Latest Interviews
Showing 61–75 of 3,055 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Sequoia Capital28 min
Post-Training Is How You Keep Your Taste | Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao
Fireworks CEO Linh Nguyen advocates for a strategic industry shift from relying on rented APIs to owning intelligence through deep model customization, enabling companies to preserve unique business judgment while reducing inference costs by five to ten times. This approach utilizes a structured lifecycle of data curation, fine-tuning, and serving loops to transition from generic prompting to specialized models, as demonstrated by success stories like Cursor and niche vertical leaders in healthcare and security. Ultimately, post-training is positioned as the critical mechanism for startups to scale after product-market fit by converting proprietary user data into unclonable domain expertise before high API expenses threaten unit economics.
- Milken Institute54 min
Banks, Private Credit, and the Future of Risk | Global Conference 2026
Erik Schatzker, Vivek Bantwal, Molly Duffy, Jeffrey Gundlach, Kristofer Kraus, Brad Rogoff, Paul
A panel of financial experts convened to assess that while direct lending poses no immediate systemic threat comparable to the 2008 crisis, significant risks remain due to loosened underwriting standards, high leverage in enterprise software, and critical liquidity mismatches in semi-liquid funds. The discussion highlighted how valuation opacity and rising refinancing costs ahead of the 2028–2029 maturity wall are eroding investor trust, particularly among retail participants facing redemption gates. Despite these structural fractures and a potential recessionary spike in defaults, institutional capital continues to view the volatility as an opportunity to deploy funds at wider spreads while awaiting a market correction driven by credit dispersion rather than a total collapse.
- Sequoia Capital29 min
How Harvey Built a Research Lab on a Budget | Gabe Pereyra
Harvey, Gabe Pereyra, Brendan, Julio, Ross, Brock
Harvey differentiates itself from well-funded frontier labs by leveraging an application-layer strategy that combines synthetic data generation guided by domain experts with post-training on open-source models. The company builds specialized legal benchmarks and utilizes infrastructure partnerships to train agents on complex tasks like contract negotiation without exposing sensitive client information. By deploying these capabilities across multiple vendors and product surfaces, Harvey aims to solve organizational productivity challenges while mitigating the performance gaps inherent in current long-context environments.
- Sequoia Capital17 min
How Companies Are Building Their Own Intelligence | Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
Approximately 80 portfolio company founders and AI leaders convened to strategize the adoption of Sovereign AI, a framework defined by vertical integration where organizations own model weights rather than relying on external APIs. The event combined high-level market analysis with technical workshops led by industry experts to outline a four-step roadmap for building custom intelligence capabilities. Participants explored critical architectural decisions regarding cost efficiency, latency reduction, and the necessity of dedicated research labs to leverage open-weight models for proprietary domain performance.
- Y Combinator42 min
Peter Steinberger: What Happens When 4.7 Million People Let It Cook
Launched in November 2024 by a solo developer to solve personal automation needs, the open-source agent project "OpenClaw" rapidly evolved into a viral community initiative that engaged over 18,000 contributors and achieved 4.7 million weekly downloads by mid-2025. Rather than accepting venture capital or acquisition offers, the founder established a 501(c)(3) non-profit status with Nvidia support to maintain independence while addressing security misconceptions and refining the architecture for multimodal voice interactions. The project's trajectory highlights a strategic shift from proprietary models to open-weight alternatives, ultimately serving as a case study on sustaining developer velocity through personal enjoyment and rigorous community governance.
- Milken Institute54 min
Modernizing Military Power | Global Conference 2026
Colin Demarest, Julie Bush, Dave DeWalt, Dino Mavrookas, Chris Power
A pivotal panel explored a massive surge in defense technology investment, projecting capital to reach $100 billion by 2026 as funds shift from software to hardware and industrial "neo-prime" entities consolidate the market. Participants detailed how a Trump-era budget blueprint and shifting Pentagon procurement culture are accelerating the adoption of commercial AI and dual-use technologies while addressing critical labor bottlenecks through de-skilled manufacturing and rapid workforce training. Looking toward 2026, the discussion highlighted an irreversible strategic pivot toward sovereign reindustrialization, characterized by aggressive shipbuilding initiatives, quantum-ready cybersecurity, and a projected wave of industry-wide mergers driven by the failure of past globalization strategies.
- Y Combinator1h 24m
Why Robotics Still Isn't Solved - But Could Be Soon | YC Paper Club
Francois Chaubard, Marcel Torne, Milan Ganai, Tyler Ga Wei Lum, Niko West, Bill Jiao, Guanming Wang, Shyam Gollakota
Recent industry presentations address critical scaling barriers in robotics, including Sim-to-Real gaps, deformable object handling, and the lack of sensory feedback by introducing specialized architectures like Multi-Scale Embodied Memory and self-supervised Chain of Thought frameworks. Concurrently, a strategic shift toward "Robotics Application Companies" emphasizes proprietary data collection and teleoperation over generalist models, while new World Action Model optimizations reduce inference latency to enable real-time physical AI deployment. These technical and business advancements collectively aim to transition robotics from isolated demos to mass-market, long-horizon task execution.
