Latest Interviews
Showing 1396–1410 of 3,059 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator10 min
Desining from Day One: Artists as Founders: Multiverse (S20) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020
Multiverse, a Y Combinator-backed platform founded by two MIT engineers and illustrator Sara, is developing a hybrid of Dungeons & Dragons and Roblox to digitize tabletop RPGs into a visual, streamable online experience. The company differentiates itself by prioritizing high-fidelity narrative art as a core business asset, recruiting top-tier indie creators from platforms like ArtStation and Twitch rather than traditional AAA studios to drive user engagement and market validation. By granting equity to its artistic co-founders and leveraging visual assets for fundraising, Multiverse aims to bridge the gap between scrappy entertainment storytelling and scalable platform economics.
- All-In Podcast1h 22m
E13: SPACsgiving Special! Vaccine news, innovation vs regulation, fixing higher ed, challenge trials
Chamath, Friedberg, Sacks, Jason, Dave Chappelle, Trump, Biden
David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Jason Calacanis discussed Metro Mile's SPAC-led public listing, highlighting its pay-per-mile insurance model that leverages OBD-II data to lower costs for consumers. The panel also analyzed the rapid rollout of mRNA vaccines under Operation Warp Speed, debating the ethics of challenge trials and attributing the acceleration to deregulation and a critique of regulatory capture. Broader economic conversations covered SEC rules for gig workers, the potential of income sharing agreements for education, and the geopolitical shifts driven by energy economics that facilitated the Abraham Accords.
- Goldman Sachs15 min
Oscar Munoz, Executive Chairman of United Airlines
United Airlines Executive Chairman Oscar Munoz leveraged his background in crisis management and direct government lobbying to secure CARES Act funding and implement rapid liquidity measures that enabled the carrier to navigate the pandemic's immediate threats. Under Munoz's leadership, the airline shifted from reactive survival to proactive customer-centric innovation by eliminating change fees and advocating for global rapid testing protocols to facilitate safe international travel. With a strategic focus on passenger safety and profitability, United projects a phased return to full operations by 2022, contingent on vaccine deployment and the successful integration of hybrid digital and physical customer service models.
- Goldman Sachs12 min
Tom Lister, Co-Managing Partner of Permira
Primera Capital navigated the early pandemic's valuation gap by fortifying its existing healthcare and technology portfolios before resuming aggressive investment in resilient marketplaces. The firm’s current strategy prioritizes securing exceptional assets despite intense competition, relying on rigorous primary-source verification and a disciplined approach to monetization timing rather than model-dependent assumptions. Looking ahead, investors are advised to maintain resilience against market pushback while preparing for a higher S&P 500 trajectory, even as geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China remain politically driven.
- Goldman Sachs7 min
Carbonomics: The Green Engine of Economic Recovery
Mark Carney opened a high-level conference for 30 CEOs to frame decarbonization as a financial efficiency opportunity capable of mobilizing $16 trillion in infrastructure and creating 20 million global jobs. Major oil firms including BP, Total, and ENI are transitioning into broader energy entities by leveraging their operational expertise to integrate renewables, clean hydrogen, and carbon capture technologies. This strategic shift, underpinned by data showing top-quintile ESG companies outperformed peers by 320 basis points, reflects a global policy consensus moving from European leadership toward widespread adoption by the U.S., China, and Japan.
- Milken Institute1h 1m
Healthy Longevity: New Strategies for a New Normal
Nora Super, Freddy Abnousi, Richard Ashworth, Anna Dixon, Freda Lewis-Hall
The Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging convened leaders to examine how the pandemic exacerbated age-related health inequities while accelerating a permanent shift toward digital fitness and telehealth. Speakers highlighted persistent disparities in life expectancy driven by social determinants like housing quality and internet access, noting that systemic barriers outweigh individual responsibility in shaping outcomes. The session concluded that sustainable healthy aging strategies must integrate personalized technology with structural policy reforms to address decades of accumulated disadvantage.
- Y Combinator2 min
Ramen VR (S19) - YC Tech Talks: Gaming 2020 (November 9th, 2020)
Co-founders Andy and Lauren are scaling Raman VR to develop Zenith, a massively multiplayer VR world that fuses action-adventure mechanics with an infinitely scalable backend. The company recently secured a major funding and marketing partnership with Oculus following a historic $280,000 Kickstarter, capitalizing on a year where the VR market grew from $300 million to over $1 billion. To support the transition from individual gameplay to a user-generated metaverse platform, Raman VR is actively recruiting environment artists, tech artists, and graphics engineers.
- Y Combinator1 min
Athlane (S19) - YC Tech Talks, Gaming 2020 (November 9, 2020)
Founded by Ryan Jay, Athlane positions itself as a professional infrastructure platform connecting game streamers with major brands like Reebok and Herman Miller to facilitate full-time creator careers. Backed by endorsements from high-profile investors such as Ninja, the company reports strong market validation through hundreds of daily campaigns and positive reception from both content creators and enterprise clients. As Athlane actively expands its team by hiring engineers and operations specialists, it invites industry professionals to connect regarding its growing opportunities within the creator economy.
