Latest Interviews
Showing 946–960 of 2,590 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator26 min
From A Pivot To Building A $9.6 Billion Payroll Company
Harj Taggar, Joshua Reeves, Hodge Tagger
Founded by three co-founders who pivoted from a failed expert advice marketplace, Gusto revolutionized the fragmented U.S. payroll industry by delivering a cloud-based, design-driven solution that replaced outdated manual processes used by major incumbents like ADP. The company initially targeted California startups with bare-bones tax filings before leveraging a landmark seed round from prominent tech founders to scale into benefits and compliance, ultimately positioning itself as an AI-powered back-office partner for small businesses. Today, Gusto continues to drive market growth by expanding its self-serve platform and launching a comprehensive compliance hub, aiming to increase the survival rate of new employers through proactive, pattern-matched operational guidance.
- Sequoia Capital51 min
Josh Woodward: Google Labs is Rapidly Building AI Products from 0-to-1
Josh Woodward, Ravi Gupta, Sonya Huang
Google Labs operates as an autonomous unit dedicated to rapidly prototyping frontier AI products, prioritizing market validation over immediate technological perfection. Key initiatives include Mariner, a computer-use agent currently targeting enterprise automation, alongside Veo, a generative video model solving physics constraints while shifting industry models toward pay-per-output. The organization accelerates innovation by blending veteran engineering with diverse creative talent to launch ideas within 50 to 100 days, ultimately aiming to replace passive consumption with steerable, asset-driven user experiences.
- Goldman Sachs13 min
10KSB Voices Rural Advocacy Conference in DC: David Solomon with Program Graduate & Punchbowl News
David Solomon, Anna Palmer, Jenny Steffensmeyer
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and small business owner Jenny Steffensmeyer discussed critical challenges facing the "10,000 Small Business Voices" program, including capital access, workforce shortages, and a significant rural artificial intelligence adoption gap. Solomon expressed optimism that a Republican-controlled administration will reduce regulatory burdens to stimulate growth, while Steffensmeyer highlighted that technological upskilling remains impossible without affordable financing. To address these disparities, the group urged Congress to deregulate small businesses, simplify SBA lending, and provide incentives to level the competitive playing field.
- a16z14 min
Why American Dynamism Is Just Getting Started
Katherine Boyle, David Ulevitch
Launched three years ago with a 2022 geopolitical catalyst, the "American Dynamism" thesis rapidly transformed the venture capital landscape by shifting founder focus toward physical-world technologies and critical national infrastructure. This movement mobilizes a broad coalition of investors and engineers to support companies serving federal agencies and sectors like defense, energy, and manufacturing, effectively overcoming Silicon Valley's earlier resistance to patriotic business narratives. By prioritizing tangible outcomes over digital ad optimization, the initiative has established a new industry standard for building meaningful supply chains and technologies aligned with U.S. government interests.
- The Economist20 min
In sickness and in stealth: threats to America’s CDC
Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Rebecca Jackson, Josh Roberts, David Benin
Following the inauguration of the Trump administration, the CDC has faced severe operational disruption through Executive Orders targeting DEI initiatives, a mass termination campaign involving 750 employees, and the imposition of restrictive communication protocols by the acting director and DOGE-affiliated entities. Simultaneously, silver market dynamics have shifted as institutional demand surged with Russia adding reserves to holdings and industrial requirements for solar manufacturing drove a 50% increase in consumption, outpacing gold in recent returns. In the entertainment sector, a resurgence of live album releases has emerged among major artists like Dua Lipa and The Cure, driven by post-pandemic appreciation for raw performance energy and a strategic pivot away from the studio-centric production models that dominated the late 20th century.
- a16z1h 36m
Building the Next Generation of Conversational AI
Ankit Kumar, Anjney Midha, Maya
Sesame is developing a voice-first "companion" interface using a talent-dense team of fewer than fifteen engineers to prioritize natural conversational dynamics over general-purpose utility. The company has open-sourced its Conversational Speech Model base weights while withholding character-specific implementations, aiming to evolve toward a full duplex architecture capable of native audio understanding and real-time interruption handling. By targeting smart glasses as the optimal hardware form factor and employing qualitative human evaluation rather than standard metrics, Sesame seeks to build a long-term memory layer that acts as an emotionally resonant mediator for multi-step tasks.
- All-In Podcast1h 39m
Fixing the American Dream with Andrew Schulz
Andrew Schulz, Friedberg, Gavin Newsom, Trump, Jason Calacanis
In a May 3 Miami event featuring comedian Andrew Schulz, hosts Jason Calacanis and David Sack discussed advanced IVF technologies, the strategic implications of Governor Gavin Newsom's new podcast, and critiques of President Trump's tariff policies. The dialogue extended to economic solutions such as investing the Social Security Trust Fund in equities to prevent 2032 insolvency, while analyzing housing market distortions and the psychological drivers behind modern conspiracy theories. Panelists also shared personal investment origins, evaluated the Department of Government Efficiency's potential under Elon Musk, and highlighted JD Vance's political trajectory as a key figure in future American leadership.
