Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 243 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Milken Institute23 min
Conversation with CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz & HHS Chief Counselor Chris Klomp | Global Conference
Mehmet Oz, Chris Klomp, Esther Krofah
Under the strategic mandate "Making America Healthy Again," CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and HHS leadership are overhauling the U.S. healthcare system by shifting from fee-for-service to value-based models that target upstream chronic disease prevention and address the nation's 27% unfilled prescription rate. The administration is enforcing strict integrity measures to eliminate $100 billion in annual fraud while simultaneously deploying AI to modernize legacy infrastructure and accelerate FDA drug approvals from 15 years to under five. These initiatives aim to align U.S. drug pricing with global "Most Favored Nation" standards and restore public trust in federal health agencies to counter competitive gaps with international rivals like China.
- Milken Institute41 min
Investing in Economic Mobility: Building a Path to Opportunity | Global Conference 2026
Michael Milken, Ted Cruz, Brad Gerstner, Kevin Hassett
The "Invest America Act" mandates the automatic creation of direct-ownership investment accounts for millions of children, a program championed by Senator Ted Cruz and economists like Kevin Hassett as a vehicle for "Opportunity Conservatism" rather than government redistribution. Supported by massive private philanthropy from figures such as the Dells and Ray Dalio, the initiative allows tax-free annual contributions up to $5,000 with projected account values reaching $700,000 by age 35. By targeting the bottom of the income distribution, the White House aims to cultivate a nationwide constituency of young investors while driving a political shift toward expanding personal capital ownership beyond current eligibility thresholds.
- 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.
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.
- Milken Institute36 min
The AI Investment Cycle: Platforms, Infrastructure, and Markets | Global Conference 2026
Yun-Hee Kim, Dennis Gada, Tony Kim, Lily Liu, Scott Rubner
This event analyzes the current trillion-dollar trajectory of global AI capital expenditure, which is driving a structural market shift away from traditional SaaS models toward a three-layer stack dominated by compute and intelligence providers. Key figures from Citadel, BlackRock, and the Solana Foundation discuss the emergence of machine-to-machine financial rails, the geopolitical bifurcation of sovereign AI, and the impending influx of trillion-dollar AI valuations into public markets. The discourse concludes by projecting long-term economic rewiring that will necessitate new frameworks for human capital, cognitive preservation, and decentralized ownership models.
- a16z42 min
The New Media Advantage with Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen
Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, Erik Torenberg, Gaby Goldberg
The event details a fundamental shift from restricted legacy media to an offense-oriented, direct-to-audience strategy where founders must prioritize the "person as brand" over corporate abstraction. Speakers argue that traditional journalistic gatekeeping is obsolete, urging executives to adopt an "outside-in" narrative framework that links their companies to macro-trends like geopolitics and supply chain crises, as exemplified by Alex Karp and Ryan Peterson. To succeed, founders are advised to reject scripted media training in favor of authentic, polarizing communication and to build teams skilled in long-form storytelling rather than traditional public relations.
- All-In Podcast40 min
Why Secondary Markets Are Eating the IPO | All-In Liquidity Secondary Markets Panel
Brad Gerstner, Gavin Baker, Kelly Rodriques, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Naval, Thomas Lafont, Keller
In Q1 2025, the private market established secondary trading as a primary exit mechanism for late-stage companies like Anduril and SpaceX, with employee transactions accounting for 31% of primary venture activity as shares shifted to a premium valuation. Institutional players such as Schwab and Vanguard are democratizing access through regulated interval funds, prompting a structural shift where venture capital firms actively manage capital recycling to return liquidity to limited partners. While panelists identify AI infrastructure and space logistics as key investment areas within a "parabolic" but fundamentally sound market, they also warn of emerging regulatory pressures and the risks of retail investors lacking the discipline to navigate cyclical drawdowns.
- Milken Institute27 min
Miranda Kerr & Baby2Baby Co-CEOs Kelly Sawyer Patricof & Norah Weinstein | Global Conference 2026
Miranda Kerr, Kelly Sawyer Patricof, Norah Weinstein, Lisa Ling, Jory Rollins
Over fifteen years, Baby2Baby has scaled from a Los Angeles storefront to a national logistics network that has distributed half a billion essentials to 1.5 million children, while currently managing a critical gap where only 15% of the ten million children in need receive support. Leveraging a high-profile board of "Angel Moms" and strategic policy advocacy, the organization successfully lobbied for diaper tax reforms in twenty-four states and secured a federal maternal health partnership with the Biden White House. Facing a waitlist of eleven million requests, Baby2Baby is now launching a capital campaign to construct a new headquarters and expand its in-house manufacturing to bridge the supply shortage serving the remaining unreached families.
- Milken Institute30 min
Science of Love: Conversation with Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd & Arthur Brooks | Global Conference
Whitney Wolfe Herd, Arthur Brooks, Savannah Sellers
Bumble and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Arthur C. Brooks collaborated to release a white paper arguing that successful offline marriages drive user growth while current app metrics exacerbate loneliness and social isolation. To counter declining relationship satisfaction and the atrophy of in-person social skills, the company is launching a Q4 product that replaces swipe mechanics with AI-driven screening for toxic personality traits and prioritizes immediate real-world meetings. This strategic shift redefines compatibility around shared core values rather than rigid filters and utilizes neurochemical insights to prove that genuine bonding requires physical presence over digital simulation.
