Latest Interviews

OpenAI vs Anthropic IPOs, Anthropic $3T, Zuck's Price War, China Ends Open Source?, Trump Accounts

Zuck, Trump, Brad Gerstner, Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya

Markets are reacting to a wave of major AI initial public offerings, with SpaceX securing a $75 billion valuation and speculation mounting for Anthropic and OpenAI despite rising token costs and plateauing productivity gains. Geopolitical tensions are intensifying as nations build sovereign infrastructure to counter US dominance, while energy constraints loom as the primary bottleneck for global AI expansion. Domestically, the "Invest America" Act has mobilized bipartisan support by launching tax-advantaged "Trump Accounts" that aim to create $1 to $4 trillion in wealth for millions of children through automated S&P 500 investments.

Why the US Dollar Could Continue to Strengthen

Brian Dunne, Chris Hussey

Driven by geopolitical tensions with Iran, robust U.S. corporate performance, and a shifting Federal Reserve stance toward rate hikes, analysts project sustained dollar strength against global rivals. This outlook supports a primary strategy of long USD positions against G10 currencies, particularly the Swiss Franc, to capitalize on favorable interest rate differentials and potential central bank divergence. Market participants also anticipate upside in specific emerging markets like Brazil and Egypt while noting that structural challenges to the dollar's reserve status remain distant.

Kalshi's Co-CEOs Disagree by Design — Why Constant Conflict Became Their Pattern

The event details a leadership model within a complex organization where intentional, continuous disagreement serves as a core operating pattern to balance regulatory risk against innovation. This approach relies on designated contrarian voices that act as a necessary check by identifying potential failure points when team enthusiasm peaks. Ultimately, the strategy establishes a delicate, constant mechanism for navigating the tension between advancing new initiatives and adhering to strict regulatory constraints.

YC's Head of Design Shows You How To Design With AI

Eve Bouffard, Aaron Epstein, Ev Bufar

Designer Ev Bufar utilizes a voice-first workflow with tools like Aqua, Conductor, and Paper.design to rapidly produce high-fidelity assets for diverse projects, including the Paxyl transcript analyzer and the Soda Zine. Her recent work at Startup School demonstrates an agent-driven production model that generated visual identities for 6,000 attendees through custom shaders and automated speaker assets, while Paxyl analyzes coding agent interactions to reveal developer patterns. By prioritizing massive context density and disposable internal models, Bufar accelerates the design iteration cycle to handle complex branding and interactive web experiences that explicitly cater to both human users and AI agents.

"Dig Through Your Couches. SpaceX Needs It." Cyan Banister on Luke Nosek's Pitch

Cyan Banister, Luke Nosek, Scott Banister, Molly O'Shea

Ranking as the world's top angel investors, Cyan and Scott Bannister leverage a methodology of identifying non-obvious trends to secure transformative stakes in companies like SpaceX and Anduril. During their discussion at Long Journey HQ, they outline a future dominated by AI-driven robotics while advocating for decentralized models to counter surveillance states and urging a shift away from traditional degrees toward artisanal entrepreneurship. Blending this strategic foresight with personal philosophies on radical authenticity and introspection, the couple emphasizes the critical need for American deep tech resurgence to navigate the coming "consumer wave" of artificial intelligence.

Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese’s AI Toolkit with CEOs of Cerebras & Black Forest Labs

Andrew Feldman, Robin Rombach, Martin Scorsese

Cerebras Systems leverages a $25 billion order backlog from major tech giants to deploy chips that accelerate AI reasoning fifteen times faster than standard inference, effectively achieving early Artificial General Intelligence while reshaping global energy infrastructure. Simultaneously, Black Forest Labs utilizes its pioneering latent diffusion algorithms to bridge generative media and robotics, partnering with entities like Martin Scorsese to create scalable production tools and autonomous "world models." Both companies advocate for a hybrid ecosystem combining open-source accessibility with proprietary sovereignty, aiming to resolve economic bottlenecks and regulatory challenges through staged deployments and secure data practices.

The Next Era of Health | Global Conference 2026

Esther Krofah, Robert Bradway, Nancy Brown, Alicia Jackson, Myechia Minter-Jordan, Dipen Parekh

Addressing a critical demographic tipping point and a $1 trillion caregiver gap, stakeholders including AARP, ARPA-H, and the American Heart Association are reforming U.S. healthcare to bridge the divide between technological innovation and clinical delivery. Initiatives range from deploying agentic AI to extend cardiovascular prevention to counties lacking specialists, to accelerating long-term care research through new regulatory pathways and a target reduction of drug discovery timelines to under five years. Concurrently, global competition drives a strategic pivot toward genomic integration and value-based models, with specific commitments to reduce Lipoprotein(a) levels by 95% and establish federal tax credits for the nation's 63 million caregivers.

