Latest Interviews
Showing 481–495 of 1,633 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- Milken Institute51 min
Author Talk: Jonathan Haidt, "The Anxious Generation" | Global Conference 2025
Jonathan Haidt, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Conrad Kieschel
At the Milken Institute Global Conference, social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and California First Lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom addressed the youth mental health crisis by identifying the 2012 shift to smartphones as the primary driver of surging depression, anxiety, and social skill atrophy among teenagers. They advocated for four specific policy norms—delaying smartphone access until high school, mandating phone-free schools, raising the age of internet adulthood to 16, and promoting unsupervised free play—to counter the addictive designs of tech giants and facilitate proper neurodevelopment. The session concluded with a call for collective community action and a "mother's rebellion" to enforce these boundaries, aiming to restore physical interaction and resilience for future generations.
- All-In Podcast1h 25m
Big Beautiful Bill, Elon/Trump, Dollar Down Big, Harvard's Money Problems, Figma IPO
Elon, Trump, Friedberg, David Sacks
The fourth All-In Summit scheduled for September 7 will feature Elon Musk alongside potential trillion-dollar market cap leaders, occurring amidst intense debates over the Senate-passed "Big Beautiful Bill" and its controversial removal of federal AI preemption and renewable energy tax credits. While the legislation triggers concerns about a fragmented regulatory landscape and economic instability, the event highlights shifting dynamics between Musk and President Trump regarding fiscal responsibility and a potential new political alignment. Concurrently, the summit context includes discussions on the Trump administration's grant cuts to Harvard, the evolving higher education sector due to AI disruption, and a surge in SaaS M&A and IPO activity driven by robust market liquidity.
Why a16z Bet $15 Million on THIS Controversial Startup
Bryan Kim, Roy Lee, Molly O'Shea
Brian Kim secured a $15 million investment in Cluely by leveraging a "momentum as a moat" strategy that prioritizes velocity and personal rapport over traditional fundraising pitches. His investment thesis for the AI era emphasizes rapid scaling and efficiency, as evidenced by his high-velocity deals with 11 Labs and Function Health while navigating regulatory headwinds regarding deepfakes. Kim argues that the current technology landscape requires building "in the plane as it falls," with companies achieving profitability through smaller teams and massive growth trajectories.
- Sequoia Capital1h 0m
Why Voice Will Be the Fundamental Interface for Tech ft ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski
Founded in late 2021 by co-founders Piotr and Maddie Staniszewski, ElevenLabs distinguishes itself through a specialized architecture that predicts acoustic output to capture nuanced emotion and tone. The remote company leverages a global team of research engineers and specialized voice coaches to deliver high-fidelity speech synthesis used in healthcare, customer support, and interactive education platforms like Chess.com. With a strategic focus on achieving human-level interaction by 2025, the firm prioritizes low-latency infrastructure and proactive safety measures to enable universal translation and ambient computing.
KKR's Head of European PE, Philipp Freise: Do Andreessen & General Catalyst Scare KKR?
Philipp Freise, Harry Stebbings
KKR Europe manages its $8 billion flagship fund through a disciplined strategy of linear deployment and strategic partnerships, focusing on mature Western European companies while maintaining strict risk controls against political instability. The firm leverages its diversified portfolio to navigate macroeconomic headwinds, prioritizing hard sectors like defense and infrastructure while rejecting tariff solutions in favor of structural economic reforms. Looking forward, KKR aims to triple its assets under management by integrating retail investors into private equity and shifting exit tactics toward strategic sales rather than public listings.
- Milken Institute1h 1m
Author Susan Morrison, "Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live" | Global Conference 2025
Susan Morrison, Lorne, Laraine Newman
Susan Morrison's biography *Saturday Night* chronicles Lorne Michaels' decade-long evolution of *Saturday Night Live* from a conservative variety show into a global franchise that balances alternative comedy with broad national appeal. The narrative highlights how Michaels' management philosophy evolved from personal trauma-induced non-confrontation to a "sports franchise" model, emphasizing operational flexibility, mentorship strategies like *Weekend Update* for new talent, and a strict hierarchy to manage host egos during the high-pressure final dress rehearsal. This deep dive into Michaels' "friendship economy" and adaptive leadership explains the show's thirty-plus year longevity and its successful international licensing, which requires navigating diverse cultural standards while maintaining the show's core identity.
Navan Files to Go Public and Canva Pulls the Brakes: Why and What Happens?
Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
Meta is deploying roughly $100 billion to acquire top AI talent and secure existential insurance against ChatGPT becoming the primary internet interface, while Harvey.ai leverages early market mindshare to justify a $5 billion valuation by positioning itself to replace rather than augment legal labor. In the broader public markets, speculative momentum drives a surge in IPO filings despite operational risks, prompting leaders like Larry Ellison to prioritize heavy AI capital expenditure over traditional buybacks. Simultaneously, B2B incumbents are locking down proprietary data to counter Model Context Protocol threats, a defensive maneuver that ultimately accelerates the commoditization of AI execution and threatens the dominance of traditional law firms.
