Latest Interviews

Riding the AI Wave

Anshul Sehgal, Chris Hussey

The April 30 FOMC meeting revealed a divided Federal Reserve committee that shifted from expectations of a near-term rate cut to a non-committal stance, a position reinforced by the incoming appointment of hawkish member Kevin Warsh. While private sector leverage has decreased since the Great Financial Crisis, concerns regarding public sector debt sustainability and elevated term premiums persist alongside a robust equity rally driven by hyperscalers and artificial intelligence. Investment strategists consequently maintain a bullish but cautious 7/10 allocation to technology, avoiding fixed income while rotating into energy and defense to hedge against potential consumer drawdowns expected in the mid-year "air pocket."

Recursion Is The Next Scaling Law In AI

Ankit Gupta, Francois Chaubard

Two 2025 research initiatives, Hierarchical Reasoning Models (HRM) and Tiny Recursive Models (TRM), challenge standard scaling laws by utilizing inference-time recursion to achieve state-of-the-art reasoning with drastically fewer parameters. HRM reaches 27 million parameters using a three-level weighted hierarchy, while the simplified TRM distills the architecture to just 7 million parameters yet achieves 87% accuracy on ARC-Prize benchmarks by treating recurrence as a dynamic latent memory tape. These systems overcome historical RNN limitations through Deep Equilibrium Models and latent recursion, offering a pathway to efficient, deep reasoning that diverges from traditional Chain-of-Thought constraints.

Figure's First Full HQ Tour: From the Lab to the Factory Floor

Brett Adcock, Molly O'Shea, Moritz

Figure AI is a Bay Area-based pure-play manufacturer with a 500-person engineering workforce deploying its flagship Figure 3 humanoid robot, which operates autonomously using the locally running Helix AI policy. The company has achieved record production output at its "Baku" facility while reducing unit costs by 90% compared to previous models, enabling deployments in settings ranging from the White House to BMW automotive assembly lines. Looking ahead, Figure aims to commercialize a lease-based home model and advance toward its "iPhone moment" with the upcoming Figure 4, which targets radical improvements in cost and usability while pursuing physical interaction-based AGI.

Stanford CS153 Frontier Systems | Anjney Midha from AMP PBC on Frontier Systems

Anjney Midha, Mike

Instructor Anj Pransanjane guides a cohort of roughly 500 in-person and thousands of remote students through a course framing the current AI era as a "great transition" driven by $1.2 trillion in projected compute investments. The curriculum details shifting industry bottlenecks, such as the rising costs of H100 GPUs and the strategic importance of verifiable context, while urging participants to build asymmetric advantages in non-scalable personal niches. Ultimately, the program challenges students to identify the necessary standards and institutions to transform compute from a monopolized resource into a standardized commodity.

Startups That Sell to the Biggest Companies in the World

Over the past three years, YC-backed startups have secured multi-million dollar deals with Fortune 10 enterprises in their first year, reversing traditional market barriers through AI-driven development velocity and strategic necessity. Coding agents now allow small teams to build nuanced products for major corporations in months, rendering the historical stealth-launch model obsolete while triggering active engagement from enterprise leadership. Consequently, the investment firm is pivoting its strategy to prioritize backing for teams capable of targeting sales deals with the world's largest companies rather than focusing on long-term feature parity.

Supply Chain 2.0 for Semiconductors

The 2021 semiconductor shortage and evolving CHIPS Act investments have exposed critical visibility gaps in multi-tier supply chains that legacy enterprise software cannot resolve. A new market opportunity has emerged to build specialized "Supply Chain 2.0" solutions capable of managing TSMC's advanced packaging bottlenecks, export control volatility, and the unique complexities of wafer allocation. This initiative aims to replace fragmented legacy systems with real-time risk monitoring and compliance tracking tailored specifically for the semiconductor industry.

The $10 Trillion Bet on Humanoid Robots | Figure Founder Brett Adcock

Brett Adcock, Molly O'Shea

Founded by Archer eVTOL creator Brett Adcock, Figure AI pursues the commercialization of general-purpose humanoid robots capable of operating autonomously for extended shifts across diverse industries. Having raised nearly $2 billion with a $39 billion valuation, the company recently terminated an OpenAI partnership to maintain control over its vertically integrated hardware and AI stack, aiming to triple production by May and deploy thousands of units within the year. Despite facing technical hurdles in scaling reliability, Figure projects a market opportunity worth trillions as it transitions from prototype testing to mass commercial deployment in homes and factories.

