Latest Interviews

AI: Hope, Hype, and Headwinds | Milken Institute Global Conference 2024

David Faber, Ashton Kutcher, Clara Shih, Aravind Srinivas, Matt Wood

A high-level convergence of global economic ambitions and technological transformation will define Los Angeles's trajectory as the city leverages upcoming international events and massive infrastructure investments to support its position as a premier innovation hub. This strategic expansion coincides with the rapid maturation of generative AI, where enterprises are transitioning from reactive content generation to autonomous agentic workflows that promise to automate up to 95% of knowledge worker tasks within three years. The resulting economic landscape hinges on the ability of organizations to secure private data assets and navigate complex safety debates while managing a workforce shift toward AI-augmented leadership.

Levers of Change: Gun Violence Prevention and Solutions | Milken Institute Global Conference 2023

Rich Ditizio, Chip Bergh, John Feinblatt, Priscilla Sims Brown, Mia Tretta

A recent panel convened with industry leaders, survivors, and financial experts to address gun violence as the leading cause of death for U.S. youth and a $550 billion annual economic drain. The event highlighted a strategic shift where corporate entities like Levi Strauss and Dick's Sporting Goods leveraged their influence to secure the Safer Communities Act, while simultaneously advancing litigation and smart-gun technologies to bypass legislative gridlock. By uniting consumer activism, investor pressure, and survivor advocacy, the discussion urged immediate public engagement to enforce safety measures before further tragedies occur.

Beyond Gridlock: The Future of Gun Violence Prevention | Milken Institute Global Conference 2024

Richard Ditizio, Ellen S. Alberding, Ralph Clark, Shereef Elnahal, Nicole Hockley, Francis Suarez, Christopher Griffith

A diverse panel of experts convened to address the escalating crisis of gun violence in the United States, where firearm thefts in Tennessee have surged 700% and gun violence now exceeds automobile accidents as the leading cause of death for children. The discussion highlighted multi-faceted intervention strategies, including ShotSpotter technology for rapid response, electronic gun locks to prevent veteran suicides, and Miami's holistic ecosystem approach that reduced homicides by 86% over four decades. By rejecting single-solution narratives, the group advocated for a collaborative framework combining federal prosecution, red flag laws, and private sector innovation to reframe gun violence as a solvable public health emergency.

A Conversation with Citadel CEO Ken Griffin | Milken Institute Global Conference 2024

Ken Griffin, Sara Eisen

Ken Griffin emphasizes the urgency of fiscal discipline and the preservation of dollar credibility while advocating for continued support of Ukraine to prevent geopolitical destabilization. He critiques current deficits and political interference in monetary policy, arguing that structural reforms to Social Security and a renewed commitment to meritocratic education are essential for long-term stability. Concurrently, Griffin identifies artificial intelligence as a primary catalyst for future productivity growth while highlighting the contrast between Miami's civic successes and ideological challenges facing Ivy League institutions.

Game Changers: Innovation and Evolution in Sports | Milken Institute Global Conference 2024

Heather Brooks Karatz, Michele Kang, Marc Lasry, Candace Parker, Ryan Spoon, Masai Ujiri

Candice Parker, Michelle Kwan, and Masai Ujiri joined Mark Lautner and Ryan Smith to analyze the shifting sports investment landscape, highlighting Parker's transition into ownership and Kwan's multi-club valuation strategy for women's leagues. The panel identified a critical capital shortage in team acquisitions while forecasting a 400% valuation surge in women's sports driven by undervaluation and a global demographic shift toward Africa. These speakers outlined a five to ten-year roadmap for capturing subsequent media deal cycles and expanding digital engagement, positioning ownership expertise as the essential differentiator for future market success.

Latin America's Technological Renaissance: Leading the Global Digital Wave | Global Conference 2024

Oscar Decotelli, Juan Jose Galnares, Florian Hagenbuch, Caroline Merin, Scott Sobel, Leonardo Vieira

The event analyzes a $600 billion value gap in Latin America's technology sector while highlighting a valuation arbitrage where the region generates superior exits despite lower GDP representation compared to India. Leading figures from firms such as Canary, Valor Capital Group, and CLIP, alongside startup founders from Leona Health and Future Cow, discuss strategic shifts driven by nearshoring, AI application layer innovation, and a pivot toward early profitability. Speakers further detail how resilient local talent and proactive regulatory frameworks are dismantling legacy barriers in payments and healthcare to attract significant global capital.

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.

Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham

Paul Graham's 2013 essay "Do Things That Don't Scale" challenges Silicon Valley orthodoxy by urging early-stage founders to manually solve immediate user problems before prioritizing technical infrastructure, a strategy exemplified by companies like Airbnb and DoorDash. This approach prioritizes rapid learning and product-market fit over theoretical scalability, allowing startups to validate demand through direct customer engagement while avoiding the pitfalls of building unwanted solutions. Although manual operations risk trapping founders in consultancy models, successfully transitioning to automation after securing initial traction provides a critical competitive advantage by ensuring software development addresses genuine market needs.

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.

Why This Is The Perfect Time To Start A Startup

Jared, Gary, Diana

A recent discussion highlights a dramatic demographic shift at Y Combinator where college students now constitute 30% of batches, driven by generative AI enabling rapid idea validation that bypasses traditional corporate learning curves. The event contrasts the energy and cognitive flexibility of young founders against the "deprogramming" required for experienced hires, citing historical outliers like Stripe and Dropbox to argue that skipping big tech employment is essential for achieving extreme growth. Emphasizing a once-in-a-decade opportunity, the dialogue urges aspiring entrepreneurs to immediately pursue billion-dollar visions rather than delaying for experience, as the compounding nature of exponential growth demands starting the long game at peak energy levels.

Jay Shetty on mindfulness in the workplace

Jay Shetty, Jacqueline Arthur, Jack Arthur

Jay Shetty transforms traditional mindfulness into a scalable business strategy by integrating neuroscience-backed practices into corporate culture, drawing on his own journey from multiple rejections by major firms to success at Accenture. He advocates for structural shifts such as shorter meeting blocks and specific sleep hygiene protocols to enhance decision-making speed and clarity, citing high-performance athletes and executives who credit mental training as a core success factor. By reframing goal-setting around internal growth rather than external outcomes, Shetty enables organizations to replace escape mechanisms with intentional elevation, turning mental health management into a driver of sustainable organizational thriving.

Focusing on data quality over quantity, Metalware built a foundation model with less compute.

Metalware, a hardware design firm without in-house PhD expertise, launched a project to build a specialized AI co-pilot by curating high-quality textbook figures and hardware data rather than relying on volume. By leveraging this refined dataset, the company successfully trained a functional model using the significantly smaller GPT-2.5 architecture instead of resource-intensive alternatives like GPT-4. This strategic pivot demonstrated that constrained tasks with superior data quality can effectively replace the need for massive computational resources while delivering practical results.

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.

Harvard’s former president Drew Faust on making “necessary trouble”

Drew Faust, Drew Gilpin Faust, David Solomon

Former Harvard University President Drew Faust details her transformation from a girl raised in segregated Virginia to a civil rights activist and historian in her new memoir, *Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Mid-Century*. The book chronicles her early resistance to gender norms, her pivotal travels to East Germany and the American South that solidified her commitment to racial equality, and her participation in major 1960s protests alongside figures like John Lewis. Faust concludes by contrasting her era's battles for personal freedom with modern higher education's challenges, which now require navigating deep ideological divides and global conflicts within diverse campus communities.

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.