Latest Interviews

Investing in California's Future

Michael Milken, Melanie Lundquist, Dominic Ng, Antonio Villaraigosa, Steve Westly

A diverse panel of civic leaders, educators, and philanthropists including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Steve Westly addressed California's paradox of high productivity paired with critical deficits in education, housing, and infrastructure. The group highlighted transformative outcomes from the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, where graduation rates in partner institutions nearly doubled, while advocating for urgent public-private investments in early childhood education, green technology, and workforce-ready curricula. To sustain economic growth and address systemic inequality, the discussion concluded with recommendations to redefine infrastructure for the autonomous age, leverage California's demographic diversity for global trade, and implement housing cap-and-trade mechanisms to ensure equitable access.

Made in California: Presentations from California Grown Startups

Dorothy Rothrock, Ian Coll McEachern, Gordon Fowler, Gabe Grifoni, Susie Harborth, Stella Kramer, Carmen Palafox, Dolly Singh, Ken Sunshine

Leaders from Make in LA, The Glue Factory, and BioLabs San Diego convened to address critical workforce shortages in California's manufacturing and biotech sectors while analyzing the rise of hardware-enabled startups and fragmented funding landscapes. The session featured five case studies illustrating this shift, including Vector Space Systems' launch vehicle innovation, Sangenomics' personalized probiotic therapy, and Thesis Couture's engineering-driven footwear. Presenters highlighted a strategic pivot from traditional networking to resource access, emphasizing the need for specialized incubators to support solopreneurs and the convergence of software with IoT and frontier technologies.

Blockchain for Social Impact

Matthew Spence, Brian Forde, Hugh Gordon, Robert Hertzberg, Lily Liu

This panel explored blockchain technology as a distributed ledger enabling immutable public records, contrasting proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus models while highlighting applications in land titling, identity verification, and healthcare data sovereignty. Senator Robert Hertzberg announced upcoming California legislation to establish a regulatory framework, aiming to modernize government infrastructure and rebuild public trust alongside international initiatives in nations like Estonia and Georgia. Despite security vulnerabilities and market volatility, the discussion emphasized blockchain's potential to revolutionize micropayments, decentralized capital formation, and the global freelance economy through tokenization and reduced intermediaries.

Sustainable Solutions For a Green Future

Tracy Gray, Tom McGrath, Nancy Pfund, Dakota Semler, Azita Yazdani, Richael Young

Moderator Tracy Marder convened a panel featuring investment leaders Nancy Fund of DBL Partners and Tom McGrath of Vital Clean Tech Ventures to explore how impact capital drives innovation in sectors like transportation, energy storage, and agriculture. The discussion detailed specific breakthroughs from founders including Michelle of Mammoth Trading, Dakota Simler of Thor Trucks, and Azita Yazdani of Exergy Systems, who presented data-driven solutions for groundwater management, electric heavy-duty logistics, and decentralized water recovery. Ultimately, the session emphasized the necessity of long-term policy stability and equitable workforce development to scale these technologies toward the $1.3 trillion annual sustainable energy investment required by 2030.

Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman

Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, Sam Altman, Craig Cannon

Future projections suggest that hardware scaling and brain-like specialized architectures will unlock qualitatively different model behaviors, while recent evidence indicates that optimizing basic algorithms and batch sizes offers more immediate impact than developing new model structures. Concurrently, the OpenAI Dota 2 project demonstrated that robust engineering infrastructure and reinforcement learning self-play enabled bots to master the game and defeat top professionals within weeks, revealing emergent tactics such as psychological baiting. These developments highlight a field where strong distributed systems engineering and bug-free code are becoming as critical as advanced theoretical knowledge, effectively bridging the gap between complex virtual simulations and real-world AI applications.

Talks at GS – Dr. Paula Johnson: Advocating for Freedom of Speech and Diversity on Campus

Dr. Paula Johnson, Edith

Biomedical research highlights significant disparities in heart disease and neurologic conditions between sexes, necessitating an interdisciplinary approach that integrates sociology, economics, and epigenetics rather than treating biology in isolation. Simultaneously, experts advocate for intentional leadership and data-driven goals to dismantle silos between sex, gender, and race while promoting free speech as a shared value essential for mutual learning across differences. This dual focus calls for conditions where dialogue assumes the potential for understanding opposing viewpoints, ensuring that advancing gender equality and protecting democratic discourse proceed in tandem.

