Latest Interviews
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Clear all filters- Milken Institute45 min
The Best of Both Funds: Public and Private Markets Outlook | Global Investors' Symposium Hong Kong
Chery Kang, Aaron Costello, Janet Perumal, Kevin Sneader, Howe Chung Wan
Global investors face a revised macroeconomic landscape characterized by downward GDP revisions, elevated recession probabilities, and a structural shift toward higher interest rates and fiscal activism. Amidst escalating trade tensions and geopolitical instability, market concentration risks in US tech giants have prompted recommendations to underweight equities in favor of non-US value sectors, private credit, and defensive hedge fund strategies. While artificial intelligence evolves from hardware to application-focused deployment, the prevailing directive emphasizes active portfolio management to neutralize passive index risks and prepare for potential volatility without abandoning market exposure.
- Milken Institute28 min
Is Hong Kong Back? | Global Investors' Symposium Hong Kong 2025
Emily Chan Tan, Goodwin Gaw, Oliver Weisberg
Hong Kong leverages its Linked Exchange Rate system and a tax-efficient business environment to attract global capital despite a real estate sector navigating high interest rates and a slowing local economy. The region is strategically evolving as the financial gateway within the $2 trillion Greater Bay Area, utilizing cross-border infrastructure to integrate with mainland hubs like Shenzhen and Beijing while seeing a reversal of recent capital outflows. With institutional investors returning due to deep talent pools, unique lifestyle amenities, and a resurgent IPO market, the city maintains its status as a resilient financial center that effectively mitigates geopolitical perceptions through economic pragmatism.
- Milken Institute40 min
Global Companies and a New Era of Growth | Global Investors' Symposium Hong Kong 2025
Avril Hong, Hans Dekkers, Tony Fernandes, Éric Martel
Representatives from IBM, AirAsia, and Bombardier convened to outline a strategic framework prioritizing robust data infrastructure as a prerequisite for effective AI adoption in the aviation and aerospace sectors. The panel detailed specific outcomes such as AirAsia's projected 3–4% fuel savings and Bombardier's 93% on-time global parts delivery rate, achieved through predictive analytics and automated supply chain management. Additionally, the discussion emphasized navigating complex regulatory certification hurdles and managing workforce cultural shifts to balance human oversight with AI-driven efficiency.
- Goldman Sachs28 min
Dame Sarah Storey on winning her 19th Paralympic gold medal
Britain's most decorated Paralympian Dame Sarah Storey secured her 19th Paris 2024 gold medal, extending her career total to 30 golds while reflecting on her unique transition from swimming to cycling and the erosion of government funding since 2008. She advocates for increased sponsorship and infrastructure investment to support the "speculate to accumulate" reality of Paralympic cycling and emphasizes innovation in physiological management as she considers a potential 10th Paralympic appearance in 2028. Storey attributes her longevity to a multidisciplinary team approach and the aggregation of marginal gains, rejecting traditional sports hierarchies in favor of holistic strategies that accommodate perimenopausal needs and family motivations.
- Milken Institute31 min
Global Debt Levels: Opportunity to Innovate | Finance Forum 2025
Matthew Aleshire, Avinash Persaud, Stacy Swann, Heiko Thoms
A panel of international economists and policymakers convened to address the critical intersection of record-high global public debt and the urgent need for climate resilience financing, highlighting how current debt frameworks stifle essential green investments. The discussion examined structural reforms in Germany, such as new debt rules exempting defense spending, alongside the growing dominance of private creditors in developing nations which complicates traditional resolution mechanisms like the Paris Club. Experts concluded that effective solutions require MDBs to expand capital bases, greater Chinese creditor participation, and the design of shock-absorbing debt instruments that capture long-term fiscal savings from climate adaptation.
- a16z26 min
The Future of Digital Workers
Level Next distinguishes itself in the AI sector by prioritizing customer outcomes over technology, recently re-architecting its Alice and Mike agents from basic prompting to fully agentic frameworks capable of planning and reasoning. The company supports this technical shift with a unique go-to-market strategy that offers free product access for validation and employs a vendor-agnostic architecture to rapidly swap model providers based on performance metrics. Underpinned by a "zero-to-one" pod structure and a hiring focus on chaos tolerance, Level Next aims to deliver anti-fragile revenue motions while educating clients on data-driven optimization over subjective perception.
- Goldman Sachs29 min
Carl Nassib: NFL star to philanthropy entrepreneur
Former NFL player and first openly gay active player Carl Nassib leverages his platform to drive a strategic modernization of philanthropy through the Raise app, aiming to bridge the technological gap between traditional nonprofit infrastructure and a mobile-native donor base. Drawing on his experience as a Penn State Board member, Nassib advocates for comprehensive financial literacy education to prepare both college athletes in the NIL era and retiring athletes for wealth management, while predicting a massive transfer of generational wealth that will redefine future charitable giving.
- Milken Institute30 min
New Directions and Opportunities for Resilient Disaster Recovery | Finance Forum 2025
Kristen Fanarakis, Lynette Bell, Tom Hoban, Nuin-Tara Key
The Truist Foundation is leading a strategic shift from reactive disaster relief to proactive resilience by committing $725 million over three years to Western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene. This initiative prioritizes small business recovery by reducing capital access timelines from 60 days to 10 days and advocates for standardized building codes alongside new tax incentives to incentivize structural upgrades. Experts further propose adopting a "risk curve" framework and leveraging regional public-private partnerships to sustain long-term funding for climate adaptation and infrastructure hardening.
