Latest Interviews

Wall of duties: Trump’s towering tariffs

Trump, Shonda Rhimes, Rosie Bloor, Rachna Shambhog, Tom Gardner, Rachel Lloyd

On April 2, 2025, Donald Trump enacted sweeping global tariffs designed to rebuild American manufacturing while economists warn of an elevated recession risk and infrastructure challenges regarding enforcement. Concurrently, the Sudanese National Army recaptured Khartoum with international military backing, though a fragmented coalition and the Rapid Support Forces' continued resistance suggest a prolonged conflict rather than a decisive peace. In the entertainment sector, Shondaland solidified its dominance by generating $2.4 billion in revenue through distinct pacing strategies and expansive universe-building, despite a market increasingly risk-averse to new creative talent.

Can the Military Move at Startup Speed? How the Army and Navy Are Rebuilding

Alex Miller, Justin Fanelli, Leila Hay

DoD leadership is dismantling legacy Cold War-era acquisition structures to replace rigid, decade-long procurement cycles with agile "Military Moneyball" approaches that prioritize speed and overmatch over incremental improvements. By leveraging Software Acquisition Pathways, OTAs, and direct startup partnerships, the Army and Navy are accelerating capability delivery from eighteen months to three while consolidating legacy systems to fund disruptive technologies like AI and autonomous swarms. This strategic pivot aligns military "outcome-driven" metrics with commercial venture speed, enabling rapid fielding of solutions ranging from mobile command apps to counter-drone networks without traditional bureaucratic barriers.

Ballot from the blue: will Ukraine hold a poll?

Rosie Bloor, Oliver Carroll, Andrew Knox, Natasha

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have recently challenged Volodymyr Zelensky's legitimacy, sparking a domestic political shift where Zelensky's approval rating of 45% now surpasses his military rival's 30% despite constitutional barriers preventing elections during martial law. Simultaneously, President Trump plans to announce "Liberation Day" tariffs that could mirror the destructive economic fallout of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act by triggering a global trade war and reducing American growth. While international and domestic political maneuvering continues, public health experts warn that the recent Daylight Savings Time shift disrupts circadian rhythms, linking the change to increased risks of heart attacks, depression, and sleep deprivation among vulnerable populations.

The idea for DoorDash didn’t come from surveys—it came from living a day in the customer’s shoes.

DoorDash's founders identified a critical delivery gap after observing a macaroon store owner reject a thick booklet of lost orders, revealing a scalable opportunity for the broader restaurant and retail ecosystem. This insight drove their strategy to validate three distinct components: the merchant need, consumer demand, and driver supply, which proved essential during their Y Combinator period. The resulting platform successfully addressed the unmet revenue potential for small merchants while establishing the necessary infrastructure for a functional gig economy workforce.

Bain Capital’s David Gross on global opportunities and private equity’s evolution

David Gross, Alison Mass

Bain Capital Co-Managing Partner David Gross outlined a bullish macro strategy targeting Japan's fragmented buyout market, Germany's divestiture wave, and India's stabilizing governance structure while leveraging a dedicated macro team to identify investable themes. To sustain competitive advantage, the firm is scaling its operational capabilities with 130 value creation professionals and deploying a venture arm to integrate disruptive technologies like AI across its portfolio. This approach, underpinned by Bain's private partnership model and disciplined valuation entry, has enabled distribution yields exceeding 30% in North America and positions the firm to navigate current cyclical lows toward a recovery in deployment and liquidity.

Right down: Le Pen barred

Le Pen, Rosie Bloor, Sophie Pedder, Callum Williams, Anne Rowe

A Paris criminal court banned Marine Le Pen from future elections for five years due to embezzlement, effectively removing her from the 2027 presidential race and plunging the National Rally into strategic uncertainty. Concurrently, a separate report highlights sustained rental inflation across wealthy nations driven by migration and supply shortages, while acknowledging that these costs have likely peaked despite remaining high. Finally, the obituary section honors Oleg Gordievsky, the high-ranking KGB officer who successfully defected to MI6 in 1985 after covertly gathering intelligence for decades.

Why CRM Needs an AI Revolution, with Day.ai Founder Christopher O’Donnell

Christopher O'Donnell, Pat Grady

Christopher O'Donnell, the former architect behind HubSpot's billion-dollar CRM growth, is launching Day.ai to replace manual data entry with an AI-native system that decompresses customer interactions into high-fidelity natural language records. By balancing autonomous automation with user oversight, the company targets the enterprise CRM market's $10 billion ARR potential while avoiding the risks of fully self-driving data models. The product's development strategy relies on direct customer engagement and a "slow is smooth" philosophy to ensure the system of record remains robust before scaling.

How Robin Hood CEO Rich Buery is addressing NYC’s rising poverty rates

Rich Buery, Richard Buery, Tony Pasquariello

The Robin Hood Foundation addresses New York City's rising poverty rate, which has surged to 25% due to expiring pandemic benefits and rising living costs, by deploying a $129 million investment strategy in 2024. This approach combines direct funding for high-impact interventions like the CUNY ASAP program with advocacy for systemic changes and the exploration of AI solutions to expand economic opportunity. Led by CEO Rich Beery, the organization utilizes evidence-based research and public-private partnerships to prioritize early childhood education and policy reforms that yield measurable long-term societal benefits.