Arielle Zuckerberg, "The Rizz & Tiz" Winning Founder Recipe
Arielle Zuckerberg, Molly O'Shea, John Doerr
Long Journey Ventures, led by Arielle Zuckerberg, distinguishes itself by targeting "magically weird" founders characterized by the "Ris and Tis" balance of magnetic charisma and neurodivergent intensity. The firm deploys up to $25 million in follow-on capital into top performers, prioritizing "adult frat" culture and founder-centric mentorship over standard thesis-driven views. While navigating a volatile AI market, Long Journey focuses on high-velocity deal sourcing through private networks to support non-traditional companies like Autopallet and Superpower.
- The Economist25 min
Wheels of justice: the ICC gets Duterte at last
Duterte, Jason Palmer, Aaron Connolly, John Joe Devlin, Cassio de Gea, Tobias Adielson, Charmec Elmi, Anne Rowe
The International Criminal Court successfully transferred former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to The Hague for trial on crimes against humanity related to his "war on drugs," a move enabled by a political rift between his family and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Concurrently, Sweden confronts an unprecedented surge in gang violence involving coordinated bombings and the recruitment of vulnerable minors, prompting legislative changes regarding wiretapping and intensified debate over immigration policies. In a separate development, celebrated apartheid-era playwright Athol Fugard passed away at age 92, leaving a literary legacy that chronicled the moral complexities of South African oppression and the enduring resilience of its people.
- Y Combinator38 min
Figma's Dylan Field: Exploring the idea maze, vibe coding, and the power of “locking in”
Co-founded by Dylan Field, Figma evolved from a series of early pivots into a dominant collaborative design platform that successfully integrated engineers and product managers alongside traditional designers. The company's trajectory was shaped by a user-driven roadmap that birthed features like FigJam and an internal culture of "Maker Weeks," which emphasized rapid iteration over long-term planning. Field's current strategy leverages AI strictly as a capability-enhancing tool to lower participation barriers while acknowledging its inability to replicate human judgment in complex design contexts.
- a16z42 min
Agent Experience: Building an Open Web for the AI Era
Netlify is pivoting its strategy from Developer Experience to Agent Experience (AX) to ensure the open web remains the native environment for autonomous AI agents rather than content relegated to walled gardens. Driven by a surge where approximately 10,000 sites are generated daily by AI tools, the company advocates for new infrastructure primitives and formal standards to support ephemeral applications and direct machine-to-web interactions. This initiative aims to democratize high-fidelity creation while redefining the web's architectural future against a backdrop of rapidly converging creation costs and shifting developer roles.
- Goldman Sachs8 min
Chief US Equity Strategist David Kostin on the market impact of recent policy updates
David Kostin, Carl, John Yang, Sarah
Goldman Sachs strategist David Koston revised 2024 U.S. equity EPS growth forecasts downward to 9% due to a weakening economic outlook, while maintaining a 6,500 target for the S&P 500. Portfolio rotations are shifting toward defensive healthcare and consumer staples as investors grow indifferent to trade policy uncertainty, with a specific focus on low-volatility earnings and companies leveraging AI for revenue generation. Although tariff scenarios could compress margins, the firm continues to view GDP growth and the Magnificent Seven's high reinvestment rates as the primary drivers for sustained market performance pending durable economic data.
- a16z27 min
DeepSeek, Reasoning Models, and the Future of LLMs
Guido Appenzeller, Marco Mascorro
DeepSeek R1 is an open-weight reasoning model from China that achieves top-tier performance by combining Multi-Head Latent Attention, Group Relative Policy Optimization, and a 256-expert MoE architecture to generate complex thought chains. The development team overcame early behavioral failures through a low-cost, self-supervised pipeline utilizing 800,000 verifiable traces and rule-based verification to produce responses up to 10,000 tokens long for roughly $5.5 million in base training costs. This breakthrough has shifted industry focus toward test-time compute and local deployment, enabling state-of-the-art reasoning on consumer hardware while bypassing traditional bottlenecks associated with human-labeled data.
- Milken Institute30 min
MacArthur Genius Raj Chetty Talks Economic Opportunity Creation | Global Conference 2024
Using anonymized tax data and social network analysis, researchers have identified that high-opportunity neighborhoods and "economic connectedness" between income groups are the primary drivers of upward mobility, contrasting sharply with the national decline where only 50% of children born in the mid-1980s now earn more than their parents. A randomized Seattle trial demonstrated that adding brokerage services to housing vouchers successfully moved over half of low-income families to these high-mobility areas, yielding an estimated $200,000 lifetime earnings increase per child for a mere 2% cost increase. While place-based investments and private sector partnerships in cities like Charlotte show promise, future policy efforts are expanding the voucher model to nine additional cities to systematically address the loss of talent and inequality affecting both social equity and innovation.
- The Economist23 min
Buck off: US pauses Ukraine aid
Rosie Bloor, Shashank Joshi, Carlos Superana, Alexandra Sewich Bass
The White House has suspended over $1 billion in US military aid to Ukraine as leverage to force President Zelensky into negotiations, threatening long-term logistical deficits in artillery, air defense, and intelligence sharing despite immediate front-line stability. Simultaneously, stablecoin adoption has surged in Turkey to 40% of global transactions for inflation hedging and commerce, prompting tightening global regulations and US legislative efforts to harness digital assets for dollar dominance while addressing audit risks. In a separate cultural pivot, the Louvre launched its first fashion gala to raise $800 million for renovations by pairing high-fashion designs with historical artifacts, distinguishing its revenue model from criticized commercial exhibitions.