Latest Interviews
Showing 766–780 of 3,496 transcripts.
Clear all filtersBenchmark vs a16z: Why Stage Specific Firms Win
Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
A recent analysis contrasts the hit-rate precision of focused funds like Benchmark against the aggregate returns of mega-funds, highlighting how the latter's dominance forces mid-tier firms into an "option value" squeeze while distorting Series A and B pricing. Concurrently, the venture landscape is shifting toward high-risk AI-driven "option value" investments as M&A activity accelerates with strategic acquisitions like Windsurf by OpenAI and distressed exits for high-flier startups. Experts warn that while AI will displace up to 50% of knowledge workers within 24 months, the broader economic impact may mirror historical tech revolutions by increasing efficiency without significantly boosting global GDP, compelling firms to adopt AI-first workflows or face obsolescence.
- All-In Podcast52 min
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, a former North Dakota governor and tech executive, has launched the National Energy Dominance Council to rapidly dismantle regulatory barriers hindering US LNG, nuclear, and critical mineral expansion. The initiative targets an energy emergency driven by surging AI and robotics demand by prioritizing Small Modular Reactors, modernizing federal permitting processes, and unlocking $8 trillion in untapped public land resources. Burgum argues that adopting a manufacturing-style approach and reducing bureaucratic duplication are essential for the United States to maintain energy independence and compete globally against China's aggressive infrastructure growth.
- Milken Institute56 min
Game Changers: Unlocking the Global Sports Economy | Global Conference 2025
Emmanuel Acho, Willow Bay, Sam Kennedy, Rich Paul, Alex Rodriguez, Jason Wright
Moderated by Emanuel Ocho, a panel of five high-profile sports leaders including Alex Rodriguez, Rich Paul, and Sam Kennedy detailed the economic transformation of women's sports and the strategic necessity of institutional capital for franchise growth. The discussion highlighted how shifting from altruistic models to revenue-focused ecosystems has driven record attendance and a 200% surge in sponsorship, while establishing that sustainable success relies on defining culture through face-to-face interaction and long-term investment patience. By addressing market gaps in media coverage and merchandise, these leaders argued that balancing fiduciary duties with player well-being is essential for navigating an era where athletes now control their own narratives and investors target high-growth asset classes.
- Sequoia Capital48 min
Building the System of Record for the AI Era ft Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach
Carl Eschenbach, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady
Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach is redefining the platform as a unified "Agent System of Record" to govern both human employees and AI agents across its database of over 70 million users. To monetize this shift, the company is deploying a multi-faceted pricing model involving seat-based uplifts, role-based agent fees, and consumption-based API access while utilizing strategic acquisitions like HiredScore to drive measurable productivity gains. Despite an 8% workforce restructuring to fund reinvestment, Eschenbach emphasizes that AI will serve as a growth engine rather than a cost-cutting tool, maintaining a human-in-the-loop approach for critical decisions to preserve the company's core values.
- Milken Institute50 min
The State of the Global Economy: Global Capital Markets | Global Conference 2025
David Faber, Waleed Al Mokarrab Al Muhairi, Jane Fraser, Jenny Johnson, Harvey Schwartz, Andrew Sullivan
Amidst rising tariff uncertainties and unsolvable fiscal deficits, major global investors from Carlyle, Mubadara, and Prudential are shifting capital allocation toward defensive balance sheets and the fastest-growing asset class, private credit. While short-term market volatility is expected as corporations delay supply chain transformations, long-term strategies increasingly prioritize U.S. assets and emerging markets like India alongside massive infrastructure investments in AI energy and data centers. Panelists project that despite immediate headwinds from regulatory burdens and debt concerns, artificial intelligence will ultimately drive superior productivity growth compared to fiscal policy measures over the next decade.
Bucky 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.