Latest Interviews

Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity”

Alexandr Wang, Garry Tan

Alexander Wang discusses his journey from founding Scale AI to leading Meta's Frontier Lab, where he is developing the Muse Spark model to deliver frontier-level AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost. He argues that the immediate future of the industry will be defined by agentic looping and the orchestration of autonomous agents rather than raw model size, predicting a massive expansion in global GDP driven by these technologies. Wang concludes by advising founders to build independent convictions based on first principles while emphasizing that systematic thinking and vision are becoming the scarce resources in an era of abundant computational intelligence.

Lumentum CEO: How Lasers Are Transforming AI Data Centers

Michael Hurlston, Tony Kim, Molly O'Shea

Under CEO Michael Hurlston, Lumentum has transformed from a diversified manufacturer into a pure-play data center optical leader, tripling revenue and driving its stock price up to 12-fold by capitalizing on the industry's rapid shift from copper to fiber connectivity. This transition, necessitated by the physical limitations of copper in high-speed environments, is straining the specialized Indium Phosphide supply chain due to long lead times for dedicated fabrication facilities. Facing tens of millions in new hyperscaler orders, the company is simultaneously expanding into space-based internet infrastructure and navigating geopolitical dynamics that favor U.S. domestic suppliers over Chinese competitors.

The Robot Episode: Four Leaders on What's Coming

Dr. Péter Fankhauser, Bernt Børnich, Amanda McMaster, Jonathan Hurst, J-Cal

Leading robotics firms including Anybotics, Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robotics have collectively deployed over 1,000 specialized units globally to replace humans in hazardous industrial settings, prioritizing data sovereignty and ISO cybersecurity standards to avoid reliance on Chinese hardware. These companies are currently transitioning from pure detection to scalable autonomy through platform-based ecosystems and cost reductions, with humanoids targeting a $40,000 price point and quadrupeds enabling continuous 24-hour monitoring in extreme environments. While immediate returns focus on safety and leak prevention, the industry anticipates a hard take-off in manufacturing capabilities within a decade as foundational AI models enable complex, multi-arm manipulation without physical safety barriers.

Blake Scholl: How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jet

Blake Scholl

Founded by Blake Scholl in 2014, Boom Supersonic successfully developed the XB-1, the first privately built jet to break the sound barrier, using a lean team and software-driven engineering to overcome decades of aviation stagnation. This historic flight directly catalyzed a shift in US federal policy, prompting an Executive Order that legalized supersonic flight over land and clearing the path for the upcoming Overture airliner. By vertically integrating manufacturing and creating revenue through ground-based engines, the company aims to double global travel speeds while eliminating the traditional sonic boom barrier.

Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Garry Tan

Sam Altman and Y Combinator highlight an exponential shift in startup capabilities where coding agents reduce development time to mere seconds while hard tech representation in the portfolio surges to 25%. The organization positions itself as a decentralizing force to prevent single-entity control of AI power, explicitly rejecting the "live action role play" mindset in favor of heretical, high-conviction building. Altman warns of safety risks regarding surveillance and model concentration but maintains that widespread founder agency and distributed innovation will ultimately prevent economic collapse or catastrophic safety incidents.

Tradewinds: Navigating Economic Uncertainty | Global Conference 2026

Gerard Baker, Whitney Baird, Xavier Bettel, John Denton, Francisco Pérez Mackenna, Michael Roberts, Jerry Baker

A global economic panel consensus identifies a critical inflection point where geopolitical volatility and policy unpredictability are driving nearly $250 billion in annual lost activity while compelling nations to prioritize supply chain resilience over pure free trade. Amidst rising food security threats from conflicts in the Middle East and evolving US-China de-risking strategies, leaders are exploring plurilateral arrangements and technological solutions to manage these disruptions. Ultimately, the event highlights a shift toward strategic autonomy and green energy innovation as essential mechanisms to mitigate inflationary pressures and narrow the widening gap between the Global North and South.

Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt

Boris Cherny, Diana Hu

The Opus 5 model release demonstrates a 30% score on the ARC AGI benchmark and unprecedented autonomous endurance by eliminating over 80% of legacy system prompts through an empirical ablation methodology. This shift enabled dynamic workflows where thousands of agents autonomously rewrote complex software stacks like the Bunn runtime and Cloud Code desktop app in mere days. Strategic advice for developers emphasizes replacing rigid prompt engineering with context design and verification protocols to leverage these emergent agentic capabilities effectively.

Chamath: Google Is the Ultimate AI Compounding Machine

Chamath

Google maintains a 25-year average return on invested capital of 32% by leveraging its dominance in search, cloud infrastructure, and specialized silicon. The company benefits from AI market fragmentation, as the proliferation of hundreds of distinct models drives demand for its hardware and cloud services while enhancing monetization across application layers. This strategy allows Google to act as a methodical compounder that capitalizes on the diverse needs of the evolving AI ecosystem rather than relying on excessive risk-taking.

Can Markets Withstand AI Risks, Fed Hikes, and Oil Shocks?

Tony Pasquariello, Josh Schiffrin, Dominic Wilson

Dominic and Josh analyze how supply shortages in AI infrastructure and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East are creating a complex investment environment driven by oil market friction and Federal Reserve policy shifts. While the S&P 500 remains near record highs, the duo warns that diverging market performance from lived economic reality, combined with intensifying inflation pressures and a move away from central bank guidance, signals potential volatility ahead. Consequently, they highlight a strategic pivot toward the long end of the yield curve and credit markets, suggesting that concentrated asset exposure is prudent as liquidity is expected to thin in the coming months.

New Operating Systems for the Physical World

A new software operating system addresses the stagnation in physical-world management by unifying AI agents, robots, and human workers into a single platform. This architecture shifts the industry value proposition from simple visibility to the direct coordination of heterogeneous labor, targeting the massive economic leverage inherent in industries where labor costs vastly exceed software spending. By capturing continuous, real-time data from mixed-field operations, the system establishes a unique data moat designed to train superior AI models and optimize safety and reliability in ways incumbent solutions cannot match.

Global Rates & FX Views: Hyperscalers, credit, & rates

Mark Cabana, Yuri Seliger, Meghan Swiber, Yuri Sigler

U.S. credit markets remain resilient despite a 30% year-over-year supply surge, though hyperscaler bonds have uniquely widened due to Amazon's weak 2.5x subscription and shifting issuance dynamics. While net bond supply remains neutralized by a Treasury bill shift, investment funds are extending duration in IG spreads even as the Federal Reserve faces a 35% probability of an unexpected July rate hike to combat inflation. Future market stability hinges on upcoming hyperscaler earnings and whether issuers maintain aggressive capital raising despite emerging signs of investor demand fatigue.

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.

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.