Latest Interviews

Why Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto

Harj Taggar, Jesse Pollak

Led by Base founder Jesse Pollock, industry leaders declare a new golden age for crypto building driven by mature infrastructure that has reduced transaction costs to near zero and achieved regulatory clarity through legislation like the Genius Act. This environment enables a shift from legacy financial systems to programmable, censorship-resistant networks where stablecoins facilitate global access and tokenization allows creators to retain ownership of their capital. As a result, Coinbase and Y Combinator are prioritizing technical founders who apply these scalable Layer 2 architectures to solve real-world problems, signaling a surge in high-quality engineering teams ready to integrate AI and financial services over the next 18 months.

Why Businesses Are Rejecting the AI They’ve Asked For ft Agency CEO Elias Torres

Elias Torres, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

Elias Torres leverages his experience founding Drift and leading HubSpot's platform rebuild to launch Agency, an AI-native company dedicated to automating entire customer workflows rather than merely assisting human agents. The venture targets enterprise clients by challenging the market's demand for perfect AI accuracy, instead promoting a model that delivers broad functionality with 10-30% efficiency gains while relying on fewer than 100 employees to scale operations. Torres aims to build a $1 billion revenue entity by deprogramming businesses from manual dependency and hiring talent driven by grit and hunger over traditional credentials.

Disaster Preparedness and Community Resilience | Global Conference 2025

Raj Kumar, Christoph Gorder, Louis A. Gritzo, Donald Howard, Vanessa Kerry, Michelle Nunn, DAN GALPIN

Industry leaders and humanitarian officials warn that escalating climate disasters and drastic foreign aid cuts necessitate a strategic pivot from reactive emergency response to proactive public-private resilience investments. By leveraging technology for rapid housing solutions and engineering for risk reduction, experts demonstrate how preventing damage yields billions in savings while addressing critical workforce shortages in reconstruction. The consensus emphasizes that future security and economic stability depend on community-led planning, direct investment in high-risk regions, and treating climate adaptation as a core driver of operational continuity rather than a peripheral cost.

Dylan Patel on the AI Chip Race - NVIDIA, Intel & the US Government vs. China

Dylan Patel, Erik Torenberg, Sarah Wang, Guido Appenzeller

NVIDIA and Intel have established a transformative $5 billion strategic partnership to jointly develop custom data center and PC products, a move that significantly boosted NVIDIA's stock and acknowledged the industry's shift from CPU to GPU dominance. This alliance contrasts sharply with China's aggressive pursuit of semiconductor self-sufficiency, where Huawei navigates US export bans and high-bandwidth memory bottlenecks through domestic innovation and alleged smuggling channels. Simultaneously, hyperscalers like Oracle and AWS are capitalizing on surging demand with massive infrastructure deals and repurposed capacity, while the market faces technical complexities in deploying next-generation Blackwell architectures and optimizing hardware for specific inference workloads.

Critical Minerals, Critical Risks: Securing Supply Chains | Global Conference 2025

Daniel Yergin, Frank Fannon, Nicholas Myers, Kei Onishi, Vandita Pant, Nick Myers

Driven by surging demand from AI infrastructure and electrification, the global market faces a critical supply gap that requires doubling copper production by the mid-2030s. While China currently dominates rare earth output and smelting capabilities, emerging U.S. ventures like Phoenix Tailings are leveraging zero-emission technologies to process industrial waste and secure supply chains. Strategic investments from major automakers and corporate venture arms are accelerating domestic refining and exploration, yet the sector remains constrained by decades-long permitting cycles and a massive infrastructure funding deficit.

Transforming Food for a Healthier Future | Global Conference 2025

Holly Freishtat, Alice Hm Chen, Sarah Mastrorocco, Ashley Tyrner-Dolce, Aaron Wiese

Industry leaders from Centene, Hy-Vee, FarmboxRx, and Instacart are redefining healthcare strategy by treating food as a primary preventive tool rather than a mere treatment, leveraging data to prove that medically tailored nutrition significantly reduces chronic disease costs. This shift is driven by evidence that 50% of U.S. adults suffer from preventable diet-related conditions, prompting payers and retailers to integrate food access into care management despite regulatory ambiguities surrounding "healthy" food definitions under changing SNAP and Medicare Advantage rules. As the sector targets a 2035 vision of seamless access, stakeholders are balancing urgent clinical outcomes with the complex logistics of scaling personalized nutrition interventions across fragmented state policies.

Charlie Kirk Murder, Assassination Culture in America, Jimmy Kimmel Suspended, Ellison Media Empire

Charlie Kirk, Jimmy Kimmel, Ellison, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Zach, Sax

Following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk by Tyler Robinson, a discussion emerges attributing the violence to a radicalized generation shaped by algorithmic extremism and social isolation rather than a random act. The event has triggered a broader national debate regarding the rising acceptance of political violence and the specific cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel, which hosts frame as a symptom of media consolidation and the erosion of free speech norms. Participants conclude by calling for a societal pledge against political violence while analyzing how tech giants and media moguls are reshaping the information landscape that fuels such ideological fractures.

