Latest Interviews

Private Equity: Value Creation Under New Rate Regimes | Global Conference 2026

Hugh MacArthur, Joe Baratta, Martín Escobari, Raoul Hughes, Meredith Jenkins, Pete Stavros

Leading private equity firms like KKR and Blackstone are pivoting from speculative AI experimentation to targeted operational efficiency, achieving modest EBITDA improvements while redefining software investment criteria to prioritize durable infrastructure over vulnerable point solutions. As the industry confronts extended holding periods and a capital stack constrained by high entry multiples, firms are shifting focus from financial engineering to deep operational value creation, leveraging specialized sourcing and geographic diversification in markets like Japan and Germany. Looking ahead, the sector anticipates a surge in liquidity driven by a wave of maturing assets and a strategic expansion of retail capital access, provided that new vehicles maintain structural parity with institutional standards to avoid conflict-of-interest pitfalls.

Global Economic Outlook: Navigating Growth, Risk, and Opportunity | Global Conference 2026

Conrad Kiechel, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Kristalina Georgieva, Mohamed Kande, Ariel Szarfsztejn, Mike Wirth

A two-month closure of the Strait of Hormuz has removed 14 million barrels daily from the global market, driving Brent crude near $115 while depleting strategic reserves and forcing the IMF to adopt adverse economic scenarios. Simultaneously, the AI sector has pivoted from generative tools to agentic automation, eliminating entry-level roles and triggering an international cyberarms race. These converging crises create a volatile environment where Europe faces energy and innovation lag, whereas nations securing reliable power and flexible capital markets are positioned to dominate the coming decades.

McLaren Racing's Lando Norris and Zak Brown: Building a High-Performance Team

Lando Norris, Zak Brown, Anthony Gutman

McLaren driver Lando Norris secured the 2025 Formula One World Drivers' Championship following a dramatic mid-season comeback, yet he recently missed a race start due to unprecedented power unit battery failures. As the team navigates 2026 regulatory changes that have widened the performance gap and altered vehicle dynamics, Norris and team principal Zak Brown are leveraging a collaborative "Papaya Rules" culture to translate driver feedback into rapid technical adaptations. This strategy aims to restore competitiveness against the "big four" constructors while ensuring the 900-person ecosystem maintains resilience against the complex, sophisticated nature of modern racing.

The Founders Who Left Tesla to Rebuild America | a16z

Erin Price-Wright, Turner Caldwell, Drew Baglino

Led by former Tesla executives Turner Caldwell and Drew Baglino, Mariana Minerals and Heron Power are building a vertically integrated domestic supply chain for critical minerals and solid-state power infrastructure to close a fifty-year capability gap with China. The companies deploy proprietary autonomous operating systems to accelerate refinery ramp-ups and modernize the grid, aiming to secure over 500 jobs while establishing a new industrial model that prioritizes physical assets over software algorithms. By co-locating manufacturing with energy generation and leveraging silicon carbide semiconductors, the initiative seeks to re-industrialize the U.S. economy through a "minerals mandate" that mobilizes private capital to rebuild the foundational infrastructure of AI dominance.

Innovation and Inflation: Twin Forces Reshaping Portfolios

Christian Mueller-Glissmann, Alexandra Wilson-Elizondo, Alison Nathan

Recorded on May 7, 2026, this market analysis addresses the 2026 stagflationary dynamic where traditional 60/40 portfolios fail to buffer against rising rates while the S&P 500 rallies on heavy technology concentration. Experts identify tactical opportunities in infrastructure and commodity carry strategies to mitigate momentum risks, though they warn that a potential labor market feedback loop or 30-year yield breakout could impose severe constraints on equity valuations. The discussion concludes by evaluating the low-probability risk of an AI positioning unwind alongside structural shifts in private credit leverage.

Conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink & Brookfield Corp CEO Bruce Flatt | Global Conference '26

Larry Fink, Bruce Flatt, Laurence D. Fink, Michael Milken

Bruce Flint of Brookfield and Larry Fink of BlackRock refuted private credit liquidity concerns while projecting a $10 trillion global infrastructure expansion driven by urgent shortages in power, compute, and defense-grade facilities. The executives detailed how hyperscalers are shifting from self-funding to external financing models, facilitating a massive capital transition where private credit and long-term asset managers fund AI data centers and autonomous security infrastructure. Furthermore, these leaders highlighted a structural evolution in retirement investing and asset consolidation, noting that consistent 12% annual returns and bespoke 50-year lock-up periods are essential to support this new "K-economy" where massive capital blocks outcompete traditional public equities.

A Conversation with Venezuelan Democratic Leader Maria Corina Machado | Global Conference 2026

Maria Corina Machado, Fareed Zakaria

Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado, having escaped Venezuela's repressive regime, advocates for a three-phase democratic transition that prioritizes electoral legitimacy, judicial restoration, and the privatization of the oil sector to address a $190 billion debt and 650% inflation. Her roadmap, supported by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, outlines a strategic framework involving debt restructuring with the IMF and the recruitment of the diaspora to rebuild infrastructure, while ensuring accountability for crimes against humanity through the International Criminal Court. Despite significant security challenges and international opposition from state actors like Russia and Cuba, Machado posits that the military's potential support and the nation's critical mineral reserves could facilitate a "nearshoring" economic boom and position Venezuela as a leader in artificial intelligence.