- Jane Street1h 4m
Building a Functional Email Server with Dominick LoBraico
Faced with the security risks and operational rigidity of a legacy mail server, Jane Street engineers replaced the system with MailCore, a homegrown server implemented in OCaml where configuration is expressed as composable code. To ensure safety during the one-year migration, the team deployed a parallel shadow instance that continuously diffed outputs against the legacy system, effectively reverse-engineering implicit knowledge while eliminating memory-safety bugs common in C-based alternatives. This architectural shift transformed email management into a software culture practice, allowing generalist engineers to safely modify routing and filtering logic using standard OCaml tools rather than relying on specialized knowledge of opaque custom domains.
- Milken Institute1h 7m
Technology and the Opening of Trade
Eugene Cornelius, Marianne Jason, Mary Yang, Kevin Smith-Ramos, Fred Hogberg
A panel of experts from the OECD, Canada, Mexico, and the US Ex-Im Bank emphasized that modernizing trade agreements like USMCA and reforming the WTO are critical to helping SMEs overcome financing barriers and digital divides. The discussion highlighted a divergence in national strategies, contrasting the US's fragmented agency approach with Canada's consolidated model while stressing the need for domestic policies to bolster workforce readiness alongside international market access. Ultimately, participants agreed that sustainable global growth requires addressing social inequities and leveraging digital tools to democratize trade participation for smaller enterprises and developing economies.
- Milken Institute1h 8m
The Credit Recovery: Uneven, Unequal, Uncertain?
Mike Divavar, Bill Friend-Carrstairs, Leslie Cowan, Joe Nagar, Jim Zelter
Panelists from Fortress, GoldenTree, Apollo, and Varday outline a K-shaped credit recovery driven by deep dislocations between equity valuations and distressed debt spreads across sectors like aviation, energy, and commercial real estate. These institutional investors are leveraging specialized infrastructure to acquire undervalued assets in emerging markets and structured credit, targeting high returns while navigating central bank dependency and the risks posed by zombie companies. The consensus projects a multi-year reconstruction phase where private credit expansion and complex asset management strategies will capture significant market share as traditional markets transition from liquidity crises to solvency challenges.
- Milken Institute1h 8m
The Impact Revolution: From Sustainable Development Goals to Solutions
Glenn, Sir Ronald Cohen, Eugene Kendall, Bhaskar, Alex Wayne
Facing a $2.5 trillion annual financing gap and a global economic contraction caused by the pandemic, experts at this event proposed leveraging impact-weighted accounting and blended finance to mobilize the estimated $32 trillion in private capital required for the Sustainable Development Goals. Leaders including Sir Ronald Cohen and representatives from the Syngenta Foundation detailed strategies to quantify corporate social and environmental costs through Harvard Business School's Impact Weighted Accounts while scaling smallholder agriculture via the Agripreneur model and digital de-risking tools. The consensus emerged that governments must mandate impact transparency to bridge the financing divide, aligning the "triple helix" of risk, reward, and impact to transform profit and purpose from mutually exclusive goals into a unified growth engine.
- Milken Institute1h 7m
Africa: Economic Recovery and Transformation
Raj Kumar, Aruma Ote, Paula Ngabiri, Vivian Nwaka
Moderated by DevEx President Raj Kumar at the Milken Institute Global Conference, a panel of African leaders and financiers including former World Bank official Arumna Ote and Rwanda's Minister Paula Ngabiri analyzed the continent's post-pandemic economic trajectory. The discussion highlighted Africa's demographic potential and the urgent need to boost intra-continental trade through the AfCFTA while addressing a critical $130 billion annual funding gap exacerbated by investor risk perception and inadequate fiscal stimulus. Panellists proposed a strategic shift toward blended finance, agile regulatory frameworks for sectors like health tech and agribusiness, and data-driven governance to attract private capital and foster inclusive growth for the projected 2.3 billion population.
- Milken Institute12 min
The Future of Market Structure
Kym Arnone, Rick McVey, Annette Nazareth, Aine O'Flynn, Jared Carney, Anya O'Flynn
Moderated by Lightdale CEO Jared Carney, the 2020 Milken Institute Global Conference "Future of Market Structure" panel featured SEC former commissioner Annette Nazareth, BMO Capital Markets' Anya O'Flynn, and Market Access CEO Rick McVeigh to analyze market dynamics during the pandemic. Nazareth highlighted the unexpected robustness of U.S. markets and a surge in retail participation, while McVeigh addressed the paradox of uneven liquidity creation across global fixed income sectors. Together, these leaders evaluated how technology and regulation interacted to maintain investor confidence despite significant economic disruption.
- Milken Institute1h 15m
A Season of Playoffs: Redefining Sports in Challenging Times
Linda, Todd Boley, Chris Paul, Kim Tagula, Richard Sherman
During the 2020 season, prominent athletes and leagues like the NBA, WNBA, and MLS shifted from a traditionally apolitical stance to active social justice advocacy, utilizing platforms such as the Orlando bubble and player-initiated jersey messages to address systemic racism following high-profile incidents involving Black Lives Matter. Concurrently, the sports industry navigated severe economic disruptions caused by the pandemic, which forced salary cap reductions, operational volatility, and a reevaluation of revenue streams while simultaneously sparking increased fan engagement and voter registration initiatives. Experts project a recovery by 2022 driven by scalable testing protocols and a renewed focus on community connection, with organizations prioritizing long-term financial literacy and diversity funding over short-term profit to sustain the sector.