Latest Interviews

Illuminating Success Stories on HBCU Campuses | Milken Institute Global Conference 2024

Troy Duffie, Michael Ellison, Darlene Goins, T.D Jakes, Michael Lomax, Gregory Vincent

Leading philanthropic organizations and financial institutions, including UNCF, Wells Fargo, and the T.D. Jakes Foundation, launched a strategic partnership to deploy up to $1 billion in capital for historically Black colleges and universities to address urgent challenges in STEM education and AI-driven workforce displacement. This initiative funds diverse interventions ranging from a $370 million pooled endowment and new technical programs at schools like Talladega College to the Milken Institute HBCU Fellowship, which places fellows in internships with major corporations like Apple and JPMorgan Chase. By prioritizing entrepreneurship instruction, direct institutional funding, and digital infrastructure through the HBCU Virtual platform, the coalition aims to secure economic mobility for non-traditional students and counteract systemic barriers in higher education.

China’s Investment Outlook: Optimism or Caution? | Milken Institute Global Conference 2024

Susan Li, Shenglin Ben, Goodwin Gaw, Fred Hu, Weijian Shan, Lu Zhang, Kevin Rudd

A panel of experts characterizes the current U.S.-China relationship as toxic and downward-spiraling, with Biden and Trump administrations jointly enforcing a hawkish stance that risks global recession if a Taiwan Strait conflict materializes. Despite these geopolitical tensions, investors are capitalizing on China's undervalued stock market and property sector corrections, leveraging the country's significant monetary policy space to support private sector confidence rather than direct stimulus. The discussion concludes that while a "China Plus One" strategy will persist for decades, the most effective path forward involves U.S. policymakers avoiding zero-sum thinking and recognizing that global technological advancement requires engagement with Chinese counterparts in sectors like AI and climate tech.

Sam Altman, Arthur Mensch and more discuss:Which Startups Are Threatened vs Enabled by OpenAI?|E1156

Sam Altman, Arthur Mensch, Brad Lightcap, Des Traynor, Tom Hulme, Tomasz Tunguz, Sarah Tavel, Harry Stebbings, Emad Mostaque, Tom Blomfield, Miles Grimshaw

Industry leaders including Meta, Mistral, and Google are driving a market consolidation where commoditized base foundation models shift competitive advantage toward deep workflow integration and personalized "thick wrappers." While cloud providers and incumbents leverage existing infrastructure to dominate the utility layer, startups face valuation risks and must differentiate through outcome-based business models rather than thin wrappers. The predicted outcome is a global oligopoly of five to six dominant model providers by 2027, forcing applications to evolve from seat-based licensing to selling full work products within specific verticals.

To be able to create something different, you have to be somewhat contrarian.

The event posits that the unlikable traits of founders, such as confrontational candor and an innate compulsion to fix broken systems, are essential contrarian mindsets required to disrupt the status quo. While this critical behavior often leads to conflict with authority and creates difficulties as an employee, it serves as a prerequisite for identifying operational failures and driving innovation. Ultimately, the presentation argues that the same dissatisfaction with inefficiency which marks a "shitty employee" is the defining characteristic of a successful founder.

Venture Capital Investing in AI | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Antoine Blondeau, James Wise, Alexandre Momeni, Dr. Charles Roberts, Nicolas Granatino

Paris has rapidly displaced London as Europe's primary AI hub, yet investors now prioritize product-first founders who solve specific customer ROI problems over high-risk foundational model builders. The strategy is shifting toward securing competitive moats through proprietary data, particularly in biotech where clinical trial scale and regulatory frameworks offer stronger defensibility than internet-hoovered information. Despite Europe's regulatory advantages, the ecosystem faces critical hurdles including a lack of corporate early adoption, a defense tech capital gap, and the need for startups to adopt a bi-continental mindset to overcome high inference costs and impending market saturation.

