Latest Interviews
Showing 16–30 of 172 interview transcripts.
Clear all filtersRace to Save Humanity: Inside $12B Colossal Biosciences & $3.8B Astromech
Ben Lamm, George Church, Molly O'Shea
Colossal is leveraging a de-extinction toolkit and AI-driven "civilization tech" to address an impending 50% global biodiversity loss while raising $400 million in recent capital. Following a breakthrough in generating healthy woolly mice for rapid phenotype testing, the company aims to birth its first extinct species within 12 months by utilizing an 80% efficient cloning arm and open-source technologies. This vertical integration strategy targets ethical textile production and invasive species eradication, operating under strict ethical boundaries that exclude human or primate genome editing.
From $18B to $300B: How Nikesh Arora Rebuilt Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is accelerating its defense against AI-driven cyber threats by launching capabilities to patch vulnerabilities within four hours, a drastic compression from the historical 55-day average. This strategic shift is supported by an aggressive acquisition model that has absorbed over 40 companies, including CyberArk, to integrate expert insights and fill internal R&D gaps. Concurrently, the broader industry is pivoting toward autonomous agents and specialized compute infrastructure while navigating unresolved liability questions and a projected period of market correction over the next two to five years.
Inside AppLovin’s $100B Ad Engine
Adam Foroughi, Giovanni Ge, Molly O'Shea
AppLovin rebounded from a 92% post-IPO decline to reach a $100 billion valuation by deploying its Axon 2 recommendation engine, a core architecture rebuilt from scratch by CTO Gio to leverage semantic embeddings and GPU optimization. Under CEO Adam Mosseri's leadership, the company expanded beyond mobile gaming into e-commerce and connected TV while maintaining a lean team of approximately 100 engineers who write code without AI assistance during onboarding to preserve technical literacy. This strategy emphasizes engineering-led prototyping and a self-serve advertiser model to generate over $7 billion in annual EBITDA, positioning the firm to potentially reach a $1 trillion valuation through $30 billion in annual cash flow.
Inside America’s Million-Drone Factory
Soren Monroe-Anderson, Molly O'Shea
Euro (Nero) has relocated its operations to a 250,000-square-foot facility designed to support an annual capacity of one million drones, enabling the vertical integration of manufacturing processes that currently yield over 250 units daily. The company is advancing its Bandit Interceptor prototype to target speeds of 400 km/h for intercepting jet-powered drones while maintaining a strict quality control protocol that mandates 100% flight testing for every unit. Strategic planning includes in-house component production, active hiring across engineering and supply chain disciplines, and a long-term vision to transition to full automation contingent upon a redesigned product architecture.
The $2.5B Drone Company Trying to Become the Toyota of Defense
Soren Monroe-Anderson, Molly O'Shea
Neuros has secured a $250 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital and ASTF to scale production at its new 250,000-square-foot facility, aiming to build one million drones annually while becoming the first FPV manufacturer approved for the UAS Blue List. The company is deploying its Bandit interceptor to Ukraine by the end of 2024 to counter the rising threat of enemy Shahed drones, leveraging a $500 million U.S. Army contract to deliver its Purpose Built Attritable System. With a portfolio expanding to include the autonomous Archer AI, Neuros prioritizes de-Chinified supply chains and mass production capabilities to fulfill growing global defense demands for attritable systems.
Inside the Factory Behind Base Power's $1B Series D
Base Power recently secured a $1 billion Series D funding round led by Ribbit and JPMorgan Chase, establishing a $13 billion valuation to accelerate production of its high-capacity BaseCore home battery system. The vertically integrated manufacturer is scaling operations at its Austin facility to 4,000 units weekly, featuring a modular design that enables full-home backup power in under two hours per unit. This growth supports a strategic rollout of both direct consumer sales and utility partnership models across key regional markets as the company prepares to open a second factory near the Austin airport.
AssemblyAI Now Handles 4x YouTube's Daily Volume
AssemblyAI has achieved explosive growth with weekly API conversations surging 800% to surpass 120 million voice interactions, driven by CEO Dylan Fox's infrastructure-focused strategy that supports over one million developers. The company distinguishes itself through advanced, context-aware voice models capable of real-time multi-language switching and noise filtering, while maintaining a lean, AI-native operational structure. Looking forward, leadership anticipates voice becoming a universal consumer interface within three years, though the industry must urgently address ethical transparency and on-device latency challenges to ensure trust.