Cluely Raises $15 Million From a16z | Roy Lee, Founder & CEO
Roy Lee secured a new funding round led by Ang Lee's team to rapidly scale Cluey, an AI-powered desktop overlay designed to assist users during screen-sharing interactions like interviews and sales calls. The company leverages a controversial viral marketing strategy and a hybrid workforce of engineers and influencers to drive profitability, with enterprise contracts already generating seven-figure revenue. Lee aims to dominate the AI distribution landscape by prioritizing aggressive growth and mindshare over traditional burn rate optimization, while positioning the product as a precursor to a comprehensive "Jarvis" interface.
- All-In Podcast45 min
Tony Robbins | All-In Live from Miami
Tony Robbins, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, David Sacks
Tony Robbins leverages a synthesis of clinical research, physiological optimization, and strategic leadership frameworks to help individuals and organizations rewire unhelpful patterns and achieve sustainable high performance. His methods, which include the Stanford-validated "Date with Destiny" program and the RPM strategy, have demonstrated significant reductions in depression symptoms and a return to pre-pandemic corporate engagement levels. Beyond personal development, Robbins channels this expertise into large-scale philanthropic "moon shots," including a global commitment to feed 100 billion people and eliminate human trafficking, while personally managing his own longevity through advanced regenerative medicine.
Chime IPO: Are IPOs Hotter Than Ever?
Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings, Garrett
Meta paid $14.8 billion to acquire 49% non-voting control of Scale AI while returning nearly the full amount to existing investors via a special dividend, effectively allowing CEO Alex Wang to move to Meta and shifting the competitive landscape for rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. The transaction, viewed primarily as a strategic talent acquisition and market signal, leaves Scale AI with diminished assets while triggering immediate demand surges as competitors seek alternative data providers. Concurrently, the deal highlights broader trends in the AI sector, including OpenAI's new Pentagon contract and rising forecasts for Chinese model dominance, all occurring amidst a resurgent IPO market featuring successful listings like Chime and imminent filings from Databricks.
- Y Combinator1h 1m
Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI, Transforming Work With Agents & Competing With China
Meta has committed to investing over $14 billion in Scale AI, valuing the company at $29 billion while appointing Alexander Wang to lead its new AI superintelligence lab. Under Wang's direction, Scale is pivoting from its origins in data labeling to building agentic workflows for enterprise and government sectors, leveraging proprietary data and specialized fine-tuned models to differentiate in a fragmented market. The partnership aims to accelerate scientific breakthroughs and develop military applications like the Thunderforge system, positioning the company to manage a future economy where human operators oversee swarms of autonomous AI agents.
- a16z54 min
Former Microsoft Executive on Apple’s Hidden China Problem
Erik Torenberg, Steven Sinofsky
Tim Cook led Apple's strategic shift to Chinese manufacturing in the 1990s, creating a high-precision supply chain ecosystem that enabled the creation of premium devices like the iPhone while fostering advanced local capabilities now utilized by global competitors like BYD. Facing rising geopolitical risks and supply chain fragilities exposed by the pandemic, Apple is now diversifying production to India while maintaining a distinct AI strategy that prioritizes privacy and edge integration over first-mover speed. Experts warn that future hardware production may return to the U.S. through high-automation facilities, yet unresolved intellectual property tensions and regulatory fragmentation in AI remain critical challenges for global technological development.
How Browserbase Raised $67.5M to Power AI Agents & Vibe Coders
Paul Klein IV, John, Bucky Moore, Turner Novak, Jeff Lawson, Patrick Collison, Guillermo Rauch, Molly
BrowserBase has secured a $40 million Series B funding round led by Notable Capital to expand its infrastructure platform that enables AI to control web browsers at scale. This investment, which brings the company's total capital to $67.5 million just 15 months after its founding, supports the launch of the "Director.ai" agent builder and a rapid team expansion from 25 to 50 employees. With a customer base now exceeding 1,000 entities and a product strategy focused on bridging the gap between legacy web systems and AI automation, the company aims to dominate the infrastructure layer for autonomous agents.
- Sequoia Capital49 min
The Breakthroughs Needed for AGI Have Already Been Made: OpenAI Former Research Head Bob McGrew
Bob McGrew, Stephanie Zhan, Sonya Huang
Bob McGrew defines 2025 as the "year of reasoning," a pivotal shift where immediate compute utilization and tool-augmented chain-of-thought capabilities drive rapid progress toward AGI while pre-training faces diminishing returns. This paradigm reframes post-training as a behavioral challenge and positions AI agents to democratize intelligence by pricing services at compute costs rather than professional market rates. Consequently, economic value accrues to application layers requiring proprietary enterprise context, while sectors ranging from robotics to software engineering transition to hybrid human-agent workflows that leverage these new efficiency gains.
- a16z1h 30m
Adam Neumann: This is How You Build Iconic Companies
Adam Neumann, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg
Following WeWork's 2019 collapse, former founder Adam Neumann formed a strategic partnership with investors Ben Horowitz and Mark Pincus to launch Flow, a vertically integrated real estate platform designed to resolve modern housing isolation and workforce fragmentation. The venture employs an asset-heavy model centered on proprietary technology and a "citizen-centric" approach, evidenced by a successful $300 million Saudi Arabia pilot that achieved over 90% occupancy within 60 days. By aligning risk and rewards immediately between Neumann and his backers, Flow aims to scale its ecosystem of managed physical communities globally to serve as a holistic alternative to traditional remote work and fragmented housing markets.