Latest Interviews

The Healthcare Outlook: Macro Challenges and Biotech Innovations

Asad Haider, Amit Sinha, Allison Nathan

Following five years of underperformance driven by capital rotation into artificial intelligence and regulatory uncertainty regarding drug pricing, the U.S. healthcare sector is undergoing a structural correction characterized by a declining S&P 500 weighting and a shift in early-stage capital formation toward private markets. Despite these macro headwinds, specific innovation cycles in oral obesity treatments, oncology, and cardiovascular therapeutics are creating idiosyncratic opportunities, particularly within the mid-cap biotech space where investors are beginning to recognize potential for outsized returns on revenue. While large pharmaceutical firms report initial AI-driven cost savings, market participants remain cautious, awaiting tangible earnings improvements before fully re-rating assets in an environment defined by a looming patent cliff and reduced federal research funding.

Using LLMs Instead of Government Consulting

With the U.S. government spending hundreds of billions annually on consulting, rising political pressure and the maturation of Large Language Models are driving a shift away from reliance on major vendors like Deloitte and Accenture. Investors are now targeting startups that streamline FedRAMP compliance and utilize AI to validate policy legality, creating a strategic avenue to displace traditional consulting work. This market evolution presents a clear opportunity to fund LLM-based solutions that replace outsourced labor with automated, cost-effective government operations.

AI Native Enterprise Software

Top-tier enterprise vendors Salesforce and ServiceNow established dominant market positions by pioneering cloud-native solutions, a disruption pattern now emerging in the generational shift toward AI-native systems. This transition promises to transform enterprise software from passive record-keeping into active assistants for sales, HR, and accounting, creating a structural opening for new startups to challenge incumbent architectures. Founders and builders interested in developing these next-generation AI tools are invited to connect to capitalize on this competitive window.

Winning the AI Race Part 5: President Trump on the AI Action Plan

President Trump, Chamath, Friedberg, Donald J. Trump, Nat, Jason Calacanis, Jacob Helberg, Doug Burgum, Howard Lutnik, Chris Wright, Lee Zeldin, Ted Cruz, David McCormick, Jensen Wong, Lisa Sue, Jeff Sprecher, Suzy Weil, Marco Rubio

The administration has secured major international trade and defense agreements with Japan, the EU, and NATO allies while establishing a universal tariff framework to pressure non-compliant nations. Domestically, the executive branch is accelerating energy dominance and AI development through the termination of the Green New Deal, the repeal of export restrictions, and the implementation of a federal standard that permits AI training on public data without creator consent. With key appointments led by David Sacks and the EPA, the government aims to achieve zero illegal border entries, trigger $17 trillion in private investment, and reclaim global manufacturing supremacy by 2026.

Is a US fiscal crisis ahead?

Kenneth Rogoff, Niall Ferguson, Allison Nathan, Ken Rogoff, Neil Ferguson

Economists Ken Rogoff and Niall Ferguson argue that the United States faces an unsustainable fiscal trajectory driven by rising global interest rates and a critical threshold where sovereign debt servicing costs have surpassed defense spending. They warn that without political reforms or productivity breakthroughs from artificial intelligence, the nation risks a rapid financial crisis involving inflation or a permanent erosion of the dollar's reserve currency status. This convergence of historical parallels and modern geopolitical fragmentation suggests the U.S. must navigate a difficult choice between austerity, higher inflation, or diminished global influence within the coming years.

What You Missed in AI This Week (Google, Apple, ChatGPT)

Justine, Olivia Moore

Google's VO3 model and recent updates to ChatGPT voice and Apple Intelligence are driving a rapid shift toward autonomous video and narrative creation, allowing users to generate consistent multi-character scenes and human-like dialogue from single text prompts. These technological leaps, alongside Eleven Labs' emotion-tagging capabilities and data showing a doubling of consumer AI startup revenue, are establishing a "faceless" creator economy where entrepreneurs can build full-stack brands using AI-generated assets. While current limitations in character consistency and high inference costs persist, the industry is rapidly moving from experimental novelty to a dominant force in social media and professional workflows.

AI Voice Assistants for Email

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The speaker proposes a collaborative initiative to engineering teams for building voice-activated tools that triage emails, draft replies, and manage scheduling during the daily commute. Leveraging current advancements in voice AI technology, the project aims to eliminate keyboard dependency for users with mobility impairments while utilizing comprehensive inbox data to train a general-purpose assistant. This partnership seeks to transform the email inbox into a foundational dataset for social, logistical, and linguistic intelligence, ultimately enabling users to achieve inbox zero before arriving at work.