Stanford CS153 Frontier Systems | Nikhyl Singhal from Skip on Product Management in the AI Era

Nikhyl Singhal, Mike Abbott

The event traces the evolution of product management from legacy documentation to founder-led models, outlining four organizational phases where roles shift from experimentation to scaling innovation. It highlights how AI is displacing bureaucratic information-gathering roles while accelerating demand for high-judgment "product builders" and causing a dramatic salary divergence at the top of the industry. Additionally, the discussion analyzes case studies from Meta and Google to illustrate the tension between rapid iteration and consensus, offering career strategies focused on systems thinking and continuous skill acquisition to navigate a landscape of frequent job transitions.

Global Capital Markets | Global Conference 2026

David Faber, Waleed Al Mokarrab Al Muhairi, Jon Gray, Jenny Johnson, Robin Vince, James Zelter, Robin Wright

Mubadala CEO Waleed Al-Saad outlines a resilient investment strategy that leverages the UAE's strong domestic cohesion to drive a global V-shaped recovery focused on long-term themes like AI, energy, and healthcare. While the US economy remains insulated by energy independence, unprecedented capital expenditure totaling trillions is reshaping asset markets through a shift from asset-light to heavy models, supported by a record $1.1 trillion in investment-grade issuance. The discussion further projects a labor market surge in blue-collar sectors due to physical AI infrastructure demands, while warning that US debt sustainability and European energy fragility necessitate a multi-faceted, open-architecture approach to funding future growth.

A Conversation with Tom Brady & Shaquille O'Neal | Global Conference 2026

Tom Brady, Shaquille O'Neal, Jim Gray, Michael Ferro, Jamie Salter, Mike Milken

Hosted by Jim Lampley to honor Mike Milken, a panel featuring Tom Brady and Shaquille O'Neal alongside business partners Jamie Salter and Michael Farrow explored the critical necessity of transitioning from sports to entrepreneurship. The athletes emphasized that enduring success requires obsessive preparation, resilience in the face of failure, and strategic partnerships that protect a legacy while addressing health and family values. Their dialogue extended to specific industry insights, including Brady's ownership strategies for the Las Vegas Raiders and O'Neal's championship predictions for the Spurs, all framed within the shared mission of the upcoming Hall of Excellence initiative.

Harshil Mathur: AI Is Compressing Every Moat

Harshil Mathur, Jon Xu

Founded by Harshil Mathur in 2015, Razorpay became the first Indian Y Combinator company to pivot from a failed educational focus to a payment infrastructure provider for startups after navigating a twelve-month regulatory gestation period. The firm secured a competitive moat by rejecting early global acquisition offers and becoming the first gateway to support UPI, subsequently processing over $180 billion in gross merchandise value while maintaining capital efficiency that inadvertently generated profits. Today, Mathur continues to lead the company through a strategic reinvention using AI, emphasizing that founder-led conviction in long-term problem-solving remains essential despite advancements in software development speed.

Digital Freedom, AI Regulation, and the Fight for the Western Internet | The a16z Show

Katherine Boyle, Sarah Rogers

The U.S. administration is prioritizing the development of a "Western AI stack" to counter adversarial nations and dismantle prior State Department censorship apparatuses by redefining public diplomacy around user empowerment and free speech. Key figures like Under Secretary Rogers are leading an office restructuring that rejects opaque foreign information integrity initiatives while countering EU regulatory threats that use digital safety laws to penalize protected political expression. This strategy aims to align AI policy with First Amendment principles, ensuring that transparency, individualistic reasoning, and user-driven moderation tools serve as the primary defense against authoritarian models and foreign viewpoint-skewed legislation.

AI-Native Discovery Engines

Frontier AI models are transforming the traditional scientific discovery loop by advancing from co-pilot tools to autonomous systems capable of executing full design-make-test-analyze cycles. These AI-native engines are already driving breakthroughs in drug discovery, material science, and protein engineering by generating hypotheses and validating them through automated laboratory workflows. As these closed-loop systems mature, they are poised to become the primary drivers of scientific progress alongside human researchers rather than remaining mere assistants.

OpenAI Misses Targets, Codex vs Claude, Elon vs Sam Trial, Big Hyperscaler Beats, Peptide Craze

Elon, Sam, Friedberg, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya

OpenAI faces mounting structural tensions as it misses 2025 revenue and user targets while CEO Sam Altman pushes for an IPO against CFO Sarah Fryer's caution amidst $600 billion in future compute commitments. The company currently maintains a compute advantage over rivals like Anthropic through excess data center capacity, even as the broader AI sector grapples with power grid bottlenecks and a record $725 billion in hyperscaler capital expenditures for 2026. Concurrently, Elon Musk pursues a $150 billion lawsuit alleging a breach of charitable trust following internal documents revealing plans to remove him before the entity's conversion to for-profit status.

How high could the oil price go? | The Economist

Zanny Minton Beddoes, Edward Carr, Mathieu, Henry

Global oil markets face a structural crisis where a 14 million barrel-per-day supply deficit has eroded the "sanguine" expectation of a quick peace deal, creating a price disconnect that literature estimates would require $167 to $460 per barrel to correct. With production gains from non-conflicted regions proving negligible, the market is currently absorbing this shortfall through record-fast inventory drawdowns of 8 to 10 million barrels daily, driven by pre-war shipments and sanctions-induced cargo displacement. As critical buffers for jet fuel and diesel approach minimum levels and logistical constraints lengthen trade routes, the only remaining adjustment mechanisms involve further depletion of commercial stocks or active demand destruction in major consuming regions like Asia.