Latest Interviews

Reshma Shetty Speaks at Y Combinator's Female Founders Conference 2016

Reshma Shetty

Founded in 2008 by Reshma Saujani and Tom Knight, Ginkgo Bioworks pioneered a platform that treats biology as an engineering discipline to manufacture cultured ingredients through rapid yeast fermentation. The company delayed venture capital until securing its first customers in 2012, eventually leveraging a Series A and B to scale a business model replacing traditional plant extraction. As the organization pursues its vision to become the "Intel of biology," it is simultaneously implementing a data-driven diversity strategy to address hiring gaps and broaden its workforce representation.

Fundraising Panel at Female Founders Conference 2016

Talia Frenkel, Katelyn Gleason, Aarthi Ramamurthy, Liz Wessel, Kat Manalac, Caitlin Gleason

Four YC alumni from diverse sectors including healthcare, consumer goods, and job marketplaces share detailed accounts of their capital-raising journeys, which ranged from bootstrapping to securing multimillion-dollar rounds through persistent outreach and strategic narrative framing. The founders emphasize that overcoming investor skepticism requires deep domain expertise, a willingness to educate unfamiliar backers, and the resilience to handle rejection without compromising professional relationships. Ultimately, the discussion underscores that fundraising is an optional strategic tool rather than a mandatory industry norm, urging entrepreneurs to prioritize value creation and self-belief over blind adherence to Silicon Valley conventions.

Christy Turlington Burns - Advancing Global Maternal Health: Talks at GS

Christy Turlington Burns

Established in 2010 by Christy Turlington-Burns following her own postpartum hemorrhage, the organization Every Mother Counts leverages the documentary *No Woman, No Cry* to address preventable maternal mortality driven by barriers in transportation, education, and medical supplies. While Turlington-Burns extends this advocacy to the United States through the CNN series *Giving Birth in America* to highlight domestic disparities in care access and Medicaid reimbursement, the initiative remains focused on a global statistic that 98% of maternal deaths are avoidable. Her approach combines personal experience with public health expertise to confront systemic failures in both developing nations and the U.S., where the country's maternal mortality ranking has notably declined despite high provider density.

The Muse's Kathryn Minshew Speaks at the Female Founders Conference 2016

Kathryn Minshew

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Taking the Long View: The Dangers of Short-Termism

Scott Minerd, Christopher Ailman, Scott Evans, Vicki Fuller, Hiromichi Mizuno

Representatives from major funds including GPIF, CalSTRS, New York State, and New York City convened to advocate for shifting from quarterly transparency to long-term "permanent ownership" strategies that prioritize corporate governance over short-term market volatility. The panelists unanimously criticized outdated fee structures and bureaucratic hiring constraints, proposing aggressive reforms such as clawback provisions, in-house management expansion, and a transition of U.S. public pensions into quasi-commercial entities to secure top-tier talent. By aligning compensation models with actual performance and redefining passive management as active stewardship, these leaders aim to sustain multi-decade return objectives amidst a landscape of near-zero bond yields and intense public pressure for immediate results.

Common Sense from Uncommon Investors

Sarah, Mark, Kyle, Mitch, Michael

Managers from Causeway, Crescent, Hamana, and Canyon Capital analyze how passive investing strategies and post-2008 regulations have created significant pricing inefficiencies in cyclical equities, sovereign debt, and the shadow banking sector. Experts including Sarah of Causeway, Mark of Crescent, Kyle of Hamana, and Mitch of Canyon highlight specific structural risks in China's banking system and argue that volatility offers active managers opportunities to exploit mispriced assets while avoiding the "risk-free" illusion of state-backed debt. To capitalize on these anomalies, these firms prioritize hiring individuals who combine fundamental insight with complex capital structuring skills to navigate a fragile macroeconomic environment where traditional balance sheets are contracting.

Discover Miami: travel the bars and beaches with the locals

Regla, Elaine Lancaster, Raven, Roberto Ramos, Sharif Malnik

This presentation outlines how Cuban migration since 1959, alongside waves from Latin America, transformed Miami into a multicultural metropolis where the local population represents one-third of the city's total residents. The discussion highlights the region's economic prosperity and cultural evolution, citing landmarks like the Wynwood art district and the historic Little Havana enclave, while noting Miami's unique status as a global art hub established by the 2002 Basel festival. Finally, the narrative examines the city's physical geography and social fabric, detailing the man-made origins of Miami Beach, the revitalization of South Beach, and the enduring community figures such as runner Raven and iconic venues like The Forge.