- Sequoia Capital51 min
Josh Woodward: Google Labs is Rapidly Building AI Products from 0-to-1
Josh Woodward, Ravi Gupta, Sonya Huang
Google Labs operates as an autonomous unit dedicated to rapidly prototyping frontier AI products, prioritizing market validation over immediate technological perfection. Key initiatives include Mariner, a computer-use agent currently targeting enterprise automation, alongside Veo, a generative video model solving physics constraints while shifting industry models toward pay-per-output. The organization accelerates innovation by blending veteran engineering with diverse creative talent to launch ideas within 50 to 100 days, ultimately aiming to replace passive consumption with steerable, asset-driven user experiences.
- Goldman Sachs13 min
10KSB Voices Rural Advocacy Conference in DC: David Solomon with Program Graduate & Punchbowl News
David Solomon, Anna Palmer, Jenny Steffensmeyer
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and small business owner Jenny Steffensmeyer discussed critical challenges facing the "10,000 Small Business Voices" program, including capital access, workforce shortages, and a significant rural artificial intelligence adoption gap. Solomon expressed optimism that a Republican-controlled administration will reduce regulatory burdens to stimulate growth, while Steffensmeyer highlighted that technological upskilling remains impossible without affordable financing. To address these disparities, the group urged Congress to deregulate small businesses, simplify SBA lending, and provide incentives to level the competitive playing field.
- Milken Institute36 min
Incentivizing Investment in Innovative Technologies | Finance Forum 2025
Karen Kornbluh, Doug Arent, Jennifer Hankins, Jigar Shah, Maggie Switek
A panel of experts from the NREL Foundation, Tulsa Innovation Labs, and the Milken Institute discussed strategies to compress multi-decade innovation timelines into three-to-five-year cycles for clean energy and AI deployment. Speakers highlighted the critical need to shift from linear financial incentives to unconventional cross-sector partnerships, warning that failing to rapidly scale domestic manufacturing risks transferring intellectual property to competitors like China. The consensus emphasized that accelerating grid capacity through virtual power plants and regulatory agility is essential to unlocking private capital and ensuring U.S. economic growth.
- Milken Institute37 min
Sovereign Wealth Funds: Lessons for the US | Finance Forum 2025
Caitlin MacLean, Victoria Barbary, Angela Rodell, Tarek Shoukri, Kaitlyn McLean
The U.S. Treasury Department is currently soliciting private sector input to design a national Sovereign Wealth Fund using a blank-slate approach for capitalization and investment mandates. Drawing on global best practices and case studies like the Alaska Permanent Fund, the proposed framework emphasizes independent governance to insulate decisions from political cycles while targeting strategic sectors such as critical minerals and AI. With further concept papers expected in the spring, the initiative aims to establish a bipartisan structure that catalyzes high-cost infrastructure deployment without crowding out private commercial activity.
- Milken Institute40 min
New Pathways to Help Forgotten America | Finance Forum 2025
Rich Ditizio, Marla Blow, Van Jones
A panel at the Milken Institute, featuring Skoll Foundation's Marla Carter and Amazon Web Services' Dan Price, analyzes the structural retreat of the U.S. public sector and the subsequent necessity for private capital and technology to solve social challenges. The discussion details strategic pivots in philanthropy toward complex capital stacks, highlights specific tech interventions in criminal justice and infrastructure, and reframes diversity initiatives as economic imperatives rather than moral obligations. Looking forward, the speakers outline a new "Center for Advancing the American Dream" to document mentorship narratives while urging the integration of AI and community access to navigate a rapidly changing technological landscape.
- Milken Institute29 min
Community Infrastructure Building Blocks: 10,000 Communities Initiative | Finance Forum 2025
Rachel Halfaker, Andreas Karelas, Jane Brady Knight, Amanda Li, Tony Pipa
High demand for rural economic revitalization faces significant deployment barriers, including insufficient project scale, limited local capacity, and traditional financing models that exclude non-profits lacking credit scores. To overcome these hurdles, successful strategies now employ blended capital stacks, direct pay provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act, and digital platforms that automate underwriting to reduce overhead on small-ticket clean energy investments. By shifting narratives toward rural agency and utilizing community financial institutions, stakeholders aim to establish a permanent, self-sustaining asset class that drives long-term wealth creation and strengthens national competitiveness.
- a16z27 min
DeepSeek, Reasoning Models, and the Future of LLMs
Guido Appenzeller, Marco Mascorro
DeepSeek R1 is an open-weight reasoning model from China that achieves top-tier performance by combining Multi-Head Latent Attention, Group Relative Policy Optimization, and a 256-expert MoE architecture to generate complex thought chains. The development team overcame early behavioral failures through a low-cost, self-supervised pipeline utilizing 800,000 verifiable traces and rule-based verification to produce responses up to 10,000 tokens long for roughly $5.5 million in base training costs. This breakthrough has shifted industry focus toward test-time compute and local deployment, enabling state-of-the-art reasoning on consumer hardware while bypassing traditional bottlenecks associated with human-labeled data.