Latest Interviews

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.

We just launched Paxel!

Paxil is a locally executed tool that generates a five-dimensional builder profile analyzing how developers utilize AI coding agents like Cursor within their own Docker environments. Y Combinator encourages Startup School applicants to integrate this data into their submissions to identify high-potential "no-resume" talent by shifting evaluation focus from final outputs to specific building methodologies. Developed to aggregate global patterns on AI-assisted software creation, the service remains free for developers seeking actionable insights into their engineering workflows.

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.

Private Wealth and the Future of Financial Security | Global Conference 2026

Maneet Ahuja, Peter Beske Nielsen, David Blanchett, Jay Jackson, Jed Laskowitz, Ida Liu

The upcoming historic wealth transfer exceeding $100 trillion to millennials, with $30 trillion allocated to women, is driving a strategic pivot toward diversified geographic exposure and long-duration themes like AI infrastructure and longevity healthcare. Financial strategies are simultaneously adapting to a volatile "new normal" by shifting retirement focus from accumulation to decumulation, utilizing probabilistic healthspan data to challenge standard withdrawal rates, and leveraging family offices as primary capital allocators. Meanwhile, the asset management landscape is consolidating around advanced AI integration for underwriting and risk analysis while accommodating gender-driven impact investing and global pension reforms that expand individual access to private market strategies.

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.

How Legora Went From YC to $100M ARR in 18 Months

Max Junestrand, Gustaf Alströmer

Following its acceptance into the YC Winter 2024 cohort, a ten-person founding team of former consultants and engineers rapidly scaled their legal technology platform to nearly 500 employees and over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. The company distinguished itself in a crowded market through a high-profile campaign featuring Jude Law and by pivoting from task-based augmentation to autonomous agents capable of executing complex end-to-end legal workflows. As the business prepares to expand beyond its legal identity, it leverages proprietary data and specialized workflow integrations to maintain a competitive moat against generalist model providers while addressing the evaluation challenges inherent in complex legal contexts.

ITPM Flash Ep114 Point, Click, Profit.

Ben Berggreen

Amidst stretched tech valuations and cooling inflation narratives, Logitech International presents a strategic opportunity as a debt-free hardware provider capitalizing on the enterprise PC refresh cycle driven by the Windows 10 end-of-life deadline and AI hardware adoption. The company's robust fiscal 2024 performance, characterized by positive operating cash flow and a new CEO-led R&D push, is supported by a bullish option strategy that pairs long August $130 calls with short July $140 calls to limit risk while targeting a potential price run to $155 by late July. This setup seeks to profit from the anticipated low-expectation Q1 earnings catalyst and the broader rotation toward companies with solid fundamentals over speculative assets.

Will European Equities Outperform the S&P?

Sharon Bell, Chris Hussey

European equities have surged to near all-time highs driven by a 6–7% average upgrade in earnings estimates within the commodity and financial sectors, supported by resilient economic growth and planned German fiscal spending. Goldman Sachs has raised its 12-month Euro Stoxx 600 forecast to 660, citing the region's broader market breadth and the underappreciated potential of heavy asset companies in defense, aerospace, and utilities that are benefiting from global infrastructure and defense spending. While analysts project high single-digit returns for Europe over the coming year, the market is expected to trail U.S. and Asian performance due to lower energy independence and the concentration of tech dominance in American hyperscalers.

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.

Rising airfares no match for a consumer going full throttle on experiences

Andrew Didora, TJ Thornton

Presented at the May 20th BVA conference, airline executives and analysts projected flat domestic capacity for mid-2026 to match a 21% year-over-year fare increase while relying on AI to optimize margins rather than drive demand. Concurrently, leisure market data highlights a persistent K-shaped recovery where premium segments like cruises and wellness outperform, supported by high-income consumers less sensitive to rising prices. Sector outlooks indicate that capacity discipline will remain the primary airline strategy throughout the second half of 2026, contingent on geopolitical stability and oil price trends.

Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Walks Us Through His AI Coding Setup

Charlie Holtz

Charlie, co-founder of Conductor, leads a team developing a macOS application that orchestrates multiple coding agents to generate software primarily in TypeScript and Rust. The platform enforces a strict non-terminal workflow where AI handles code generation while humans intervene only through specific review modes to maintain quality and prevent error cycles. With a strategic focus on high-efficiency model selection and a future roadmap emphasizing malleable, modifiable agents, Conductor positions itself as a tool that shifts software value from code itself to human-authored prompts and descriptions.

Tom Mueller: SpaceX's #1 Employee Built the Merlin Engine. Now He's Building Impulse Space

Tom Mueller, Molly O'Shea

Former SpaceX founding employee Tom Mueller founded Impulse Space to revolutionize intra-orbital transport with its fleet of advanced spacecraft, including the orbital transfer vehicle Mira and the heavy-lift Helios. The company leverages proprietary Nova Light alloy and additive manufacturing to produce the Deneb hydrocarbon engine and lightweight composite tanks, achieving performance metrics that could significantly boost payload delivery to the Moon and Mars. Currently advancing lunar infrastructure efforts through successful rendezvous tests and an active lander contract bid, Impulse Space combines in-house manufacturing with AI-driven design to support a future lunar economy.

GLP-1s are shrinking some appetites; broader use poses a prickly challenge

Peter Galbo, Jason Gerberry, TJ Thornton

As of May 2026, the U.S. GLP-1 market has reached 10 million treated patients and $28 billion in revenue while facing a deflationary pricing cycle driven by Medicare agreements and an upcoming surge of generic semaglutide competitors. This therapeutic expansion is displacing packaged food volume in snack and alcohol categories, forcing large-cap pharmaceutical firms to trade at depressed multiples as the market nears U.S. saturation and pivots toward international growth. Future value will increasingly depend on next-generation formulations targeting muscle preservation and adherence rates, with analysts forecasting a shift where international sales eventually comprise more than half of total category revenue.

Bill Ackman: Here's What the Market is MISSING

Bill Ackman, Chamath, Jason, David

Howard Ackman outlines a strategic evolution at Pershing Square toward concentrated long-term holdings in high-quality businesses, leveraging deep board involvement to counteract market short-termism and capitalize on undervalued legacy tech giants amidst AI-driven disruption. His approach extends to late-stage founder-led ventures like SpaceX and XAI, which he values through a venture capital lens of people and opportunity, while simultaneously repurposing the Howard Hughes Corporation into a "Berkshire 2.0" model that utilizes real estate cash flows to fund an insurance float for tax-efficient capital compounding. Ackman further explains how social media dynamics now enable persistent narratives to influence valuations, supporting a three-vehicle investment structure that includes a royalty-based management company, a public discount vehicle, and a transformed real estate holding to deliver sustained growth over decades.