- Y Combinator24 min
Why Two IIT Engineers Turned Down $550K Jobs To Build A Startup
GigaML, a Y Combinator-backed startup founded by IIT Kharagpur alumnus Varun and his Stanford-educated co-founder, has pivoted from EdTech to developing AI agents that achieve 60% to 70% support deflection rates for major clients like DoDash and DoorDash. The company addresses the enterprise bottleneck of manual configuration by launching "AI forward deployed engineers" that automatically iterate policies to improve business metrics, a strategy enabled by their "0.1% talent" recruitment philosophy and heavy reliance on human-coded expertise rather than sales teams. By leveraging the YC trust network to secure early contracts with eight-person operations, GigaML aims to unlock broader enterprise AI adoption through a generic automation layer that eliminates the need for extensive human engineering resources.
- Milken Institute28 min
Building a Brand in Midlife: A Conversation with Daphne Oz and Molly Sims | Global Conference 2026
Daphne Oz, Molly Sims, Loretta Lynch, Tara Hernandez O, Weronna Choi, Dorina Arellano Gonzalez Van Cleveen
At the 2026 Milken Global Conference, Molly Sims detailed her strategic expansion of WISE Beauty, a skincare brand securing $15 million in Series A funding to address the unmet needs of women aged 35 and older through a hero-focused product philosophy. Complementing the brand's growth with a rigorous "hire slowly, fire fast" culture and advanced AI integration for operational efficiency, Sims also launched her podcast *Lipstick on the Rim* to provide transparent industry insights outside traditional gatekeeping channels. Simultaneously, Daphne Oz introduced her *The Mothership* podcast to counter negative narratives about female misery, collectively positioning both entrepreneurs as key drivers in redefining the economic and emotional landscape for midlife women.
- Milken Institute26 min
Investing in Hollywood’s Connective Cultural Power: Eva Longoria & Kevin Yorn | Global Conference
Eva Longoria, Kevin Yorn, Rebecca Keegan
Eva Longoria and Kevin Glickman discuss a shifted investment landscape where successful ventures require rigorous operational execution rather than celebrity names alone. Longoria highlights her high-ROI successes with Siete Foods and John Wick, while Glickman emphasizes the critical need for protecting intellectual property and leveraging enterprise relationships in AI and cross-industry deals. Together, they outline a future where "hyphenate" talent must pair storytelling with proven business discipline, relying on specialized operators to ensure financial viability and authentic market conversion.
- Milken Institute39 min
International Security: Innovation, Investment, and Partnerships | Global Conference 2026
David Trulio, Christopher Coons, Eric Schmidt, Adam Smith, Chris Coons
Panelists including Eric Schmidt, Senator Chris Coons, and Representative Adam Smith argue that the war in Ukraine has exposed the critical need for the U.S. to replace expensive, traditional military assets with autonomous drones and AI-driven systems to secure a cost-effective deterrence against adversaries. To overcome entrenched bureaucratic inertia and fiscal constraints, the group advocates for bipartisan legislation like the SPEED Act, expanded co-production with international allies, and a workforce shift toward technical innovation over four-year degrees. These strategic adjustments aim to leverage the agility of private sector competitors against legacy defense primes while ensuring American technological leadership in an era of algorithmic warfare.
- Goldman Sachs21 min
McLaren Racing's Lando Norris and Zak Brown: Building a High-Performance Team
Lando Norris, Zak Brown, Anthony Gutman
McLaren driver Lando Norris secured the 2025 Formula One World Drivers' Championship following a dramatic mid-season comeback, yet he recently missed a race start due to unprecedented power unit battery failures. As the team navigates 2026 regulatory changes that have widened the performance gap and altered vehicle dynamics, Norris and team principal Zak Brown are leveraging a collaborative "Papaya Rules" culture to translate driver feedback into rapid technical adaptations. This strategy aims to restore competitiveness against the "big four" constructors while ensuring the 900-person ecosystem maintains resilience against the complex, sophisticated nature of modern racing.
- a16z24 min
The Founders Who Left Tesla to Rebuild America | a16z
Erin Price-Wright, Turner Caldwell, Drew Baglino
Led by former Tesla executives Turner Caldwell and Drew Baglino, Mariana Minerals and Heron Power are building a vertically integrated domestic supply chain for critical minerals and solid-state power infrastructure to close a fifty-year capability gap with China. The companies deploy proprietary autonomous operating systems to accelerate refinery ramp-ups and modernize the grid, aiming to secure over 500 jobs while establishing a new industrial model that prioritizes physical assets over software algorithms. By co-locating manufacturing with energy generation and leveraging silicon carbide semiconductors, the initiative seeks to re-industrialize the U.S. economy through a "minerals mandate" that mobilizes private capital to rebuild the foundational infrastructure of AI dominance.