Latest Interviews

Cadran Cowansage Announces Leap at the Seattle Female Founders Conference

Cadran Cowansage, Kaedryn Cowan-Sage

Y Combinator engineer Kaedryn Cowan-Sage founded Leap, a private online network of approximately 2,000 women in tech that uses real-name verification to foster civil discourse and prevent the toxic environments often driving women out of digital spaces. Initially validated within Y Combinator, the platform now connects software engineers, founders, and investors through authentic conversations ranging from career development to technical problem-solving. Members report tangible professional outcomes, including securing co-founders and landing new jobs, proving the hybrid community's efficacy in advancing careers through genuine connection.

Avni Patel Thompson at the Seattle Female Founders Conference

Avni Patel Thompson

Seattle-based startup Poppy, founded by Avni Patel-Thompson, connects families with vetted caregivers to recreate a modern village safety net for childcare following the failure of her previous subscription box venture. After validating the concept through a low-cost pilot and recruiting a technical co-founder, the company secured Y Combinator acceptance and over $2 million in seed funding by pivoting from a membership model to a transaction fee structure. Now in a rapid growth phase with a team of ten, Poppy prioritizes mission-driven hiring and founder sustainability while aiming to help hundreds of other entrepreneurs reach validated market traction.

Danny Meyer: Shaking it Up: Stories of Success from a Disruptor

Danny Meyer, Tim O'Neill, John F.W. Rogers, Kevin McCarthy, Tyler Perry, Sarah Kauss, Wilbur L. Ross, Sara Blakely, Michael Bloomberg, Gina Raimondo, Rick Snyder, Marco Rubio, Lloyd Blankfein, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett

Danny Meyer launched Union Square Cafe in 1985 by applying an "enlightened hospitality" philosophy that prioritizes employee well-being over profit, a strategy that transformed a struggling neighborhood eatery into a cultural icon following a pivotal New York Times review. This approach evolved into the Union Square Hospitality Group, which expanded to include Shake Shack and over 100 locations globally by institutionalizing a culture where leaders act as "culture carriers" and growth is driven by a specific stakeholder hierarchy. Meyer's career demonstrates how maintaining core values while aggressively pruning non-performing assets allows an organization to scale without losing its soul or financial stability.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy: Standing Up for Small Businesses

Kevin McCarthy, John F.W. Rogers, Tyler Perry, Danny Meyer, Sarah Kauss, Wilbur L. Ross, Sara Blakely, Michael Bloomberg, Gina Raimondo, Rick Snyder, Marco Rubio, Lloyd Blankfein, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican with deep roots in the state's energy and agricultural sectors, outlines his journey from early entrepreneurial ventures to crafting bipartisan legislation like the Jobs Act. He argues that small businesses are the nation's primary job creators and urges owners to build direct, sustained relationships with lawmakers to overcome capital and training hurdles. Drawing on historical symbolism from the Gettysburg Address and Washington Crossing the Delaware, McCarthy concludes by calling for cross-party collaboration to address long-term challenges and forge a more perfect union.

Startup Investor School Day 3 Live Stream

Elad Gil, Pejman, Jeff Clavier, Andrea, Ali Partovi

Day 3 of the Startup Investor School convened five prominent investors, including Elad Gil, Pejman Nozad, Jeff Clavier, Andrea Zurlo, and Ali Partovi, to dissect critical strategies for market selection, team evaluation, and portfolio construction. The speakers emphasized that successful angel investing requires a 10-year horizon, strict risk discipline regarding net worth allocation, and a service-oriented mindset that prioritizes founder support over immediate financial gains. Key consensus points highlighted the necessity of investing in brilliant founders with big ideas regardless of initial market perceptions, maintaining long-term patience through early-stage losses, and building a personal brand rooted in integrity and operational availability.

Talks at GS – Naval Ravikant: The Capital Play Behind Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Naval Ravikant

The event examines blockchain technology as a novel governance mechanism that solves consensus problems without central authority, highlighting applications ranging from Bitcoin to decentralized identity networks. It details the stringent technical expertise required to navigate high-risk investment environments marred by market manipulation, insider trading, and the complexities of ICOs replacing traditional capital formation models. Finally, the presentation analyzes how national competitiveness is shifting toward reserve currency status and regulatory adaptability as governments confront the legal challenges of enforcing laws on code-based speech and decentralized networks.

Lessons in Leadership: Women Breaking Barriers and Battling Bias

Yomi Abiola, Richard Ditizio, Asli Bayram, Jackie Cooper, Lynne Franks, Assia Grazioli-Venier, Brenda Trenowden

This panel of business leaders and activists argues that achieving global gender equality requires structural reforms beyond individual mentorship, citing the "elephant and giraffe" parable and Norway's 40% board quota as evidence that systemic bias must be dismantled through enforceable mandates and diverse executive empowerment. Key speakers including Asya and Brenda Trenodin outlined strategies such as replacing passive mentorship with active sponsorship, utilizing AI to neutralize gendered hiring language, and investing in mixed-gender leadership to normalize female presence in high-stakes corporate and venture capital environments. While acknowledging slow progress highlighted by the World Economic Forum's 2186 equality projection, the group emphasized that accelerating this timeline demands measurable KPIs, top-down accountability, and a shift in corporate culture from tolerance to active inclusion.

