Latest Interviews

Blake Scholl: How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jet

Blake Scholl

Founded by Blake Scholl in 2014, Boom Supersonic successfully developed the XB-1, the first privately built jet to break the sound barrier, using a lean team and software-driven engineering to overcome decades of aviation stagnation. This historic flight directly catalyzed a shift in US federal policy, prompting an Executive Order that legalized supersonic flight over land and clearing the path for the upcoming Overture airliner. By vertically integrating manufacturing and creating revenue through ground-based engines, the company aims to double global travel speeds while eliminating the traditional sonic boom barrier.

Tradewinds: Navigating Economic Uncertainty | Global Conference 2026

Gerard Baker, Whitney Baird, Xavier Bettel, John Denton, Francisco Pérez Mackenna, Michael Roberts, Jerry Baker

A global economic panel consensus identifies a critical inflection point where geopolitical volatility and policy unpredictability are driving nearly $250 billion in annual lost activity while compelling nations to prioritize supply chain resilience over pure free trade. Amidst rising food security threats from conflicts in the Middle East and evolving US-China de-risking strategies, leaders are exploring plurilateral arrangements and technological solutions to manage these disruptions. Ultimately, the event highlights a shift toward strategic autonomy and green energy innovation as essential mechanisms to mitigate inflationary pressures and narrow the widening gap between the Global North and South.

Will Open-Source Threaten Anthropic's Business & Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Matt Murphy

Matt Murphy, Harry Stebbings

Menlo Partners led Anthropic's initial $10 million seed round and subsequently deployed a $500 million Special Purpose Vehicle to secure a leading position in the AI sector, prioritizing access to high-conviction outliers over traditional ownership mandates. This strategy supports a broader barbell approach where the firm targets hyper-growth seed companies like Lovable and OpenRouter while maintaining large growth positions, effectively bypassing the crowded Series A stage. By focusing on technical depth, operational efficiency, and global talent hubs, Menlo aims to maximize upside in a market shifting toward "winner-take-all" dynamics despite high valuations.

The Dirty Secrets of Trading Revealed

Anton, Raj, Jason, Rush

The Institute addresses retail traders' information overload and predatory educational practices by implementing rigorous mentorship programs led by verified professionals from major financial institutions. By enforcing zero percent IB agreements and promoting strict risk management frameworks, the organization has shifted industry incentives, grown a community managing $150 million in daily risk, and achieved Sharpe ratios between 1.4 and 2.6. Through collaborative efforts with regulators like the FCA, the Institute successfully transitions students from unverified losses to institutional-grade performance by emphasizing quantitative back-testing and downside protection over speculative volume.

Mercor Head of Product on Revenue Concentration from Frontier Labs

Osvald Nitski, Harry Stebbings

McCore, led by CPO Oswald Nitzke, is navigating a hyper-growth phase driven by insatiable demand for frontier model training data while strategically pivoting from enterprise labs to self-serve tools for smaller enterprises. To manage operational complexity amidst AI coding agent proliferation, the company is streamlining its product surface area and shifting hiring priorities toward senior candidates capable of rapid business impact assessment. Looking ahead, McCore anticipates expanding into robotics and cybersecurity data markets while maintaining a high-agency startup culture to address the persistent skills gap in enterprise AI deployment.

What Actually Makes A Startup Durable

Paul Graham and YC partners outline a strategic framework for navigating the AI era, emphasizing that while AI increases individual productivity by 1,000x, founders must target "hard" problems with durable moats to survive market saturation. The session advises building companies through co-founders who provide essential emotional support rather than just complementary skills, noting that human judgment remains critical for community building and navigating high-stakes pivots. Finally, students are offered over $25,000 in AI credits to neutralize geographical disadvantages, reinforcing the program's focus on rapid execution and deep market engagement over theoretical development.

BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum

Tony Kim, Molly O'Shea

Kim outlines a fundamental shift in the global technology sector where a $30 trillion hardware-centric economy is driven by a 10,000x increase in compute density and severe memory shortages known as the "Rampocalypse." Leading institutions are responding through silicon co-design and gigawatt-scale energy infrastructure while BlackRock allocates capital toward immediate compute needs and long-term bets on quantum and orbital data centers. The narrative concludes with strategic observations on China's robotics acceleration and the restructuring of traditional enterprises into AI-native entities through proprietary token flow architectures.

Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | The GPU Economy

Sunny Madra, Brad Gerstner, Apoorv Agrawal

Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Grok co-founder Sonny Maduro outline a transformative shift where AI distribution costs are now compute-intensive, driving the integration of deterministic architecture with Nvidia's GPU ecosystem to accelerate inference. This strategic fusion, which led to Nvidia's $20 billion acquisition of Grok, enables a 2.5x increase in token generation while addressing critical power and memory constraints to support the transition from chat-based tools to autonomous agents. As the industry approaches Artificial General Intelligence faster than anticipated, the convergence of these hardware innovations and emerging regulatory frameworks aims to redefine global economic output and the future value of human labor.

