Latest Interviews
Showing 526–540 of 1,635 interview transcripts.
Clear all filtersBucky Moore @ Lightspeed Venture Partners: Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed
Following his move from Kleiner Perkins to Lightspeed Venture Partners as a partner, Bucky Brown outlines a strategic pivot toward supporting mega-platforms capable of deploying billions in capital to capture multi-trillion dollar AI outcomes. He argues that while model providers will dominate core categories, the "long tail" of specialized enterprise applications remains a viable space for early-stage ventures, provided investors prioritize deep domain expertise and founder selection over traditional market sizing. Brown warns that mid-sized funds face increasing obsolescence as the market polarizes, urging a conservative capital approach and a focus on "Team" to navigate the extreme capital intensity and rapid adoption defining the current AI era.
- All-In Podcast50 min
Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture | All-In DC
Brooke Rollins, David Friedberg
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins is spearheading a major realignment of the Department, utilizing executive orders to reduce waste, cancel billions in contracts, and refocus the agency on food security as a national security imperative while addressing obesity through SNAP restrictions. The administration pairs these internal reforms with a protectionist trade strategy designed to eliminate agricultural deficits and personally secure new markets in Asia and South America, all while navigating labor shortages through targeted visa programs. Simultaneously, Rollins is working with bipartisan legislators to deconstruct the Farm Bill's political "Christmas tree" structure, aiming to separate nutrition reform from agricultural support to foster a more efficient, sovereign food system.
Windsurf: The Making of a Billion-Dollar AI Company | Leigh Marie Braswell, Kleiner Perkins
Leigh Marie Braswell, Molly O'Shea
Kleiner Perkins deployed its $2 billion combined KP21 fund through a nine-partner team led by Lee Marie Braswell, utilizing a "major and minor" specialization model to target early and growth stages in AI-driven sectors like Windsurf and Glean. The firm is actively validating high-velocity startups such as Windsurf, which recently hit $100 million ARR by pivoting from GPU infrastructure to a unified IDE, while rejecting the notion that current market conditions prevent the creation of historically significant companies. By enforcing rigorous diligence on recurring revenue and leveraging a "talent vortex" hiring strategy, the partnership aims to capture outliers in coding agents and enterprise automation despite macroeconomic turbulence and skepticism regarding AI profit margins.
- Y Combinator53 min
Windsurf CEO: Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding
Varun Mohan, Mark Mandelmann, Jr., Melanie Warrick, Amanda Schade, Mark Blyth
Windsurf, led by founders who pivoted from GPU virtualization to AI coding tools in 2022, has rapidly scaled to over one million developers and achieved eight-figure annual revenue without a dedicated sales team. The company differentiates itself through an "agentic editor" that handles codebases exceeding 100 million lines by combining AST parsing with real-time GPU re-ranking, enabling automated legacy migration and multi-step code execution. This rapid growth was driven by a strategy of immediate product iteration, such as transforming a VS Code extension into a standalone IDE to overcome architectural limitations, all while maintaining a hiring philosophy centered on engineers capable of executing high-stakes pivots.
What Does it Take to Be Good at Series A and B Today?
Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, Fabrice Grinda, Harry Stebbings
Venture capital markets are currently navigating a dual reality defined by an AI-fueled "gold rush" and a constrained liquidity environment where exit windows remain closed. Investors are diverging between aggressive "megatrend" bets on artificial intelligence and defense technology versus deep-value plays in digitized B2B sectors, while grappling with rapidly evolving risks such as model obsolescence and geopolitical instability. This high-velocity landscape is forcing strategic shifts toward earlier exits, a preference for "deranged" founders capable of exponential scaling, and a structural reevaluation of how private company lifecycles align with technological obsolescence.
- The Diary Of A CEO1h 28m
Michelle Obama: This Is A Scam! People Were Running From Us Because We Were Black!
Michelle Obama, Steven, Craig Robinson, Barack Obama
Michelle and Craig Robinson's podcast explores their upbringing in Chicago, where their parents instilled resilience and advocacy through personal sacrifice and community leadership. The conversation details Michelle's pivotal career shift from corporate law to public service, influenced by personal tragedy and her relationship with Barack Obama, alongside the challenges of navigating the White House as the first Black First Lady. Concluding with their mother's recent passing, the siblings emphasize a legacy of mentorship, urging audiences to prioritize character, practice boundary-setting, and navigate adversity with empathy.
- Dwarkesh Patel1h 16m
Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 months
Meta has officially launched four Llama 4 models, immediately releasing the efficient Scout and Maverick variants while developing a massive two-trillion parameter "Behemoth" to distill intelligence into smaller, consumer-ready agents. The company is shifting its evaluation metrics from external leaderboards to internal product performance, prioritizing low-latency, full-duplex voice interactions and AI-driven content that reacts dynamically to user input across its billion-person ecosystem. By leveraging internal coding agents to accelerate development and advocating for a dual ad-supported and premium business model, Meta aims to narrow the gap with closed-source competitors while navigating infrastructure bottlenecks that will constrain the pace of an anticipated intelligence explosion.