Talks at GS – Icarus: Uncovering a Scandal of Olympic Proportions

Bryan Fogel, Dan Cogan, David Fialkow

Director Brian Fogel launched a documentary project that evolved into a high-stakes thriller after scientists suggested anti-doping tests were easily bypassable, leading him to partner with Russian whistleblower Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov. Their collaboration produced the record-breaking film "Icarus," which exposed Russia's state-sponsored doping program and forced Rodchenkov into exile following threats from Vladimir Putin's regime. This pivotal case study demonstrates how a sports investigation transformed into a survival narrative, ultimately setting market benchmarks for documentary valuations and catalyzing the shift toward streaming platforms as the primary distributor for the genre.

The Balfour Declaration's impact, 100 years on

Jeremy Berkovits, Ahmad Shakarneh, Ahmed Shikane

The 1917 Balfour Declaration established a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine while promising to protect the rights of existing non-Jewish communities, yet British policy reversals and subsequent conflicts failed to satisfy either side. Following the 1948 establishment of Israel and the 1949 armistice, the resulting displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, known as the Nakba, initiated a century of wars, occupation, and diplomatic impasses. Despite the coexistence efforts of dual-national staff at the American Colony Hotel, the Declaration's original promise remains unfulfilled for Palestinians, leaving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intractable with no Palestinian state established.

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.

Facial recognition technology will change the way we live

In 2018, advancements in machine learning and the integration of biometrics into consumer smartphones propelled facial recognition from niche development to mainstream adoption. While commercial applications expanded globally from tracking retail habits in the West to managing a 700 million-person database in China, researchers warned that the technology's ability to covertly identify individuals and infer personal attributes poses significant threats to privacy and civil liberties. Consequently, the year emerged as a critical juncture for establishing regulatory frameworks to balance security benefits against the risks of non-consensual surveillance.

Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett on Live Video's Struggle for Interestingness

Casey Neistat, Matt Hackett, Craig Cannon

The organization pivoted from failed raw live-streaming concepts to "Panels," a constrained product designed to foster articulate debate on daily news while employing strict moderation to mitigate online toxicity. This evolution reflects a broader hybrid strategy that merges media content creation with engineering rigor, overcoming cultural friction between newsroom and tech teams to build a sustainable "media plus product" model. Supported by CNN's long-term capital, the founders have transitioned from a survival mindset to a decade-long vision, prioritizing team stability and deep content development over immediate viral metrics.

Women Leading a Wellness Revolution

Joyce Chang, Nancy Brinker, Alexia Brue, Donna Karan, Melanie Whelan

Moderated by Joyce Chang, a panel of industry leaders including SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whalen and Susan G. Komen founder Nancy Brinker explored how community building drives success across wellness, fashion, and healthcare sectors. The discussion highlighted specific organizational strategies such as SoulCycle's referral-based growth and Urban Zen's integrated care models, while identifying systemic barriers like transportation gaps and the need for user-owned health data. Ultimately, the group advocated for a future where wellness is accessible to all, emphasizing the role of conscious consumerism and educational integration in preventing chronic disease and fostering global connection.

Transforming cities with technology

Fabio Duarte, Caitlin Dolkaert, Nick Mokua

With global urbanization driving 900 million people into slums and cities consuming three-quarters of world energy, the smart city sector is surging toward a $1.5 trillion valuation by leveraging real-time data networks. Innovators in Seoul, Nairobi, and Boston demonstrate this shift by deploying integrated sensor systems to optimize transportation, coordinate emergency services, and detect public health crises through sewage and infrastructure monitoring. These initiatives prioritize using data to "make people smarter," directly addressing affordability, traffic gridlock, and opioid surges without relying solely on hardware deployment.

Putting Prevention First

Liz Szabo, Kelly Close, William Dietz, Frank Hu, Anne Schuchat, Hugh Waters, Bill Dietz

Presenting the latest CDC data and Harvard research, this event highlights that nearly 40% of U.S. adults and 20% of children are obese, driving a three-fold increase in chronic diseases and a 7% rise in obesity-related cancers. The discussion details how excess weight gain in young adulthood significantly elevates risks for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and premature death, while costing the U.S. economy $3.4 trillion annually. To address these escalating trends, experts advocate for a strategic shift from individual willpower to systemic interventions targeting young adults, including improved food access, campus wellness programs, and increased federal funding for the CDC.

Mark Zuckerberg On Yahoo's Billion Dollar Offer

Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman

In mid-2006, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook rejected a $1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo, a high-stakes decision that triggered an immediate exodus of the early management team due to misaligned visions. This pivot toward a global mission was rapidly validated by the launch of the News Feed and the opening of the platform to the general public within weeks. Consequently, Zuckerberg cemented a long-term hiring strategy to support this independence, asserting that no future acquisition offers would be entertained despite the increasing complexity of modern technology bets.