Nate Foster: Verifying Network Data Planes

Nate Foster, Bill Hallahan, JK Lee, Cole Schlesinger, Steffen Smolks, Robert Soule, Han Wang, Ron

Cornell Professor Nate Foster and Barefoot Networks have developed an automated verification tool for P4 programs running on programmable data planes to prevent catastrophic network failures caused by configuration errors. This system transforms P4 code into guarded commands to efficiently compute weakest preconditions using the Sacks and Flanagan algorithm, checking safety conditions against the Z3 SMT solver to generate counter-examples for invalid header accesses without requiring manual annotations. By modeling the separation between data and control planes through ghost state, the tool validates programs up to 20,000 lines of code in minutes, establishing a critical foundation for verifying complex software-defined network topologies.

The Most Important Decision is Getting Started – Laura Behrens Wu

Laura Behrens Wu, Carolyn Levy

Shippo, co-founded by Laura Behrens-Wu and Simon, built an API platform that processes millions of monthly shipments for 16,000 e-commerce merchants after pivoting to solve critical shipping transparency issues. The company successfully raised $9 million in two rounds despite facing significant hurdles, including 115 investor rejections, team turnover, and a lawsuit, by maintaining transparent communication and executing a compressed four-week Series A process. Behrens-Wu now leverages this experience to advocate for inclusive hiring practices and warns founders to vet investors on their crisis management behaviors while navigating systemic gender biases in the B2B technology sector.

Electric cars will come of age in 2018

The 2018 automotive landscape marked a global tipping point where electric vehicle costs fell below those of fossil fuel models, driven by halved battery prices, doubled driving ranges, and government mandates from nations like Britain and France to ban internal combustion engines by 2040. China's dominance in production and sales, combined with corporate commitments to fully electrify fleets, aims to disrupt global oil demand while introducing ethical supply chain challenges regarding cobalt extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Experts characterize this transition as an inevitable momentum that will eventually phase out the 1880s-era internal combustion engine, despite the trillions of dollars required to upgrade power grids and stabilize regions reliant on oil revenue.

Al Gore: Leading the Charge for Environmental Action

Al Gore, S Iswaran, Michael Klowden

A comprehensive analysis frames the climate crisis as a solvable sustainability revolution driven by AI, IoT expansion, and renewable economics that now outperform fossil fuels. Despite accelerating temperature anomalies, extreme weather events, and ecosystem collapse threatening global stability, the speaker highlights record-breaking decarbonization trends and a $22 trillion financial risk assessment that compels market-led action. Ultimately, the transition is portrayed as inevitable due to technological capability and investment momentum, even as political fluctuations and lagging mitigation efforts continue to exacerbate immediate atmospheric and humanitarian risks.

Jobs of 2037: Preparing for the Future

Michael Milken, Josephine Teo, Joseph C. Tsai, Igor Tulchinsky, Jaime Augusto Zóbel de Ayala, Michael Clouden

The Milken Institute Global Conference Asia Summit addressed the strategic imperative of balancing automation with human connection to prepare for a global population projected to reach one billion more by 2037. Speakers from Singapore, the Philippines, and China highlighted successful models where targeted education, industry transformation maps, and ecosystem-driven logistics have offset workforce shrinkage and created millions of new roles. The consensus emphasizes that governments and corporations must foster facilitative environments and robust social safety nets to ensure technological advancement translates into shared economic prosperity rather than widespread displacement.

Building a Startup is About Solving a Problem - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy

Avni Patel Thompson

Founded by Avni, Poppy is a Seattle-based childcare network designed to recreate a modern village by connecting vetted caregivers with families seeking reliability. After a failed subscription box startup and multiple rejections from Y Combinator, Avni pivoted by leveraging manual "concierge" operations to validate demand, eventually securing over $2 million in seed funding and acceptance into the Winter 2016 cohort. The company now operates on a weekly growth rhythm that prioritizes solving core customer frustrations over product perfection, demonstrating how curiosity and user feedback drove the transition from a personal struggle to a scalable business model.

Diane Greene's Advice for Founders

Diane Greene

Diane Greene, currently Chief of Google Cloud and a veteran founder who established VMware and Bebop, delivers a strategic masterclass to over 800 global female founders on building resilient enterprises. She outlines critical success factors including lean founder alignment, non-disruptive market adoption strategies, and the importance of fostering collaborative corporate cultures, drawing direct parallels between her competitive sailing experience and high-stakes business leadership. The session concludes with a Q&A segment where Greene discusses the viability of corporate intrapreneurship and shares her philosophy on prioritizing process and value creation over immediate financial outcomes.

Jeff Dean’s Lecture for YC AI

Jeff Dean, Zach Stone

The Google Brain Team outlines its mission to advance machine intelligence through foundational tools like TensorFlow, which now powers critical products including Search, Gmail, and medical diagnostic systems. Led by the speaker, the organization has transitioned from shallow methods to deep neural networks fueled by massive compute scaling, resulting in breakthroughs such as human-level translation quality and automated neural architecture search. Future developments focus on custom TPUs for cloud infrastructure and multitask models aimed at solving complex healthcare diagnostics and accelerating scientific discovery.