Latest Interviews

Dan Dreyfus: The Next AI Bottleneck is Copper

Dan Dreyfus, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Shabbath

Dan Dreyfus argues that the U.S. is pivoting from a "capital-light" economic model to an urgent, infrastructure-heavy industrial cycle driven by AI, electrification, and geopolitical supply shocks. This transition creates a critical bottleneck in copper and critical minerals, necessitating massive government intervention and new mining capacity while exposing vulnerabilities in the aging electrical grid. Consequently, investors are positioning for a commodities supercycle and high-wage re-industrialization to hedge against currency debasement and meet the unprecedented demand for physical resources.

Reinventing Play: The New Frontier of Gaming Technology and Creation | Global Conference 2026

Geoff Keighley, Johanna Faries, Laura Miele, Gregory Milken, Donald Mustard, DAN GALPIN, MANO MARKS, LAURA MURPHY

Industry leaders Johanna Levinson, Gregory Melkin, Donald Mustard, and Laura Miele convened to outline the gaming sector's transition from episodic releases to continuous live-service models driven by AI adoption and transmedia expansion. The panelists agreed that while mobile platforms retain the largest user base, the market is shifting toward flexible pricing strategies and global partnerships that allow small teams to compete with AAA studios through democratized development tools. Furthermore, the consensus emphasizes a strategic pivot where creative integrity and long-term cultural relevance now outweigh short-term monetization, as publishers integrate mobile, cloud, and social features to sustain player engagement across diverse hardware ecosystems.

Bill Maris: How Google Could Crush AI Competitors, Why Small Funds Win, and AI's Atari Stage

Bill Maris, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Thomas, Sachs, Alex Komoroske

Former Google Ventures CEO Bill Mares has launched Section 32, a $150 million venture fund designed to capitalize on the mathematical advantages of smaller fund sizes by targeting high-growth infrastructure plays in the rapidly evolving AI sector. Drawing on his history of scaling Google's data center business and generating 4.1x returns at GV, Mares explicitly rejects non-financial metrics to outperform larger competitors that struggle with valuation inflation and return multiples. The strategy prioritizes early-stage deep tech and computational biology opportunities in markets where smaller capital pools can achieve top-decile performance without the structural inefficiencies plaguing billion-dollar funds.

Startup School is back!

YC Startup School functions as a high-impact incubator for smart, ambitious founders by exposing attendees to elite peers and high-profile experts like Fei-Fei Li and John Preskill. This immersive environment demystifies the Y Combinator application process while validating the attainability of entrepreneurship, a shift that often prompts participants to abandon traditional employment paths. Consequently, the program frequently serves as the primary catalyst for launching ventures, fundamentally altering the trajectory of those who attend.

Palo Alto Networks CEO: "AI Found 5 Years of Bugs in 6 Weeks"

Nikesh Arora, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Sarah, Dave, Shamad, Takeda, Jeff Weiner, Bill Hackman

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora celebrates an eight-year tenure marked by a $17 billion to $238 billion market capitalization surge while projecting a potential path to a $1 trillion valuation. Arora details how the company's AI system "Mythos" identified code vulnerabilities in six weeks that would normally take years, signaling a rapid industry shift where analytical SaaS becomes obsolete and infrastructure demand surges tenfold. Looking forward, the organization is pivoting its acquisition strategy toward high-margin operational efficiency and predicting that AI agents will replace traditional user interfaces and legacy software within five years.

Leading Through Complexity: EY’s Janet Truncale on Leadership, AI, and the Modern Boardroom

Janet Truncale, Matt McClure

EY Global Chair Janet Troncalli is steering the firm's transformation into a tech-enabled professional services model that leverages AI for 400,000 employees across 150 countries while prioritizing a "humans at the center" approach. The organization is shifting toward co-source managed service partnerships and fostering a challenger culture to navigate geopolitical risks, evidenced by accelerated client capital deployment despite dampened M&A activity. This strategic pivot is underpinned by a unified global operating model, extensive AI training for the workforce, and a leadership framework designed to manage complex decision-making through alignment over consensus.

The Economics of AI Usage and What's Next For SaaS | Benedict Evans on a16z

Benedict Evans, Erik Torenberg

Benedict Evans analyzes the rapid transition of agentic coding into a definitive product-market fit, noting how massive CapEx investment by major tech firms is currently creating a disequilibrium between supply and demand. He argues that while foundation models may eventually become low-margin commodities akin to mobile infrastructure, the immediate future involves significant adoption challenges and a divergence between deep workflow integration and superficial usage. Ultimately, Evans suggests that AI will drive profound economic restructuring and invisible automation, though the primary financial value will likely accrue to application-layer companies rather than the model providers themselves.

