Latest Interviews

KKR's Henry Kravis on private equity, culture, and global markets

Henry Kravis, Alison Mass

In an October 2023 interview, KKR co-founder Henry Kravis outlines the firm's evolution from a $120,000 startup to a $520 billion alternative investment manager while detailing its transition to a co-CEO leadership model under Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall. The discussion highlights KKR's distinct value creation philosophy that aligns management and shareholder interests through owner-operator capital requirements, alongside a strategic "lean in" approach to market downturns focused on operational efficiency. Kravis further addresses the firm's broader macroeconomic outlook regarding sustained inflation and geopolitical risks, while emphasizing its internal "Ownership Works" culture and philanthropic commitment to education and social mobility.

Fireside Chat with Sean Duffy

Sean Duffy, Vijay Pande

Amada Health, rebranding as Raising Health, recently celebrated reaching one million patients by leveraging a proprietary dataset of 25 million messages to deploy AI that augments care teams while addressing the limitations of GLP-1 medications through a dedicated lifestyle track. Co-founder Sean Duffy highlights how the company evolved from skepticism about "provider without clinics" into a foundational digital infrastructure that utilizes artificial empathy to mitigate provider shortages and lower long-term healthcare costs. By pivoting from pure software replication to a hybrid tech-life sciences model, the organization now positions itself as an essential "between-visit" partner capable of offloading longitudinal management from overwhelmed primary care clinicians.

How AI is generating a revolution in entertainment

Alfie, Ankit, Tobias, Harry Yeff, Marcus Hutton, Tom Wainwright

The event details how artificial intelligence is reshaping the music, film, and entertainment industries through data-driven discovery, generative creation tools, and predictive analytics like Cinelytic. While these technologies promise trillions in economic growth and lower barriers for under-resourced creators, they simultaneously spark significant labor disputes over job displacement and intense legal battles regarding copyright and consent. Stakeholders remain divided on whether these advancements will ultimately enrich human creativity or lead to a market flooded with derivative content.

The Fitness Scientist: "Even A Little Alcohol Is Hurting Your Health!" Kristen Holmes

Kristen Holmes, Dr Matthew Walker

VP of Performance Science Kristen Holmes presents data revealing that strict sleep-wake regularity, circadian alignment, and time-restricted eating are superior predictors of longevity and metabolic health compared to total sleep duration alone. The presentation details how lifestyle factors including alcohol consumption, blue light exposure, and social jet lag significantly degrade physiological recovery metrics such as Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and executive function, while also correlating with increased disease risks. By integrating behavioral protocols like morning light exposure, strategic training zones, and value-driven identity shifts, the session offers evidence-based strategies for optimizing human performance and mitigating the severe health impacts of modern circadian disruption.

Uncharted territory: Navigating a ‘geopolitical recession’

Jared Cohen, Ian Bremmer, Allison Nathan

Former State Department official Jared Cohen and political analyst Ian Bremmer describe a global "geopolitical recession" where domestic political pressures in the US and China have eroded traditional governance, creating a credibility deficit that forces all sectors into the crossfire of great power rivalry. While the Middle East conflict has isolated Washington and empowered Iran, strategic stabilization has emerged in US-China relations driven by Beijing's economic fragility, leaving a leadership void that can only be partially filled by climate cooperation. The speakers advise businesses to abandon pure efficiency for "intellectual efficiency," targeting geopolitical swing states like India and the Gulf nations to navigate an era defined by fragmented trade blocs and supply chain weaponization.

The No.1 Poo & Gut Scientist: If Your Poo Looks Like This Go To A Doctor! Dr Will Bulsiewicz

Dr Will Bulsiewicz, Dr Tim Spector

Dr. Golsowitz outlines the critical role of the gut microbiome in regulating immunity, mood, and metabolism, emphasizing how low-fiber diets have triggered a generational loss of microbial diversity linked to rising chronic disease rates. The presentation details actionable dietary strategies, such as consuming 30 plant varieties weekly and following the "F-Goals" framework, while highlighting the connection between gut health, relationship quality, and early-life microbial transfer. Furthermore, the discussion addresses emerging medical trends like standardized fecal transplants and clarifies the importance of monitoring stool characteristics as a primary vital sign for long-term physiological wellness.

Safety in Numbers: Keeping AI Open

Arthur Mensch, Anjney Midha

DeepMind and Meta researchers established foundational scaling laws proving that balancing compute between model parameters and dataset size optimizes performance more effectively than simply increasing model scale. Building on these insights, Mistral AI leveraged Sparse Mixture of Experts architectures to deliver open-source models like Mixtral that match the performance of proprietary giants while reducing inference costs by six times. Founder Arthur Mensch advocates for application-level regulation rather than model restrictions, arguing that open-source collaboration accelerates safety and drives the industry toward specialized, efficient AI ecosystems.