'Enterprise AI Safeguards Defining Safety and Enhancing Trust, Governance in the Age of GenAI' |

Johan Rahl, Philippe Béraud, Sacha Rubel, Sean, Ludwig Perron

Moderated by a focus on synthesizing complex regulations into practical standards, a panel of leaders from France, Singapore, Microsoft, AWS, and Google discussed the necessity of aligning private sector innovation with government oversight to ensure responsible AI development. Participants emphasized that effective governance requires risk-based frameworks and technical feasibility to resolve tensions between open-source transparency and security, ultimately aiming to prevent disinformation, malicious use, and the digital divide while fostering public trust. The consensus highlighted that operationalizing abstract principles like explainability through multistakeholder collaboration is essential to drive investment and widespread adoption of AI technologies.

'AI VCs with more than money' | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Marten Mickos, Bernard Liautaud, Antoine Blondeau

HackerOne CEO Martin Mikos moderated a panel with investors Antoine Blondeau and Bernard Liotto to analyze the chaotic yet transformative nature of the current AI explosion, which Blondeau describes as a "giant accident" that requires a pivot from feature-based startups to full-scale outcome-oriented businesses. Both investors emphasized that while adoption speeds are compressing, successful AI ventures must balance immediate operational agility with five-year strategic planning to leverage high-margin automation and secure leadership teams with a rebellious obsession for quality. The discussion concluded that the sector is rapidly evolving toward hyper-efficient companies generating massive revenue with fewer than 100 employees, warning that only founders who build enduring businesses rather than transient widgets will survive the market's volatility.

'Architecting the Future The Enterprise Revolution through GenAI' | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Florence Verzelen, Victoria Weller, Gilles Babinet, Emilie Sidiqian, David Martineau, Charles-Edouard Bouée

Moderated by Charles-Édouard Boué, a panel of industry leaders including Florence Verzelin and Gilles Babinet analyzed the shift of generative AI from experimental phases to enterprise-scale deployment across sectors like luxury retail, life sciences, and construction. The discussion detailed specific value realization strategies, such as Gucci's tripled e-commerce growth and Dassault Systèmes' code acceleration, while outlining strategic frameworks like Martineau's three-category matrix to guide competitive advantage. Furthermore, experts addressed critical workforce implications, emphasizing the transition from job displacement to employability loss and the necessity of human-in-the-loop oversight to manage hallucinations and sustain innovation pipelines.

'International Perspective on GenAI Views from the Frontiers' | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Rodrigo Liang, Patrick Perez, Michael Kratsios, Benjamin Cistecky, Chandra Khatri, Antoine Moyroud, Antoine Moreau

Global investors and governments are aggressively pursuing "sovereign AI" strategies, exemplified by Saudi Arabia's rumored $40 billion fund and the EU's push for a trust hub, to ensure cultural alignment and data control over large language models. Industry leaders like Samba Nova and Criterium are addressing critical technical barriers in low-resource environments by developing custom tokenizers and open-source models that overcome the fragmentation of non-Latin languages. This convergence of geopolitical ambition and technical innovation is expected to reshape the market into a diverse ecosystem of local champions and open science, moving beyond English-centric dominance to serve billions of new users.

'AI Blueprint Deploying GenAI for Enterprise Transformation' | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Gabriel Hubert, Biljana Kaitovic, Bruno Zerbib, Laetitia Cailleteau, Philippe Battel, Jérémy Arosh

Moderated by Jérémy Arosh of Capgemini, a roundtable featuring representatives from Dust, Engie, Orange, Oracle, and Accenture explores how generative AI is transforming enterprise operations from specialist tools into universal workforce assets. The discussion details specific implementation strategies, such as Orange's DINO2 platform boosting developer productivity by 40% and Engie's use of AI for predictive safety maintenance, while addressing critical challenges like the EU AI Act compliance and the management of workforce anxiety. Experts conclude that successful adoption requires a cultural shift toward iterative exploration and robust governance frameworks to navigate the transition from deterministic computing to stochastic, high-impact AI systems.

