Latest Interviews

BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum

Tony Kim, Molly O'Shea

Kim outlines a fundamental shift in the global technology sector where a $30 trillion hardware-centric economy is driven by a 10,000x increase in compute density and severe memory shortages known as the "Rampocalypse." Leading institutions are responding through silicon co-design and gigawatt-scale energy infrastructure while BlackRock allocates capital toward immediate compute needs and long-term bets on quantum and orbital data centers. The narrative concludes with strategic observations on China's robotics acceleration and the restructuring of traditional enterprises into AI-native entities through proprietary token flow architectures.

Are Hedge Funds Still Bullish on AI Stocks?

Vincent Lin, Chris Hussey, Vinny Lin

Following a historic 32% drawdown in high-beta momentum strategies, the market has stabilized as hedge funds reduced semiconductor exposure from record levels while managing a four-fold surge in volatility. Despite the sharp correction driven by heavy selling pressure in technology sectors, equity funds have maintained healthy returns and are currently repositioning near median exposure to capitalize on dipping AI infrastructure valuations. Analysts now advise utilizing limited-loss option structures to navigate upcoming earnings for mega-cap hyperscalers, while monitoring the risk of rising stock correlations that could undermine the current low-correlation alpha opportunities.

How Photoroom Trained Themselves To Dream Bigger

Gary Tan, Elliot

PhotoRoom, the largest Y Combinator company headquartered in Europe, leveraged a strategic pivot to e-commerce photography to achieve 300 million downloads and serve major clients like Amazon and Uber. Its founders attribute this exponential growth to a cultural shift fostered by YC, which replaced European risk aversion with a "failure-safe" mindset that treats a billion-dollar valuation as an attainable target. By enforcing English-only offices, prioritizing deep vertical focus, and utilizing aggressive resource constraints, the company instilled a mandatory ambition across its team to drive rapid scaling and execution speed.

Scientists Are Built for Startups

Arvind Veluvali, Ayman Saleh, Dima Yanovsky

The speaker leverages their experience engineering fungus-based materials and simulating the NASA Perseverance rover to argue that scientists, particularly those from structured space agencies, possess the ideal mindset for startup entrepreneurship. Contrasting NASA's rigid, decade-long project lifecycles with the high-pressure, iterative environment of seed-stage ventures, the speaker demonstrates that technical feasibility and the willingness to conduct long-term experiments are more critical than formal business training. Ultimately, the presentation posits that researchers accustomed to managing massive-scale contractor coordination and undefined success metrics are uniquely prepared to lead new ventures despite the inherent risks.

Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | The GPU Economy

Sunny Madra, Brad Gerstner, Apoorv Agrawal

Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Grok co-founder Sonny Maduro outline a transformative shift where AI distribution costs are now compute-intensive, driving the integration of deterministic architecture with Nvidia's GPU ecosystem to accelerate inference. This strategic fusion, which led to Nvidia's $20 billion acquisition of Grok, enables a 2.5x increase in token generation while addressing critical power and memory constraints to support the transition from chat-based tools to autonomous agents. As the industry approaches Artificial General Intelligence faster than anticipated, the convergence of these hardware innovations and emerging regulatory frameworks aims to redefine global economic output and the future value of human labor.

Elon Musk on Europe, the far right and civil war in Britain | The Economist

Elon Musk, Zanny Minton Beddoes

Elon Musk and an interviewer clashed over the classification of his political views and his claims that civil war in Britain is inevitable due to demographic shifts. While Musk defended his promotion of a film depicting vigilante violence and rejected accusations of racism by citing his personal relationships, the interviewer challenged his assertions with crime statistics and labeled his influence on UK politics as irresponsible and based on a distorted American perception. Despite Musk's dismissal of his critics as a minority, the discussion highlighted a fundamental disagreement over his role in shaping public discourse and the validity of his warnings regarding Western safety and immigration.

The Philosopher CEO | Clay Co-Founder Kareem Amin

Clay Co-Founder Kareem Amin, Kareem Amin, Varun, Nikolai, Mike Vernal, Pete Caputa, Jack Dorsey, David Solomon, Tarek

Clay CEO Kareem guides his company through a "long strange trip" of pivoting from broad ambitions to the specific niche of Go-to-Market Engineering, where he prioritizes radical transparency and usage-based pricing to align with technical users. By rejecting standard management dogmas in favor of "momentum detective" leadership and "deep work" practices, Kareem fosters a culture of devotion that withstands pricing backlash and drives a unique product philosophy valuing flexibility over simplicity. This strategy successfully established a new market category while navigating a five-year period of ambiguity to achieve product-market fit without relying on external validation.