A New Era of Military Technology | Global Conference 2025

Rick Newman, Jeff Cole, Matt Markel, Mariam Sorond

This Milken Institute panel brought together defense technology startups Hidden Level, Epirus, and NextNav to demonstrate how agile, non-traditional contractors are closing critical warfare gaps left by legacy primes. Highlighting specific operational successes, the session detailed Hidden Level's passive radar for rapid drone detection, Epirus's high-power microwave systems for cost-effective kinetic disruption, and NextNav's 5G-based terrestrial positioning as a GPS alternative. Executives and strategists concluded that leveraging rapid-acquisition pathways like OTAs is essential to overcoming bureaucratic inertia while securing US technological resilience against global threats.

Keith Rabois: Lessons from PayPal Mafia, $OPEN, & Investing

Keith Rabois, Jerry Garcia, Molly O'Shea

David Sacks emphasizes that successful founders must identify a unique comparative advantage to become irreplaceable, a strategy supported by his own recruitment of key talent like Ian Wong through deep network connections rather than traditional interviews. He argues that building a resilient organizational culture requires an initial phase of heroic, in-person effort to create a system robust enough to function at scale, while also rejecting common myths about stretching and sleep in favor of evidence-based health protocols. Sacks now applies this rigorous, contrarian framework to venture capital, leveraging his exceptional memory and intellectual curiosity to evaluate high-potential startups and mentor the next generation of industry outliers.

Will Fed Cuts Drive Stocks Higher?

Tony Pasquariello, Chris Hussey

The Federal Reserve signaled a trajectory of five rate cuts over the next few years while revising upward its growth and inflation expectations, a move Goldman Sachs views as consistent with its internal forecasts despite minor timing differences. Investment strategists advocate for a continued focus on US big-cap technology and Japan due to strong earnings momentum and shareholder reforms, while remaining cautious about European markets and potential valuation compression in the US. Market participants will closely monitor upcoming employment data and the evolving US labor landscape as volatility is expected to rise following the October earnings reporting season.

Don’t Be Afraid to Talk About Price

This analysis challenges the common founder hesitation regarding willingness-to-pay discussions, arguing that such dialogues are essential for validation rather than customer deterrence. Vendors are advised to explicitly link specific problem-solving capabilities and agreed metrics to customer valuation to effectively frame these inquiries. The primary strategic outcome of this approach is the early disqualification of prospects who lack financial readiness or the willingness to purchase.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz | Global Conference 2025

Mehmet Oz, Esther Krofah

CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz has launched a strategic overhaul targeting an $80 billion annual savings by combating fraud, consolidating fragmented IT systems, and addressing lifestyle-driven chronic illness through the "Make America Healthy Again" initiative. The administration is restructuring federal incentives to support governors, deploying AI for real-time health notifications, and terminating wasteful contractors to fix systemic inefficiencies that currently cost the nation billions in duplicate payments and fraud. Oz warns that without these immediate structural interventions and a shift toward individual health responsibility, the Medicare and Medicaid system faces the risk of catastrophic collapse.

Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko on Crypto's Next Era: Quantum, AI, and the Future of Money

Anatoly Yakovenko, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko outlines a transformative financial vision where $1.7 billion institutional tokenization and new regulatory frameworks like the "Genius Act" unlock trillions in stablecoins and real-world assets on Solana as the global execution layer. He predicts that within five years, the internet will surpass China and Japan as the top holder of US treasuries, driven by quantum-resistant cryptography and a synchronized, speed-of-light settlement network. This shift aims to displace traditional banking margins and integrate regulated entities like NASDAQ, provided that legal clarity enables the mass adoption of tokenized securities and uncapped economic utility.

The Healthcare Outlook: Macro Challenges and Biotech Innovations

Asad Haider, Amit Sinha, Allison Nathan

Following five years of underperformance driven by capital rotation into artificial intelligence and regulatory uncertainty regarding drug pricing, the U.S. healthcare sector is undergoing a structural correction characterized by a declining S&P 500 weighting and a shift in early-stage capital formation toward private markets. Despite these macro headwinds, specific innovation cycles in oral obesity treatments, oncology, and cardiovascular therapeutics are creating idiosyncratic opportunities, particularly within the mid-cap biotech space where investors are beginning to recognize potential for outsized returns on revenue. While large pharmaceutical firms report initial AI-driven cost savings, market participants remain cautious, awaiting tangible earnings improvements before fully re-rating assets in an environment defined by a looming patent cliff and reduced federal research funding.

Next Tech Frontier: How Latin America Does It Best | Global Conference 2025

Rodrigo Bettini, Julio Vasconcellos, Roberto Campos Neto, Cesar Carvalho, Maya Dadoo, Scott Sobel, Cesar Gonzalez

Despite receiving a fraction of the venture capital allocated to other emerging markets, Latin American startups are generating superior global-scale outcomes through a unique combination of resilient talent, supportive public sector innovation, and venture funds outperforming global indices. Key success stories like WellHub and Worky illustrate how founders are leveraging regulatory tailwinds, such as Brazil's PIX system and Mexico's labor law reforms, to build defensible moats and achieve rapid international expansion. This trajectory is further accelerated by the Central Bank of Brazil's push for tokenization and Open Finance, which are dismantling legacy barriers and positioning the region as a future hub for programmable financial infrastructure and cross-border capital efficiency.