The Love Expert: The REAL Reason We’re Lonely, Loveless, Depressed - Alain De Botton, School Of Life

Alain De Botton, Ryan Holiday

Alain de Botton addresses the psychological crises of modern love and mental health by challenging Romantic ideals of soulmates and emphasizing that relationships require practiced skills rather than innate chemistry. He argues that unresolved childhood traumas and the societal pressure for individual perfection fuel contemporary anxiety, proposing that emotional literacy and "reflexive listening" are essential for conflict resolution. Ultimately, the event advocates for transforming personal suffering into knowledge through disciplined introspection and viewing mental health maintenance as a vital, non-indulgent necessity for thriving.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's philosophy on management is highlighted as the most impactful advice, specifically focusing on the leader's responsibility to ensure their team fully understands their perspective. The speaker attributes past career failures to unspoken assumptions and context gaps, emphasizing that leadership requires the continuous ability to explain ideas clearly. This approach enables colleagues to execute concepts independently without needing constant clarification from their supervisors.

Big Ideas 2024: The Consumer AI Battleground Moves from Model to UX with Alex Immerman

Alex Immerman, Steph

A16Z partners forecast that the 2024 consumer AI landscape will pivot from competing on proprietary foundation models to optimizing user experience and workflow integration, driven by the commoditization of AI infrastructure. Founders are advised to leverage third-party APIs and open-source tools to build defensible businesses through unique use cases, network effects, and high switching costs rather than attempting to develop base models. This strategic shift mirrors the 2010 mobile revolution, where superior interface design and deep workflow embedding, rather than raw technical capability, determined market leaders.

Big Ideas 2024: New Applications for Computer Vision and Video Intelligence with Kimberly Tan

Kimberly Tan

A16Z partners identified a pivotal 2024 thesis centered on applying computer vision to real-world industries, driven by the convergence of abundant video data, affordable edge computing, and transformer-based model innovation. Kimberly Tan highlighted the emergence of hybrid hardware-and-software business models, exemplified by Flock Safety, which are now expanding from residential safety into transportation, agriculture, and mining sectors to solve labor shortages. This shift enables natural language querying of visual data for efficiency and compliance while mitigating privacy risks through strict regulatory design and non-biometric tracking.

Big Ideas 2024: A New Age of Maritime Exploration with Grant Gregory

Grant Gregory

Capitalized on a significant mapping gap where seabed resolution lags far behind celestial charts, the maritime sector is undergoing a digital and hardware revolution driven by urgent regulatory and geopolitical needs. Companies are adapting space-age engineering to replace analog workflows with autonomous vessels and synchronized seafloor topography, addressing critical vulnerabilities exposed by recent supply chain disruptions. This shift creates a multi-billion dollar opportunity for entrepreneurs to layer software onto hardware platforms, transforming an industry that handles over 55% of global GDP while overcoming decades of operational friction.

Big Ideas 2024: AI Interpretability: From Black Box to Clear Box with Anjney Midha

Anjney Midha

In 2024, a16z partners led by General Partner Anjane Mita prioritize mechanistic interpretability to shift the AI industry from observing model outputs to understanding the specific features and "head chefs" driving decision-making. This strategic pivot aims to transform AI explainability into an engineering discipline that enables precise model controllability and reliable deployment in critical sectors like healthcare and finance. By addressing scaling challenges through advanced autoencoders and combinatorial reasoning, the industry seeks to replace fear-based regulation with empirical evidence of model behavior.

E158: Global trade disrupted, Adobe/Figma canceled, realtors sued, Trump blocked

Trump, Jason, Ryan Petersen, Friedberg, Biden, Chamath Palihapitiya

Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks restructured the podcast's leadership into a dual CEO model while addressing a Red Sea crisis that is driving global freight costs up 300% and threatening regional escalation. The hosts also analyzed a surge in regulatory hurdles stifling M&A activity and a historic lawsuit that threatens to dismantle real estate commission monopolies. Finally, the group critiqued the Colorado Supreme Court's decision to remove Donald Trump from the ballot, arguing the ruling bypassed due process and risks exacerbating political polarization ahead of the election.

Big Ideas 2024: The Rise of the Developer as a Buyer in Financial Services with Angela Strange

Angela Strange

The financial services sector is undergoing a fundamental transformation where developers have emerged as influential buyers, driving a shift from legacy "marble" infrastructure to composable, code-based "as-a-service" architectures. This transition is accelerating the adoption of open-source libraries and generative AI tools to modernize the estimated 40% of banking code still running on COBOL, while open banking mandates in regions like the UK and Brazil are replacing fragmented systems with standardized APIs. Ultimately, these technological advancements aim to reduce infrastructure costs and improve product quality, creating new opportunities to serve the two billion people currently underserved by traditional banking models.