Bending the Cost Curve: Understanding the GLP-1 Era | Global Conference 2025

Josh Barro, Michael Ferro, Simon Johnson, Lisa Stevens

A panel of industry leaders and medical experts analyzed GLP-1 drugs as a transformative treatment that significantly improves cardiovascular health and reduces long-term healthcare costs, provided patients adhere to therapy. The discussion highlighted a critical adherence gap where global discontinuation rates reach 50%, contrasting with a UK pilot program that achieved 98% retention through AI-driven telehealth and mandatory screening. While facing challenges like high initial costs, supply chain fraud, and societal stigma, successful employer-led programs are emerging as essential mechanisms to manage access, ensure safety, and align financial incentives for sustained workforce productivity.

Dynamic Software Interfaces

Current software interfaces remain largely static and generic, yet the maturation of coding agents now empowers users to function as their own forward-deployed engineers for radical customization. To realize this future where shared primitives support wildly divergent front-end designs, the organization is calling on radical thinkers to redefine the software delivery stack and determine whether source code must replace packaged binaries. This initiative seeks to resolve critical architectural questions regarding how user-controlled agents can safely modify both visual elements and underlying middleware to match specific professional needs.

YC Paper Club

YC is launching the "Paper Club," a community initiative for researchers, engineers, and founders to navigate the rapid pace of AI development through small, biweekly gatherings at its Mountain View office. The program focuses on selecting under 100 participants, specifically targeting builders who implement papers and researchers studying production failures, to discuss new research presentations followed by private dinners. Applications are currently open for the inaugural cohort, with the first session scheduled for May 20th.

CA Governor Candidate Steve Hilton on Why California is Destroying Itself & How a Republican Can Win

Steve Hilton, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg

Steve Hilton, a former UK government advisor and naturalized U.S. citizen, is leading the crowded California gubernatorial race by proposing a radical conservative platform focused on eliminating state income tax for households earning under $100,000 while slashing the state budget by $60 billion. His policy agenda identifies union power, CEQA litigation, and climate regulations as primary drivers of the housing and energy crises, advocating for immediate construction deregulation, increased oil production, and strict law enforcement to address homelessness and crime. With poll numbers ahead of Democratic contenders, Hilton aims to capitalize on a perceived Republican base in the state to implement these affordability measures in the 2026 election.

Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough

Demis Hassabis, Garry Tan

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis projects Artificial General Intelligence will emerge around 2030, contingent on inventing specific architectural breakthroughs in continual learning and structured memory rather than merely scaling current methods. While deep tech startups are warned to anticipate AGI disrupting their decade-long cycles, the organization is simultaneously deploying efficient, modular "Flash" and open-source nano models to power edge devices and accelerate scientific discovery in fields like drug design and materials science. Ultimately, DeepMind advocates for interdisciplinary collaboration between AI and physical sciences to overcome current reasoning limitations and drive the next generation of autonomous agents.

300 Pages on Anduril: Inside Modern Warfare

Kyle Harrison, Molly O'Shea

Anduril Industries disrupts the defense sector by replacing the Pentagon's cost-plus acquisition model with fixed-cost contracts and a "build-to-mission" strategy that prioritizes high-volume, low-cost autonomous systems. The company utilizes its proprietary Lattice AI platform to integrate multi-domain assets into a unified network, aiming to counter China's industrial superiority by accelerating the production of drones, torpedoes, and munitions. Founded on the philosophy that credible military capability is essential for conflict deterrence, Anduril has seen its valuation double to roughly $60 billion as global power dynamics shift toward Great Power competition.

Electronics in Space

Philip Johnston

StarCloud co-founder Philip Johnston is addressing the surge in space launch capacity from companies like SpaceX and Astrospace by developing orbital data centers optimized for inference workloads. Y Combinator is currently recruiting chip designers with backgrounds at SpaceX and NVIDIA to create specialized processors that meet critical requirements for reduced mass, thermal efficiency, and radiation hardening. This initiative aims to capture the urgent market demand for computing resources that can operate effectively in the harsh space environment.

A Conversation with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva | Global Conference 2025

Kristalina Georgieva, Gerard Baker

Following an IMF downgrade of the global growth forecast to 2.8%, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva addresses diverging inflation trajectories and rising fiscal constraints while urging China to undertake structural reforms to shift toward domestic consumption and reduced state intervention. Amidst a volatile trade landscape marked by the erosion of fair trade mechanisms and a transition to new economic equilibriums, policymakers are prioritizing bilateral agreements and supply-side productivity enhancements to stabilize financial markets and foster sustainable expansion. This strategic pivot seeks to navigate "off the charts" uncertainty by balancing emerging market resilience against the severe deflationary pressures in China and the debt challenges facing advanced economies.