Shock and war: Myanmar junta exploits quake

Donald Trump, Rosie Bloor, Su Lin Wong, Anton LaGuardia, Lizzie Pete

Amidst a devastating earthquake in Myanmar, the ruling junta has intensified airstrikes and blocked humanitarian aid to populations outside its control, resulting in a confirmed death toll of 1,700 that officials fear will rise significantly due to restricted information access. Simultaneously, the US administration has ended over eighty years of global broadcasting by shutting down Voice of America and related networks, a move praised by authoritarian regimes like China and Russia as it eliminates platforms exposing human rights abuses in regions such as Xinjiang. In a separate development, the 2025 Economist Glass Ceiling Index revealed that while Sweden has reclaimed the top spot for gender equality, the United States continues to lag due to a lack of federally mandated parental leave and high childcare costs, despite record highs in women's parliamentary representation in nations like Britain and Japan.

What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game

Aaron, Raphael Schaad

Raphael Schad argues that successful startups require the intersection of design, business, and technology, urging designers to learn coding to bridge the gap between concept and execution. His startup Cron exemplifies this approach, having evolved into Notion Calendar following an acquisition that validated the power of founders who can build their own product visions. As artificial intelligence reshapes product categories, Schad emphasizes that the ability to create interactive prototypes and understand technical constraints remains a critical competitive advantage for modern founders.

Whack of all trades: America’s economy

Jason Palmer, Simon Rabinovich, Sarah Larniuk, Oleg Tsenkoltadze, Lyudmila Mironenko, Kate Mikluka, Andrew Miller

Amidst record economic uncertainty driven by President Trump's imminent tariff announcements, small businesses face paralysis while the auto industry risks severe disruption from new protectionist measures. In parallel, Japan continues its extensive non-military support for Ukraine through reconstruction grants, workforce retraining, and cultural preservation initiatives that have helped sustain 4% economic growth despite the war. Meanwhile, the viral success of the Netflix series "Adolescence" has intensified global debates on the impact of toxic online cultures and generational disconnects in addressing male violence against women.

Inside Varda’s Space Factory | Delian Asparouhov, Founders Fund & Varda

Delian Asparouhov, Molly

Varda Aerospace has transitioned from an MVP demo to a high-cadence manufacturing operation, securing its first major revenue recognition with a commercial-pharmaceutical mission and launching a dedicated Department of Defense contract. Founders Fund co-founder Delian Liu projects an aggressive schedule of monthly launches and landings while leveraging Rocket Lab's platform to focus engineering resources on re-entry vehicles and drug reactors. The company currently operates a 60,000-square-foot facility in El Segundo with 115 employees and is navigating complex regulatory hurdles by targeting landing zones in Australia to bypass US military range scarcity.

You spin me right round: Europe’s populists reckon with Trumpism

Jason Palmer, Sophie Petter, Nicholas Pelham

European right-wing leaders like Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen are navigating a strategic split between their initial political alignment with Donald Trump's re-election and the reality of American isolationism clashing with European security needs and domestic public opinion. Simultaneously, escalating US military strikes in Yemen continue to fail in reducing Houthi operational capacity while hardening the group's stance on regional negotiations and risking broader Persian Gulf conflict. In a separate sector, the Christian entertainment industry is leveraging lower production costs and a demand for morally uplifting narratives to expand rapidly on streaming platforms, prioritizing economic profitability over strict biblical adherence.

The Top 100 GenAI Products, Ranked and Explained

Anish Acharya, Olivia Moore

The latest Gen AI 100 report reveals a rapidly evolving ecosystem where 17 new companies have entered the web rankings and consumer adoption lags model development by six to twelve months, creating a dynamic transition from infrastructure to application. Distinct performance metrics highlight that high-traffic apps do not always correlate with revenue, while Chinese models and Deep Seek's rapid rise illustrate how shifting copyright landscapes and reasoning capabilities disrupt established players like ChatGPT and Runway. Success in this fragmented market increasingly relies on solving specific pain points and prioritizing user stability over technical novelty as low-code tools enable non-technical founders to launch disposable software at scale.

DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market

Garry, Tony Xu

DoorDash was founded on the principle of empowering physical businesses after observing a macaroon store owner's inability to fulfill delivery requests, leading to a validated strategy that prioritized suburban markets and a diverse driver workforce over traditional high-density city centers. The company weathered critical operational crises, such as the 2013 Stanford delivery delays and persistent investor skepticism, by establishing a customer-obsessed culture that later enabled it to surpass competitors during the 2020 pandemic through strategic commission cuts and industry-wide support. Today, DoorDash employs over seven million drivers and commands approximately 60% of the U.S. food delivery market share while maintaining its long-term mission to grow the GDP of every city.