Lumentum CEO: How Lasers Are Transforming AI Data Centers
Michael Hurlston, Tony Kim, Molly O'Shea
Under CEO Michael Hurlston, Lumentum has transformed from a diversified manufacturer into a pure-play data center optical leader, tripling revenue and driving its stock price up to 12-fold by capitalizing on the industry's rapid shift from copper to fiber connectivity. This transition, necessitated by the physical limitations of copper in high-speed environments, is straining the specialized Indium Phosphide supply chain due to long lead times for dedicated fabrication facilities. Facing tens of millions in new hyperscaler orders, the company is simultaneously expanding into space-based internet infrastructure and navigating geopolitical dynamics that favor U.S. domestic suppliers over Chinese competitors.
Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition
Cognition has secured a $26 billion valuation and $500 million in revenue by deploying its autonomous AI engineer, Devon, to solve complex engineering tasks for major clients like Goldman Sachs and NASA. The company recently consolidated its operations by acquiring the 200-person Windsurf IDE team, creating a unified hybrid environment where local coding and remote cloud agents collaborate seamlessly. Founder Scott Wu emphasizes an immediate "abundance era" of software mass-creation over human obsolescence, while maintaining model neutrality and refusing integration into larger tech conglomerates as the firm prepares to demonstrate its self-driving software capabilities at the upcoming RAISE AI summit in Paris.
BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum
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.
David Friedberg Explains America's Economic Crisis in 60 Minutes
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.
Hyperscalers Are Out of Capacity? | MongoDB CEO
Driven by hyperscaler capacity shortages and stringent data sovereignty requirements, major enterprises are migrating workloads back on-premises while adopting heterogeneous AI architectures to manage complex agentic environments. CEO CJ Desai leads MongoDB's strategic response by prioritizing real-time, operational database solutions for AI-native startups and Fortune 500 clients, shifting from traditional model selection to a focus on deterministic outcomes and autonomous administration. This approach positions the company to capitalize on the "AI super cycle" by ensuring the high-quality data layer required to transition experimental prototypes into scalable, production-grade applications in sectors like banking and aviation.
Inference 101: SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang
Sambanova has secured its first $1 billion tranche at an $11 billion valuation, bringing its total capital raised to $2.5 billion as it pivots to optimizing inference for trillion-parameter models. The company's SN40 architecture enables premium, high-accuracy inference within standard 10-kilowatt air-cooled racks, offering a scalable alternative to the massive, liquid-cooled data centers required by competing GPU technologies. This infrastructure strategy, led by founder Rodrigo Yang, supports a heterogenous data center model and edge deployments to meet the latency demands of agentic AI while allowing cloud providers to maximize revenue per rack.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Winning Travel's AI Race | Ariel Cohen, Navan and Molly O'Shea, Sourcery | RAISE Summit 2026
Navan leverages its "Navan Cognition" orchestration platform to deploy hybrid human-AI workflows that handled 60% of complex travel issues with human-comparable satisfaction while driving 50% year-over-year Gross Booking Value growth. This strategy enabled the company to achieve profitability and positive cash flow by combining AI efficiency with a "supervisory model" where human agents oversee automated agents for high-stakes executive travel. Ariel Cohen positions Navan to capture market share from legacy competitors by replacing the traditional SaaS model with performance-based revenue and a blended business-leisure booking experience.
Senra Systems' $65M Series B: Fixing Aerospace & Defense's Biggest Bottleneck
Jordan Black, Ken Venner, Molly O'Shea
Senra Systems successfully closed a $65 million Series B round led by Lower Carbon and Interlagos, bringing its total capital to $100 million while integrating SpaceX veteran Ken Venner into its executive leadership. The company addresses the critical bottleneck in wire harness assembly by deploying a proprietary Manufacturing Operating System and accelerated training program to transform fragmented, manual processes into scalable software-driven production for defense and commercial clients. With an 80,000-square-foot facility already producing 4,000 units weekly and a strategy to replicate this model globally, Senra aims to automate complex manufacturing workflows to support the surging demand in electrification, aerospace, and satellite sectors.