Frontier Labs Threatened by Kimi? Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models & Stripe Buys PayPal

Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings

China's Moonshot AI and Alibaba recently launched near-frontier open-weight models like Kimi and Qwen that are rapidly capturing significant market share and challenging US dominance despite a six-to-nine-month technology gap. While political friction over "AI communism" and data sovereignty risks creates regulatory uncertainty, aggressive engineering and massive capital injection are accelerating the convergence of Chinese and US model performance. Simultaneously, the sector is witnessing a strategic shift toward vertical integration and specialized micro-models, as investors anticipate that open-weight economics will force legacy US frontier providers to compete with inference costs up to 80% lower.

The Philosopher CEO | Clay Co-Founder Kareem Amin

Clay Co-Founder Kareem Amin, Kareem Amin, Varun, Nikolai, Mike Vernal, Pete Caputa, Jack Dorsey, David Solomon, Tarek

Clay CEO Kareem guides his company through a "long strange trip" of pivoting from broad ambitions to the specific niche of Go-to-Market Engineering, where he prioritizes radical transparency and usage-based pricing to align with technical users. By rejecting standard management dogmas in favor of "momentum detective" leadership and "deep work" practices, Kareem fosters a culture of devotion that withstands pricing backlash and drives a unique product philosophy valuing flexibility over simplicity. This strategy successfully established a new market category while navigating a five-year period of ambiguity to achieve product-market fit without relying on external validation.

David Friedberg Explains America's Economic Crisis in 60 Minutes

David Friedberg, Molly O'Shea

David Friedberg warns that the United States faces potential social collapse within two years due to policy failures that exclude the bottom 50% from capital ownership, a structural gap he estimates represents a $33 trillion wealth disparity. He advocates for replacing Social Security and Treasury-bond-heavy pension systems with equity-based individual accounts, while proposing a 40% capital gains tax and a national goal of shifting 2% of Americans to capital ownership annually. Friedberg argues these reforms, alongside closing inheritance loopholes and eliminating income tax for the bottom earners, are essential to prevent a socialist death spiral and restore economic mobility before the chaotic political landscape of 2028.

What AI insiders say off the record | Jasmine Sun

Jasmine Sun, Zershaaneh Qureshi

A consensus among AI researchers predicts mass displacement of knowledge workers and the emergence of a permanent underclass, driving a critical brain drain where top talent concentrates in a few frontier labs to secure equity. This technological determinism is reinforced by a polarized ecosystem where safety concerns are weaponized as political slurs while a diverse coalition of "AI populists" organizes against corporate power without traditional unions to mediate the transition. Consequently, policy efforts face a high demand for action but a shortage of solutions, with success hinging on addressing public distrust rooted in inequality and building cross-issue coalitions with newly activated labor and environmental advocates.

Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition with a16z

Marc Andreessen, Erik Torenberg, Qasar Younis, Peter Ludwig

Founded by Peter Cawthorne, Applied Intuition is launching its "Dana" platform to democratize the development of physical AI for non-automotive sectors like mining, agriculture, and defense. Operating as a horizontal technology provider similar to Nvidia, the company leverages a decade of proprietary data collection and rigorous safety validation to help clients navigate the complex hardware integration required for real-world autonomy. With over $1 billion in cash reserves, the firm aims to scale operations that could outperform traditional digital giants within the next 25 years while challenging legacy manufacturing models through vertical-free deployment.

Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself

Matan Grinberg, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

Factory CEO Matan Cohen refunded nearly $2 million in early revenue to pivot the company from premature autonomous agents to a model-agnostic architecture that prioritizes customer obsession over vendor lock-in. By launching the Droid CLI and implementing a "Model Router" that dynamically allocates tasks between open-weight and frontier models, the firm has shifted its business model toward outcome-based pricing that replaces token consumption with result-oriented billing. This strategy positions Factory to navigate an impending market correction while transitioning enterprises from synchronous tool usage to asynchronous "dark factories" that autonomously resolve complex issues.

The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao

Lin Qiao, Harry Stebbings

Fireworks AI founder Lin Kuao positions the company as an infrastructure-focused platform specializing in customized intelligence rather than general applications, predicting a market shift toward millions of specialized models driven by a tenfold reduction in token costs. With annual recurring revenue currently at $800 million and processing over 40 trillion tokens daily, the firm aims to double its ARR to $1.6 billion by year-end while prioritizing the deployment of open-source models for enterprise workflows. To support this high-velocity growth, Kuao has recruited former Salesforce President George Huang to expand the go-to-market team, emphasizing a strategy that balances aggressive hiring of high-ownership talent with a "Zero KLD" training architecture that ensures numerical equivalence between training and inference.