How Supabase Became One Of The Fastest Growing DevTool Companies In The World

Paul Copplestone

Supabase founder Paul Copplestone recently secured a $500 million round at a valuation exceeding $10 billion, propelling the company to decacorn status with a 10 million developer base driven largely by AI agents launching 60-90% of new databases. The fully distributed organization leverages its open-source PostgreSQL strategy and a shift toward Infrastructure as Code to achieve exponential usage growth, reducing time-to-value from minutes to seconds while bypassing traditional marketing channels. Moving beyond standard user interfaces, Supabase is now building self-driving database capabilities and "Infrastructure for Platforms" to support enterprise labs managing millions of ephemeral instances autonomously.

Multiplayer AI

While current AI adoption remains limited to isolated, single-player interactions, the proposed shift toward "multiplayer agents" enables teams to observe, redirect, and hand off autonomous tasks in real-time, mirroring human collaboration. This platform transition aims to replace static transcript sharing with live agent sessions tailored for specific departments like engineering, sales, and legal to solve complex problems collectively. An open call for partnership invites organizations to build future AI systems with these multiplayer capabilities at their core.

Building a Company in Stealth | Travis Kalanick with a16z

Travis Kalanick, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg

Travis Kalanick, reflecting on lessons from his 2017 departure from Uber, is now leading ADAM, a stealth-backed venture that digitizes physical manufacturing and logistics to drive meal costs down to $8–$10. By integrating over 300 dark kitchen facilities and autonomous mining operations acquired from Pronto, the company leverages robotics to transform heavy industries while avoiding the external pressures that previously hindered Uber's scalability. Kalanick applies an "Industrial AI" framework focused on internal correctness and management capacity constraints to scale operations in food, mining, and transport simultaneously.

Indexing Humanity: A Fireside With the Simulation Company | Simile | RAISE Summit 2026

Joon Sung Park, Sahir Azam, Jun

Simile, founded by former Stanford researchers including CEO Jun, has launched a foundational model of human behavior that replicates individual subpopulations with 85% accuracy for enterprise clients like CVS and Fortune 500 companies. Leveraging strategic partnerships with Gallup and Dynata to access a 20-million-person data panel, the company differentiates itself by prioritizing human imperfections and biases over pure algorithmic efficiency to augment corporate decision-making in market research and product development. Supported by Index Ventures, Simile operates on a four-stage simulation hierarchy ranging from individual dynamic testing to society-wide forecasting, while adhering to strict ethical principles regarding data consent and transparency.

How the Finance Department Killed Intel - Former CEO

The speaker analyzes Intel's recent decline as a direct consequence of shifting from a technical, PhD-led culture to one dominated by financial management, which prioritized $100 billion in shareholder returns over critical manufacturing investments. This strategic misalignment led to a decade without new factories and the delay of essential Extreme Ultraviolet machine purchases, decisions the speaker argues required technical judgment rather than spreadsheet analysis. In contrast, the discussion highlights that successful modern tech leaders like Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Google's Sundar Pichai maintain deep technical expertise to guide high-stakes, billion-dollar decisions effectively.

Why Ambitious Startup Ideas Are Actually Easier To Sell

James Hawkins

PostHog is transitioning from an open-source analytics platform to an AI-driven service that autonomously fixes engineering issues and solves customer support tickets by generating production-ready pull requests. Co-founders James and Tim restructured their operations to align with this new "self-driving software" vision, delegating management duties to the latter so the former can focus exclusively on AI product architecture while the company doubles in size. This strategic pivot replaces traditional manual product management with a system where AI configures workflows and implements fixes based on deep user data, aiming to secure massive market valuation through "insane" ambition rather than conservative growth.

The art of deception in modern war | The Economist

Jack Watling, Shashank Joshi

The event analyzes how modern deception strategies now target an adversary's intent rather than mere presence to neutralize overwhelming surveillance, drawing on historical precedents like D-Day alongside recent intelligence failures in Ukraine, Israel, and Russia. It further details how transparent battlespaces compel forces to deploy resource-intensive drone operations that paradoxically increase human density and logistical footprints, requiring teams of five and nearly two tons of equipment per unit. By forcing enemies to waste munitions on decoys, these tactics aim to degrade capabilities, though the summary notes their inherent vulnerability and limited operational endurance of roughly three days.

David Friedberg Explains America's Economic Crisis in 60 Minutes

David Friedberg, Molly O'Shea

David Friedberg warns that the United States faces potential social collapse within two years due to policy failures that exclude the bottom 50% from capital ownership, a structural gap he estimates represents a $33 trillion wealth disparity. He advocates for replacing Social Security and Treasury-bond-heavy pension systems with equity-based individual accounts, while proposing a 40% capital gains tax and a national goal of shifting 2% of Americans to capital ownership annually. Friedberg argues these reforms, alongside closing inheritance loopholes and eliminating income tax for the bottom earners, are essential to prevent a socialist death spiral and restore economic mobility before the chaotic political landscape of 2028.