Ken Thompson - Strengthening Trust in the Criminal Justice System: Talks at GS Session Highlights

Ken Thompson

The Brooklyn District Attorney's Office manages approximately 100,000 cases annually through initiatives like the "Begin Again" program, which resolves one million low-level warrants via mobile courts, and the Conviction Review Unit, which has exonerated 17 wrongfully convicted men. To address gun violence, the office operates a fast-track multi-judge court system to accelerate case resolution and collaborates with the NYPD on long-term investigations targeting the out-of-state smuggling of firearms that comprise 90% of recovered weapons. This dual approach aims to correct systemic inequities for the poor while simultaneously enhancing public safety through faster adjudications and targeted intercepts of illicit weapons.

David Benioff - Behind the Scenes of HBO's 'Game of Thrones': Talks at GS Session Highlights

David Benioff, Stephen Friedman

Co-creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss transformed *Game of Thrones* into the world's largest television production by expanding George R.R. Martin's universe from six countries and thousands of extras while navigating the unprecedented challenge of original storytelling beyond published books. Despite initial pilot setbacks, the team secured unprecedented control from HBO to forge new narrative paths for Season Six and beyond, marking a shift toward a series they consider their most proud work. The collaboration remains defined by Martin's unique mentorship, which continues to influence the writers' approach to complex character dynamics and historical fidelity as the show prepares for its eighth and final season.

Panel - Entrepreneurship and Building a Business: Talks at GS Session Highlights

Byron Dixon, Matt Riley, Lance Uggla, Michael Sherwood, Lance Ugler

Market.com CEO Lance Ugler, Daisy Group founder Matt Riley, and Microfresh leader Byron Dixon discussed how regulatory shifts and strategic location choices drive business growth while maintaining a "people first" culture. The panelists emphasized that true innovation involves changing operational methods rather than just products, highlighting intangible assets like work ethic and a family-like atmosphere as key competitive advantages. Despite the complexities of scaling publicly traded entities, the leaders stressed that remaining close to customers and staff is essential for sustaining long-term success and employee retention.

Gobble founder Ooshma Garg speaks at Female Founders Conference 2016

Ooshma Garg, Usma

Gobble founder Usma Garg pivoted her struggling food delivery startup from a failed on-demand marketplace to a successful subscription model after surviving a capital drought and rejecting early investor advice. Joining Y Combinator in 2015, Garg collaborated with executive chef Thomas Ricci to launch "Mise en Place" kitchen kits, which solved product-market fit through operational innovation rather than paid marketing. This strategic shift attracted funding from Trinity Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, enabling the company to scale to 120 employees and thousands of daily deliveries across seven states while adhering to a zero marketing budget.

Effective ML

Yaron Minsky

Yaron Minsky, a Jane Street Capital programmer, outlines a software development philosophy where reader readability and compiler enforcement take precedence over writer convenience to manage financial risk. The firm applies this approach through rigorous interface standardization, algebraic data types that render illegal states unrepresentable, and exhaustiveness checks that prevent logic errors during refactoring. These strategies enable the maintenance of a massive OCaml codebase, prioritizing correctness in high-frequency trading systems by using phantom types for safety and avoiding unnecessary abstractions that increase complexity.

Revolutionizing Cancer Treatment with Immunotherapy: Talks at GS Session Highlights

Giovanni Caforio, Laurie Glimcher, Jill O'Donnell-Tormey, Dr. Giovanni Coforio, Dr. Lori Glimcher, Jamie

Immunotherapy has emerged as a transformative cancer treatment by harnessing the patient's immune system to target mutated cells through checkpoint blockade, offering a personalized alternative to the non-specific toxicity of traditional chemotherapy. Clinical trials in melanoma and lung cancer have demonstrated that this approach yields response rates exceeding 60% and has nearly eliminated the need for first-line chemotherapy in these malignancies. Looking ahead, the field aims to expand these outcomes by addressing patient non-responsiveness through strategies that personalize therapy based on unique tumor genetic profiles.

Why OCaml

Approximately a decade ago, Jane Street adopted OCaml as its primary functional programming language to secure C-like performance and rigorous type safety while maintaining development conciseness. This strategic choice serves as a filtering mechanism for hiring, attracting highly motivated engineers through a specialized one-month training program that results in a consolidated, high-performing workforce. Although the firm faces ecosystem limitations compared to mainstream languages, the implementation of a single language across its multi-billion-dollar systems enables significant code reuse and shifts the priority from empirical testing to the universal guarantees of static type checking.

Effective ML 2011 Harvard CS51 Part 1

Ron Minsky

Ron Minsky, a technical leader at Jane Street Capital, presented a comprehensive case for prioritizing code correctness and maintainability through strict OCaml design principles that leverage the type system to enforce data invariants and ensure pattern match exhaustiveness. The lecture outlined specific architectural strategies, including mandatory interfaces, uniform naming conventions, and a "reader-over-writer" philosophy, which collectively minimize cognitive load and prevent silent failures in high-stakes financial systems. Additionally, the speaker addressed immediate course logistics by extending the Moogle project description deadline and recommending simple list-based implementations to avoid unnecessary debugging complexity.