Every Startup Has a Hole in the Ship — Kalshi's Tarek Mansour on the Problem You Can't Delegate

Tarek Mansour

The speaker distinguishes between organizations that actively confront critical internal flaws and those that ignore them, asserting that unaddressed defects inevitably lead to failure despite external growth. In January, the industry identified a reputational leak caused by public confusion between regulated platforms like Calci and unregulated offshore operators such as Polymarket. To resolve this, the organization has initiated a strategy to educate stakeholders on the necessity of regulation, aiming to normalize compliant operations and distinguish them from non-compliant models.

Dot Plots: How to Actually See What Your Users Are Doing

David Lieb, Dave

Founders and enterprise product teams can uncover hidden usage patterns and early churn signals by utilizing dot plots, a visualization method originally derived from PayPal's fraud detection systems. This technique replaces opaque aggregate metrics with granular grids that map individual user activity against time, allowing stakeholders to distinguish between active cohorts and vanity behaviors that traditional dashboards mask. By combining these visual insights with cohort retention curves, organizations ranging from early-stage startups to massive platforms like Google Photos can identify specific feature correlations and usage gaps that drive product iteration and contract renewals.

Kalshi's Tarek Mansour: Chaos by Design

Tarek Mansour, Luana Lopes Lara, Dharmesh

Kalshi co-founders Tarkan and Luana structured their organization to maintain a flat hierarchy and deliberate strategic disagreement, which fueled a legal battle against the CFTC that resulted in a 2024 victory and a 95% dominance of the U.S. prediction market. The company distinguishes itself through a regulated exchange model that charges fees on volume rather than customer losses, while enforcing strict risk management protocols for younger traders to ensure responsible usage. This victory allowed Kalshi to launch political markets just before the 2024 election, leveraging a founder-led culture of aggressive detail and real-time cultural synchronization to solidify its position against offshore competitors.

The Next President May Control Superintelligence

Sneha Revanur, Zershaaneh Qureshi

Founded by Sneha Ravenor at age 15, the nonprofit ENCODE has evolved from capability skepticism to spearheading a strategic campaign to regulate existential AI risks through state-level legislation and coalition building. The organization successfully influenced California's SB 53 and SB 1047 by prioritizing whistleblower protections and internal deployment reporting, while simultaneously dismantling corporate intimidation tactics like the OpenAI subpoena through diplomatic engagement. Facing the 2028 election as a potential turning point for AI governance, ENCODE advocates for a phased regulatory approach that codifies voluntary safety standards to build political capital before pursuing aggressive liability measures.

Solving the Blank Canvas Problem: Gusto's AI Co-Founder

Eddie Kim, Harj Taggar

Launched in just ten weeks by a five-person team including co-founder Eddie Kim, Gusto Co-founder is a new AI product that transforms Gusto's payroll and HR data into proactive, agent-based automations for small businesses. The platform has already onboarded 500 paying customers by replacing traditional dashboards with text-based interfaces that execute complex workflows, such as full payroll processing, weather-based customer notifications, and tax credit application. This initiative validates a strategic pivot toward becoming a proactive business partner capable of lowering entry barriers for new entrepreneurs while automating compliance and growth opportunities through a "vibe coding" development methodology.

Asia-Pacific Overtures: Investment Returns Through Diversification | Global Conference 2026

Laura Deal Lacey, Michael DeSombre, David Elia, Jacqueline Poh, Pandu Sjahrir, Lu Yin

The event convened U.S. policymakers, Singaporean ecosystem builders, and major sovereign wealth managers from Australia and Indonesia to align trade, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence strategies across the Indo-Pacific. Participants detailed a coordinated shift toward removing non-tariff barriers, deploying over $2 billion in targeted foreign assistance, and establishing regional AI stacks to counter Chinese technological dominance. Discussions highlighted a broader trend where pension funds and state actors are bifurcating portfolios between traditional commodities and frontier technologies while accelerating cross-border energy and digital infrastructure projects to sustain long-term regional growth.

Has the AI boom entered a manic new phase? | The Economist

Henry Curr, Mike Bird, Josh Roberts

US equity markets have reached near-record capitalization levels driven primarily by massive AI-focused "giga IPOs" like SpaceX and anticipated offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. This concentration, now comprising nearly 40% of the S&P 500, coincides with unusual retail participation and inverted options pricing that signal a shift toward speculative mania. Simultaneously, major technology firms have redirected capital expenditure toward infrastructure, causing a collapse in free cash flow and transforming the sector into a dominant force in global corporate debt markets.

The New Rules of Enterprise Software with Steven Sinofsky

Steven Sinofsky, Seema Amble, Elena Burger

As enterprise software evolves to support AI agents accessing core logic via APIs rather than traditional interfaces, incumbents like Salesforce are pivoting toward "headless" architectures to facilitate direct data retrieval. However, the immense stickiness of legacy systems such as SAP persists due to deeply codified business logic and regulatory compliance that cannot be easily replaced by simple automation or "vibe coding." Consequently, high-value startup opportunities emerge not by competing directly with these giants but by building invisible layers that capture unstructured human context, bridge functional gaps between departments, and manage the complex "long tail" of exceptions that legacy platforms ignore.