AI Research Labs

Y Combinator is actively soliciting applications from founders to establish new AI research labs with multi-year commercialization timelines, explicitly mirroring the long-term trajectory of OpenAI, its first investor. While acknowledging OpenAI's success in pioneering the independent research model, the accelerator emphasizes that significant unsolved problems persist to justify funding deep, open-ended inquiry beyond typical three-month product cycles. This initiative aims to capitalize on remaining opportunities in the field by supporting new entrants committed to extended research horizons rather than rapid shipping.

Internal Agent Builder

Y Combinator is funding founders to build internal agent platforms that enable every employee to create personal AI tools for automating routine tasks. This initiative leverages secure infrastructure integrated with daily software to handle sensitive data, effectively reducing time spent on mundane operations like term sheet reviews. The strategic goal is to eliminate low-value work so staff can dedicate their efforts to high-value human activities, such as supporting founders, while YC invites entrepreneurs to develop the foundational AI infrastructure required for this shift.

AI Personal Tutor for Everyone

Grant Sanderson

Building on JCR Licklider's 1960s concept of human-computer symbiosis, the initiative leverages modern multimodal reasoning models to deliver the interactive, step-by-step visualizations and voice explanations seen in benchmarks like 3Blue1Brown. This approach overcomes historical limitations by offering true personalization that decomposes complex topics into accessible formats for every learner with basic internet access. The project concludes with an open invitation for developers of AI tools to collaborate in realizing a vision where high-quality, personalized tutoring is universally available.

AI Personal Assistant

Driven by recent advances in Large Language Models, a new class of AI personal assistants is emerging to transform static task lists into automated execution systems that act as full-fledged chief of staff. These advanced tools leverage deep contextual understanding of a user's correspondence, scheduling, and work routines to independently handle emails, calendar management, and recurring processes while maintaining user approval controls. The initiative seeks strategic collaboration with startups to bring this executive assistance technology to market, ultimately offloading operational burdens so users can dedicate their attention exclusively to high-value strategic work.

More Design Founders

The presentation argues that integrating advanced coding tools over the next decade will elevate superior design to a primary strategic asset, prompting a shift from traditional employment to founder-led product launches. By redefining the "design job of the future" as entrepreneurship, the speaker highlights how user empathy and quality standards, proven by successes like Airbnb and Stripe, can drive independent company formation. Consequently, the strategy prioritizes funding teams that embed strong design culture from the outset to capitalize on these accelerating technological capabilities.

Full-stack AI Companies

Y Combinator announced a strategic pivot to prioritize funding for "full-stack AI companies" that replace industry core operations with automated agents rather than selling tools to existing businesses. This initiative specifically targets slow-moving incumbents, aiming to have startups build entirely new firms that directly compete with traditional players using large language models. The shift marks a deliberate move from a vendor model to an aggressive strategy designed to displace established industry dinosaurs through complete operational automation.

South Korea at the Crossroads | Global Dinner Dialogues 2025

Vincent Park, Roxanne Davies, Joon Oh, Jenni Risku, Michael Wee, Laura Deal Lacey, Byoung Hwan Kim, Robin Hu, Hoon Lee, Timothy Reese, Taewon Yang, Richard Ditizio, John B. Quinn, Samuel Kim, JP Lee, Junghee Oh, Jongku Choi

The inaugural 2025 Milken Institute Global Dinner Dialogues in Seoul convened key financial leaders and policymakers to address South Korea's strategic pivot amid geopolitical shifts and domestic reforms. Chairman Byung-hwan Kim and global investors highlighted critical initiatives ranging from a 50 trillion Won technology financing vehicle to the National Pension Fund overhaul, while panelists outlined robust opportunities in AI, retail expansion, and shipbuilding despite looming US tariff risks. Ultimately, the forum underscored a consensus that resolving structural challenges and leveraging Korea's tech sovereignty will drive significant capital deployment and solidify the nation's transition into a premier global financial actor.

All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson

Colin, Samir, Chris Williamson, Bryan Johnson, Friedberg, Jason, Chamath

Major legacy media giants are aggressively reorganizing their strategies to compete with an independent creator economy that now dominates connected TV viewership through superior algorithmic retention and authentic long-form content. Top creators are increasingly rejecting traditional media deals to retain full intellectual property ownership, pivoting instead toward lean business models that prioritize direct product sales, high-value physical events, and 360-degree brand partnerships. This structural shift is further accelerated by new monetization vectors such as health-focused consumer goods and experimental physiological research, which collectively challenge the historical dominance of legacy broadcast networks.