Threads of Tomorrow: GenAI and the Reinvention of Luxury Experience | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Massimo Moretti, Nicolas, Carla, Patrick

Moderated by Massimo Moretti, the "Threads of Tomorrow" panel featured experts Nicola, Carla, and Patrick in discussing how generative AI is redefining the luxury sector through application-layer innovation, sovereign data infrastructure, and new creative workflows. The discourse highlighted critical challenges including GPU capacity bottlenecks and the necessity of new quality auditors, while citing specific art market transformations where AI co-creates value and reshapes ownership dynamics. Looking ahead, the group predicted that AI-driven efficiency will fundamentally alter the work week to just two or three days, positioning Europe as a competitive frontier for creativity-driven growth despite global capital competition.

Building the Impossible: Technical Frontiers in GenAI for Enterprises | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Solène, Baptiste Pannier, Elias, Mathieu Valland, David Begassarian, Romain Guyett

Founders from Adaptive, PhotoRoom, Google Cloud, and Crisp discussed the strategic divergence between building in-house infrastructure for core competitive advantages and leveraging external APIs for validation or non-critical functions. The panel highlighted that while data moats and proprietary RLHF techniques offer defensibility in niche verticals, startups face significant hurdles regarding high GPU costs, senior talent acquisition, and navigating the uncertainty of the EU AI Act. Ultimately, the consensus emphasized that sustainable AI growth requires balancing rapid product iteration with long-term architectural control to avoid market bubbles and regulatory pitfalls.

Navigating the New Era: Designing AI strategies for Competitive Edge | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Moody Mahmoodi, Julie Hardy, Emmanuel Vivier, Nicole, Bogdan

Julie Hardy, Emmanuel Vivier, Nicole, and Bogdan convened to analyze how B2B enterprises can secure competitive advantages by shifting from generic LLMs to proprietary "brain brands" built on clean data and domain-specific expertise. The panelists emphasized that future success relies on the "Dual PhD" model, where deep industry knowledge combines with technical skills to automate entire critical workflows rather than isolated tasks. Looking ahead, the experts predict a market dominated by verticalized AI solutions and multimodal content generation, provided organizations overcome adoption barriers like talent shortages and regulatory uncertainty through structured change management.

Transforming Healthcare: Unleashing GenAI's Potential Across Medical Frontiers | RAISE Summit 2024

Hakima Berdouz, Christian Allouche, Clément Stippel, Charles Roberts

Founders from Hope Valley AI, Glimmer, DeepSyn, and OKI alongside ARK Invest's Charles Roberts discussed how generative AI is transitioning healthcare from theoretical promise to tangible tools that accelerate drug discovery, reduce radiology errors by up to 50%, and democratize access to mobile imaging for five billion people. The panel highlighted critical industry challenges, including regulatory bottlenecks under the EU AI Act, the necessity of human oversight to maintain patient trust, and the urgent need for diverse development teams to mitigate algorithmic bias in clinical outcomes. Ultimately, the session framed the sector's future around "causal discovery" in biology and the deployment of audited, explainable AI systems that serve as co-pilots rather than replacements for medical professionals.

Responsible AI Activation: Governance AI | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Teos, Nicole Butna, Shyam Nagarajan, Rinald Manohar

Moderated by INSEAD professor Theos, a panel of AI strategy experts Nicole Butna, IBM consultant Shyam Nagarajan, and blockchain specialist Rinald Manohar identified critical risks such as human dependency on automation, data poisoning, and the potential for un-audited systems to mirror financial crises. The discussion established a consensus that effective AI governance must evolve from reactive compliance to proactive "ethics by design," requiring board-level oversight and multi-party accountability to manage self-evolving models and synthetic data feedback loops. To bridge the current maturity gap and regulatory skepticism, the panel advocated for treating AI governance as essential infrastructure comparable to financial auditing, emphasizing shared global values and cost-effective tamper-proof auditability to foster industry trust.