- Sequoia Capital56 min
The Quest to ‘Solve All Diseases’ with AI: Isomorphic Labs’ Max Jaderberg
Founded to construct a general AI-driven drug design engine, Isomorphic Labs has leveraged Demis Hassabis's Nobel Prize-winning leadership and Max Yoderberg's AI expertise to release AlphaFold 3, a diffusion-based model that predicts the 3D structures of proteins, DNA, RNA, and small molecules. By replacing months of traditional crystallization with instant in-silico analysis, the company collaborates with industry partners like Eli Lilly and Novartis to navigate the 10^60-sized chemical space and advance programs in oncology and immunology without operating its own wet labs. This approach positions AI as a fundamental, indispensable tool for the entire pharmaceutical industry within five years, while the firm advocates for new regulatory frameworks to validate these predictive models for clinical trials.
Plural Partner, Taavet Hinrikus: Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds
Taavet Hinrikus, Harry Stebbings
Venture capitalist Tal Talbot outlines Plural's strategic shift toward a low-fee, high-volume model that aligns incentives by charging half the industry standard management fee and requiring partners to personally back every investment. The firm targets deep hard-tech sectors like defense, fusion, and AI, explicitly rejecting saturated enterprise software markets to pursue 100x returns while advocating for European geopolitical sovereignty through government purchasing and unified capital mobilization. With Fund II expanding its reserve ratio to 50% and targeting companies such as Helsing and Proxima Fusion, Plural aims to rebuild Europe's critical industries amid a tri-polar global landscape where traditional VC metrics are declining.
- All-In Podcast1h 30m
Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google's Gemini Problem, China's Thorium Discovery
Trump, Bessent, Elon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg
A panel of experts analyzes global market dynamics, noting that recent rallies stem from trade deal expectations rather than Federal Reserve support, while highlighting strategic tensions over China's control of rare earths and its lead in thorium energy research. The discussion extends to foreign policy, where participants advocate for accepting the Istanbul Deal to end the Ukraine war and criticizing the moralistic approach to nation-building. Finally, the group evaluates corporate strategies for Alphabet and Tesla, the fiscal hurdles facing the Department of Government Efficiency, and the regulatory complexities surrounding Nvidia's global supply chain.
Superpower Raises $30M Series A Led by Forerunner
Superpower, led by founder Jacob Peters, secured a $30 million Series A round led by Forerunner Ventures to advance its vision of replacing fragmented healthcare with an AI-driven concierge model. The company leverages a three-part architecture of data centralization, diagnostic intelligence, and action-oriented marketplace tools to provide comprehensive health monitoring at a fraction of traditional costs. By capitalizing on widespread metabolic dysfunction and Peters' personal health crisis, Superpower aims to disintermediate the current system and build a vertically integrated preventative care network.
- Sequoia Capital46 min
Pricing in the AI Era: From Inputs to Outcomes, with Paid CEO Manny Medina
Manny Medina, Pat Grady, Lauren Reeder
Manny Medina outlines a strategic pivot for AI success toward narrow, high-utility applications that replace specific Business Process Outsourcing roles rather than general-purpose creative tasks. He details four emerging pricing frameworks, particularly agent-based billing that allows companies to allocate AI costs to human resources budgets, while warning that rising inference costs are compressing margins unless vendors shift to outcome-based revenue models. Medina concludes that sustainable growth requires founders to abandon broad market ambitions in favor of deep vertical expertise, utilizing paid to track unit economics as the industry transitions from trial-based excitement to contract renewals.
Dave CEO, Jason Wilk: The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time
Dave, Jason Wilk, Harry Stebbings
Dave CEO Jason Goldman details how the fintech firm reversed a 98% market capitalization decline to reach $1.13 billion by leveraging AI-driven underwriting to slash credit loss rates and achieve significant profitability without layoffs. The company utilizes cashflow-based analysis across 12 million accounts to offer low-cost credit alternatives to legacy overdraft fees, projecting continued expansion into buy now, pay later and longer-duration lending. Goldman argues that the firm's capital efficiency and removal of traditional debt structures position it to disrupt the $3 trillion credit card market, though he cautions against regulatory overreach that could stifle consumer access to fair lending.
Inside the $350M Pelosi Stock Tracker
Autopilot, formerly known as the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker, is a venture-backed fintech platform that has grown to manage $500 million in assets for 2.5 million users before pivoting to a creator economy model allowing influencers to offer tradable portfolios. The company leverages its history of tracking high-performing politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Richard Burr to highlight market timing disparities while advocating for the bipartisan "Pelosi Act" to ban congressional stock trading. Having generated eight-figure revenue without a down month, Autopilot is transitioning from a single-figure focus to a sustainable social investing ecosystem funded by roughly $7 million in venture capital.
- Sequoia Capital58 min
Arc Institute's Patrick Hsu on Building an App Store for Biology with AI
Patrick Hsu, Josephine Chen, Pat Grady
The ARC Institute, led by Patrick Hsu, has launched EVO2, a generative foundation model trained on genomic sequences across all domains of life to predict the functional consequences of genetic variants with state-of-the-art accuracy. By reclassifying Variants of Unknown Significance, this open-source tool aims to transform genetic testing outcomes and prevent unnecessary medical interventions while establishing a roadmap toward simulating virtual cells by 2030. This initiative reflects a strategic shift within ARC to merge academic rigor with industrial application, utilizing evolutionary data to build a unifying theory of biology rather than focusing solely on traditional drug design.