular design that enables full-home backup power in under two hours per unit. This growth supports a strategic rollout of both direct consumer sales and utility partnership models across key regional markets as the company prepares to open a second factory near the Austin airport.
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.
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.
Hyperscalers Are Out of Capacity? | MongoDB CEO
Driven by hyperscaler capacity shortages and stringent data sovereignty requirements, major enterprises are migrating workloads back on-premises while adopting heterogeneous AI architectures to manage complex agentic environments. CEO CJ Desai leads MongoDB's strategic response by prioritizing real-time, operational database solutions for AI-native startups and Fortune 500 clients, shifting from traditional model selection to a focus on deterministic outcomes and autonomous administration. This approach positions the company to capitalize on the "AI super cycle" by ensuring the high-quality data layer required to transition experimental prototypes into scalable, production-grade applications in sectors like banking and aviation.
AMD, Starcloud, Coatue..10 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI
Max Cook, Matan Grinberg, Pim de Witte, Philip Johnston, Mark Papermaster, Rodrigo Liang, Ramin Hasani, Robin Rombach, Chris Madden, Henri Delahaye, Molly, Philippe, Thomas
At the RAISE Summit, industry leaders like Max Cook and Matan outlined a decisive shift toward agentic AI ecosystems that replace traditional interfaces with natural language and naturalize the routing between frontier and open-source models based on latency and cost. Concurrently, hardware giants such as SambaNova and StarCloud announced billion-dollar investments and space-based compute strategies to overcome power constraints and enable efficient inference on edge devices. This convergence of sovereign AI initiatives, supply chain scaling, and automated software engineering marks a global transition where enterprises treat AI as a deployed product rather than a research tool.
Andrew Feldman on Building a Chip 58x Larger Than Nvidia's
Cerebrus has secured a landmark partnership with OpenAI valued at over $20 billion to address the severe shortage of AI infrastructure caused by data center construction lagging behind compute demand. The company employs a co-design strategy to overhaul traditional power and cooling architectures while urging industry participants to diversify chip suppliers to avoid single-vendor lock-in. This surge in hardware innovation, marked by Cerebrus's recent IPO creating 1,000 millionaires, is expected to drive breakthroughs in cancer research, autonomous safety, and personalized education within the next quarter-century.
Harvey Co-Founder Gabe Pereyra on the Token Pricing Reckoning Coming for AI
Gabe Pereyra, Niko Grupen, Molly O'Shea
Harvey Labs launched the open-source Legal Agent Benchmark (Lab) to evaluate AI performance on specialized legal tasks using synthetic data validated by human lawyers, replacing generic QA with rigorous, task-specific unit tests. Initial findings reveal a fragmented market where no single model dominates all domains, prompting a strategic shift toward diverse model routing and post-training open-weight solutions to navigate cost-quality tradeoffs. While usage has reached 13 trillion tokens, the industry now prioritizes organizational intelligence and billing transparency over raw capability, driven by the need to resolve conflict-of-interest risks and optimize complex agent workflows.
Brian Armstrong: "We're Bringing Every Asset Class On Chain"
Brian Armstrong, Cat Ferdon, Molly Abraham, Jesse Pollak
Coinbase is accelerating its shift toward an agentic economy by launching tokenized U.S. stocks, a unified liquidity exchange, and new AI infrastructure like the Coinbase MCP protocol to enable autonomous financial transactions. CEO Brian Armstrong and leadership team emphasize that the company is leveraging AI to optimize costs and operational velocity, projecting that AI agents will soon outnumber human employees while driving the company's "Everything Exchange" strategy. Simultaneously, the firm is solidifying its regulatory compliance stance for tokenized assets and positioning its Base blockchain as the primary infrastructure for both AI agents and real-world asset trading.
Inside Harvey AI: CEO Winston Weinberg on How a 4-Year-Old Company Is Taking on the Foundation Labs
Winston Weinberg, Molly O'Shea
Harvey AI has scaled to nearly $300 million in ARR and over 2,000 enterprise clients by migrating to cloud agents and deploying specialized legal models that outperform general frontier AI. CEO Sam Saltman drives a culture of rapid reinvention and meritocracy, where over 200 legal professionals transition into product and engineering roles to build vertical-specific solutions for high-growth sectors like finance and pharmaceuticals. The company differentiates itself from traditional legal tech and generic AI labs by prioritizing granular ROI proof per token and rejecting legacy technology acquisitions in favor of acquiring high-performing teams to fuel its current 12-to-13 trillion token monthly usage projections.