- Y Combinator57 min
Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough
Max Hodak, CEO of deep-tech startup Science, details the company's solar-powered retinal prosthesis that successfully enabled a patient to read a 300-page novel following major clinical trials. The discussion outlines Science's operational strategy, which includes the proprietary Helix purchasing platform to accelerate hardware procurement and an Eigenreviews performance system utilizing eigenvector centrality for continuous employee evaluation. Hodak further argues that success in brain-computer interfaces relies on high-speed iteration, mission-driven leadership, and building custom internal tools rather than relying on generic enterprise software.
- Bank of America29 min
Global Rates & FX Views: NFP & refunding review
Sphia Salim, Aditya Bhave, Mark Cabana, Meghan Swiber
The July U.S. labor report revealed a net loss of 23,000 nonfarm payrolls driven by seasonal education declines and reduced hospitality staffing, though private payrolls remained resilient near break-even levels. This data, characterized by falling wage growth and a surprising drop in the unemployment rate due to labor force exit, has shifted Federal Reserve policy expectations toward a dovish stance with diminished probability for September rate hikes. Concurrently, Treasury guidance maintained constant auction sizes while coordinated yen interventions utilized Federal Reserve swap facilities, effectively limiting direct selling pressure on the U.S. debt market.
- Y Combinator56 min
How To Design In The Agent Era
Led by Stephen Haney, Paper is an AI-native design platform currently ranking as the third most-used tool behind Figma and Sketch, utilizing a native HTML and CSS rendering engine to facilitate precise agent collaboration. The application distinguishes itself by treating code as the single source of truth, offering features like direct React component handoff and an MCP server that allows autonomous agents to manipulate local repositories and design canvases. While the team prioritizes human curation to maintain design quality against common AI aesthetic pitfalls, the platform is rapidly evolving into a visual coordination layer for the broader agent ecosystem by integrating tools like Paper Shaders and multi-model image generation.
- Goldman Sachs1 min
GoldenTree’s Steven Tananbaum on why disruption moves at different rates
The transition from the dot-com boom of 1999 to the 2000 downturn reveals a pattern where new technological waves generate immediate market uncertainty while delaying full industry disruption for years. This historical trajectory, which took four to five years to impact newspapers and fifteen years to significantly affect television, currently mirrors the evolving instability in the AI sector. Such comparisons highlight how sectors like advertising and cable operators may withstand initial innovation shocks before eventually facing materialized disruptive forces.
- Goldman Sachs1 min
GoldenTree’s Steven Tananbaum on the importance of entry price in distressed investing
In a shrinking market rife with insolvencies, an acquiring firm purchased a directory business generating $800 million in profit at an average entry price of 1.5 times enterprise value, securing high-20s returns through a strategy targeting management teams prioritizing capital return over reinvention. The buyer explicitly rejected a Canadian management team's plea to fund costly reinvention to prevent liquidation, instead executing a transaction designed to stabilize the asset without the proposed reinvestment. This approach allowed the firm to capitalize on a competitive sector while avoiding the liquidation scenarios that had plagued similar entities in the industry.
- Goldman Sachs32 min
Steven Tananbaum: The Evolution of Credit Investing and AI Opportunities
Steven Tananbaum, John Waldron, Steve Tenenbaum
GoldenTree Asset Management founder Steve Tenenbaum outlines current credit market risks driven by AI adoption, noting widened spreads for entities like SpaceX alongside his firm's evolution from post-2008 distress turnaround strategies to targeted 3.0 platform acquisitions. He details the firm's disciplined investment process, which prioritizes specific catalysts and strict asset coverage ratios to navigate complex environments like the 2020 oil services and European bank sectors where the firm generated billions in returns. Looking forward, Tenenbaum identifies dispersion caused by AI disruption as a key driver for new opportunities in private credit, software, and 30-year TIPS while emphasizing the necessity of rigorous process discipline over complex narratives.
- Milken Institute45 min
AI Infrastructure at Scale: Financing the Power-Constrained Grid | Global Conference 2026
Brian Sullivan, Lucy Heintz, Douglas Kimmelman, Karl Kuchel, Rajit Nanda, Michael Zeltkevic, Doug Kimmel, Carl Cuscelli, Lucy Hines
Projected to approach one trillion dollars in global capital expenditures, the AI energy transition is being driven by hyperscalers utilizing long-term power purchase agreements to de-risk infrastructure financing amid rising electricity costs. As the industry shifts from a focus on speed to market to speed to power, data center locations are increasingly dictated by the immediate availability of reliable energy and data sovereignty constraints, with nations like Saudi Arabia positioning themselves as strategic inference hubs. While supply chain advantages and government permitting acceleration are accelerating deployment, the sector faces significant consolidation risks and financing hurdles for unproven storage technologies as the race for compute capacity intensifies.
- Y Combinator42 min
Garry Tan: The Future of AGI Is Personal
The speaker advocates for "Personal AGI," a system of user-owned agents that process vast personal context on private infrastructure to drastically increase output and preserve cognitive independence. Drawing parallels to Baruch Spinoza's rejection of institutional compromise, the talk details how "skill files" and hybrid architectures enable individuals to replace traditional workforces with scalable, compounding digital labor. This shift promises to democratize high-level execution by allowing founders to achieve unprecedented economic leverage while retaining full ownership of their generated knowledge and intellectual tools.