The IPO Comeback: Why Tech Giants Are Finally Going Public | All-In Liquidity IPO Panel

Andrew Feldman, Will Marshall

Cerebras Systems CEO Andrew Feldman and Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall project a transformative 2026 for Initial Public Offerings, driven by Cerebras' record-breaking debut and Planet's 10x post-IPO surge. Their discussion highlights the strategic convergence of artificial intelligence and space infrastructure, where declining launch costs and Wafer-Scale Engine technology promise to shift computing operations from Earth to orbital data centers. This market shift is redefining capital allocation for investors, positioning public listing and real-time satellite integration as critical catalysts for future trillion-dollar valuations in sectors ranging from agriculture to global security.

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.

Emergent: How Six Months of Tinkering Led To A $100M ARR Company

Mukund Jha, Jared Friedman

Emergent is an AI-driven platform founded by Dunzo alumni Mukund and Madhav that enables non-programmers to build and monetize functional software through natural language interaction. Operating with a 95% Bangalore-based engineering team, the company has scaled to an $100 million annual recurring revenue run rate and serves over 8.5 million users by leveraging a proprietary multi-agent architecture that ranks first on industry coding benchmarks. The platform distinguishes itself by focusing on end-to-end software execution rather than prototypes, having shipped over 10 million applications globally within its first nine months of operation.

Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | Applications, Applied AI

Tuhin Srivastava, Apoorv Agrawal, Doohan

Base10, led by CEO Toohin, provides a managed inference infrastructure that powers over 30 trillion tokens daily by aggregating 18 clouds to optimize costs for custom open-source AI models. The company differentiates itself from hyperscalers by abstracting complex hardware management and enabling customers to post-train proprietary models, a strategy driven by a thesis that GPU scarcity will remain permanent as agentic demand grows exponentially. With a projected capital expenditure of $7 billion to secure 150,000 B200 equivalents, Base10 aims to industrialize AI deployment through modular data centers and a transition from compute markup to token-based pricing.

Dan Loeb: The Lost Art of Short Selling, and Why Stock Picking is Back

Dan Loeb, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg

Third Point founder Dan Loeb outlines his firm's strategic evolution toward a multi-platform model managing nearly $30 billion in assets, which integrates hedge fund operations, private credit, and insurance to capitalize on selectivity in a shifting bond-and-credit market. Loeb details aggressive investment tactics including shorting the housing sector and bullish positions on NVIDIA, while emphasizing the irreplaceable human element in assessing character alongside technological literacy. Beyond finance, the narrative highlights Loeb's high-profile criminal justice reform efforts, specifically the successful advocacy for the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, and his philanthropic focus on education reform to address income inequality.

Why are Gen-Z socialists obsessed with taxing billionaires? | The Economist

Generational shifts are driving a move from traditional progressive taxation toward novel levies on immovable wealth, exemplified by New York's new pied-à-terre tax on non-resident luxury properties. While economists debate whether targeting static assets like real estate avoids the innovation-killing pitfalls of direct billionaire wealth taxes, the discourse is increasingly expanding to include inheritance reform and one-off proposals in states like California. As AI-driven IPOs generate new ultra-high-net-worth individuals, this debate is poised to redefine fiscal policy beyond the narrow "billionaire" label in both the US and UK.

Thomas Laffont: The $4T AI IPO Wave Is Coming… and We’ve Never Seen Anything Like It

Thomas Laffont, Chamath, Jason, Nikesh

Hosted by Thomas Kostigen and Chamath Palihapitiya, this event analyzes the explosive 70% growth in the unicorn economy driven by AI's dominance in global fundraising and the emergence of a new "Magnificent AI" index valuing nearly $4 trillion. The discussion highlights how capital is concentrating in massive players like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, which are outpacing traditional cloud providers and projected to generate more liquidity value in 2026 than the previous decade combined. Furthermore, the speakers evaluate the transition from a 2021 preservation era to a power-law investment model, forecasting that extreme compounding and public listings from these top-tier winners will reshape multiple sectors through 2028.

Future of Storytelling: A Conversation with Laurene Powell Jobs & Darren Walker | Global Conference

Laurene Powell Jobs, Darren Walker, Davis Guggenheim

Former Ford Foundation president Darren Walker has assumed the role of CEO at Anonymous Content, a strategic move intended to restore the studio's institutional stability following the grief-stricken vacancy left by founder Steve Golan. Walker and board member Lorraine Twohill position the leadership transition as a response to an evolving media landscape characterized by evaporating legacy revenue and a critical distribution bottleneck, leveraging the studio's independence from private equity to fund long-term, high-risk storytelling. Together, the new leadership emphasizes a renewed focus on human-centric narratives that bridge physical and digital divides, aiming to reset industry confidence through projects that prioritize universal resonance over activist didacticism.