SpaceX IPO: Inside the Firm That Owns 1%
Justin Fishner-Wolfson, Molly O’Shea
Co-founded by Justin Fishner-Wolfson, 137 Ventures manages $15 billion in assets by prioritizing a concentrated, secondary-first strategy that has enabled approximately two dozen distinct investments in SpaceX over sixteen years. The firm leveraged SpaceX's operational efficiency and leadership stability to fund a pivotal shift from cost-plus to firm fixed pricing, ultimately supporting the company's profitability and the economic viability of Starlink. As the private market anticipates a new listing cycle led by SpaceX, the firm continues to target durable enterprises while navigating a $240 billion secondary market that facilitates liquidity for employees and investors alike.
Tom Mueller: SpaceX's #1 Employee Built the Merlin Engine. Now He's Building Impulse Space
Former SpaceX founding employee Tom Mueller founded Impulse Space to revolutionize intra-orbital transport with its fleet of advanced spacecraft, including the orbital transfer vehicle Mira and the heavy-lift Helios. The company leverages proprietary Nova Light alloy and additive manufacturing to produce the Deneb hydrocarbon engine and lightweight composite tanks, achieving performance metrics that could significantly boost payload delivery to the Moon and Mars. Currently advancing lunar infrastructure efforts through successful rendezvous tests and an active lander contract bid, Impulse Space combines in-house manufacturing with AI-driven design to support a future lunar economy.
Dara Khosrowshahi’s Full Circle Launch: Expedia x Uber
Dara Khosrowshahi, Molly O'Shea, Barry Diller
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi detailed a strategic pivot from deep losses to $10 billion in annual free cash flow, driven by a multi-service ecosystem that integrates Rides, Eats, and an expanded Travel suite. The platform recently launched new features including an Expedia hotel booking partnership, a "Shop For Me" procurement service, and AI-driven development tools designed to accelerate innovation while preparing for a future fleet of autonomous and air taxis. By aggregating third-party mobility providers and emphasizing cross-platform membership loyalty, Uber aims to outperform single-line competitors through increased user retention and global service accessibility.
The $10 Trillion Bet on Humanoid Robots | Figure Founder Brett Adcock
Founded by Archer eVTOL creator Brett Adcock, Figure AI pursues the commercialization of general-purpose humanoid robots capable of operating autonomously for extended shifts across diverse industries. Having raised nearly $2 billion with a $39 billion valuation, the company recently terminated an OpenAI partnership to maintain control over its vertically integrated hardware and AI stack, aiming to triple production by May and deploy thousands of units within the year. Despite facing technical hurdles in scaling reliability, Figure projects a market opportunity worth trillions as it transitions from prototype testing to mass commercial deployment in homes and factories.
Skydio HQ Tour: The $3.5B Bet on American Drone Manufacturing with CEO Adam Bry
An autonomous drone network delivers 24/7 public safety operations by deploying units from charging docks to locate missing persons, track suspects, and inspect infrastructure without human pilots. The system utilizes Beyond Visual Line of Sight waivers and Pathfinder AI to execute complex missions across diverse hardware, ranging from the indoor R10 tactical unit to the high-speed F10 fixed-wing prototype. Through a transparency portal and continuous real-world stress testing, the company has integrated these force-multiplier tools into law enforcement culture while scaling production for imminent general availability.
Skydio Raises $110M Series F at $4.4B Valuation | CEO Adam Bry
Skydio recently closed an $110 million Series F round at a $4.4 billion valuation to scale its U.S.-manufactured autonomous drone fleet, which now secures a $50 million contract with the Army and serves 4,000 government and enterprise clients. The company differentiates itself from Chinese competitors through 100% domestic supply chain security and AI-driven agentic robotics that enable off-grid operations and reduce public safety response times by 70-80%. With plans to triple manufacturing capacity this year, Skydio aims to integrate its systems into 911 responses across the U.S. while expanding into energy utilities and battlefield intelligence.