Latest Interviews

How To Design In The Agent Era

Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein

Led by Stephen Haney, Paper is an AI-native design platform currently ranking as the third most-used tool behind Figma and Sketch, utilizing a native HTML and CSS rendering engine to facilitate precise agent collaboration. The application distinguishes itself by treating code as the single source of truth, offering features like direct React component handoff and an MCP server that allows autonomous agents to manipulate local repositories and design canvases. While the team prioritizes human curation to maintain design quality against common AI aesthetic pitfalls, the platform is rapidly evolving into a visual coordination layer for the broader agent ecosystem by integrating tools like Paper Shaders and multi-model image generation.

The Nuclear Renaissance - Radiant |  a16z American Dynamism

Tori Shivanandan, Doug Bernauer

Radiant Energy is developing the transportable Kaleidos micro-reactor, a modular nuclear power unit designed to replace aging infrastructure and support applications ranging from AI data centers to deep space exploration. Founded by former SpaceX engineer Doug Kim, the company leverages a factory-built assembly line model to deliver plug-and-play energy modules with a five-year fuel cycle, aiming to conduct its first full-power test at Idaho National Laboratory's Dome by 2026. This initiative seeks to restore U.S. energy independence and accelerate nuclear innovation by overcoming historical regulatory stagnation through a commitment to aggressive safety testing and mass production.

Inside the Factory Behind Base Power's $1B Series D

Justin Lopas, Molly O'Shea

Base Power recently secured a $1 billion Series D funding round led by Ribbit and JPMorgan Chase, establishing a $13 billion valuation to accelerate production of its high-capacity BaseCore home battery system. The vertically integrated manufacturer is scaling operations at its Austin facility to 4,000 units weekly, featuring a modular design that enables full-home backup power in under two hours per unit. This growth supports a strategic rollout of both direct consumer sales and utility partnership models across key regional markets as the company prepares to open a second factory near the Austin airport.

David Sacks: Anthropic Wants to Kill Open Source AI in America

David Sacks

The speaker argues that derivative models developed by American companies from public domain open-source assets, such as the Cursor "Composer 2" system, constitute independent domestic intellectual property rather than Chinese entities. Warnings are issued that restricting access to these modified tools would severely damage the American open-source ecosystem by effectively penalizing standard industry innovation. Furthermore, the presentation contends that such limitations primarily serve Anthropic's competitive interests by eliminating rivals seeking to leverage shared public resources.

AI for the Aging Population

Facing a projected surge to 20% of the U.S. population over age 65 by 2030 alongside a critical caregiver deficit, emerging technologies are addressing the urgent need for better senior support. While existing consumer voice assistants often frustrate older adults, new AI-driven solutions are introducing natural conversational interfaces, safety monitoring, and robotics to enable independent living. These innovations aim to bridge the gap for the 53 million unpaid family caregivers and tap into the world's largest underserved market by streamlining care coordination and emergency response.

The Primer

Neal Stephenson

Inspired by Neal Stephenson's *The Diamond Age*, a new venture seeks to deploy AI-driven adaptive tools that deliver one-on-one tutoring quality in reading, writing, and arithmetic to every child at consumer scale. Rather than replacing educators, the system is designed to augment classroom instruction, addressing historical inequalities in access to personalized learning. Founders are actively recruiting builders to develop this technology, aiming to achieve a fraction of the Primer's societal impact as the foundation for a broader educational revolution.

Former Intel CEO on What Went Wrong, What's Next + Lovable CEO on the Real Promise of Vibe Coding

Pat Gelsinger, Jason, Anton Osika

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger diagnosed the company's strategic decline as a fifteen-year period of non-technical leadership that diverted $100 billion to shareholders rather than manufacturing infrastructure, allowing competitors like NVIDIA and TSMC to seize market dominance. He further warned of acute geopolitical risks to the semiconductor supply chain in Taiwan while projecting that AI growth will be constrained by energy capacity rather than a speculative bubble. Concurrently, Lovable founder Anton Osicka outlined a business model achieving $600 million in revenue by leveraging AI to enable non-technical users to build production-ready software, fundamentally reducing development costs and accelerating enterprise tool creation.

YC's Head of Design Shows You How To Design With AI

Eve Bouffard, Aaron Epstein, Ev Bufar

Designer Ev Bufar utilizes a voice-first workflow with tools like Aqua, Conductor, and Paper.design to rapidly produce high-fidelity assets for diverse projects, including the Paxyl transcript analyzer and the Soda Zine. Her recent work at Startup School demonstrates an agent-driven production model that generated visual identities for 6,000 attendees through custom shaders and automated speaker assets, while Paxyl analyzes coding agent interactions to reveal developer patterns. By prioritizing massive context density and disposable internal models, Bufar accelerates the design iteration cycle to handle complex branding and interactive web experiences that explicitly cater to both human users and AI agents.

Solving the Blank Canvas Problem: Gusto's AI Co-Founder

Eddie Kim, Harj Taggar

Launched in just ten weeks by a five-person team including co-founder Eddie Kim, Gusto Co-founder is a new AI product that transforms Gusto's payroll and HR data into proactive, agent-based automations for small businesses. The platform has already onboarded 500 paying customers by replacing traditional dashboards with text-based interfaces that execute complex workflows, such as full payroll processing, weather-based customer notifications, and tax credit application. This initiative validates a strategic pivot toward becoming a proactive business partner capable of lowering entry barriers for new entrepreneurs while automating compliance and growth opportunities through a "vibe coding" development methodology.

Inside Harvey AI: CEO Winston Weinberg on How a 4-Year-Old Company Is Taking on the Foundation Labs

Winston Weinberg, Molly O'Shea

Harvey AI has scaled to nearly $300 million in ARR and over 2,000 enterprise clients by migrating to cloud agents and deploying specialized legal models that outperform general frontier AI. CEO Sam Saltman drives a culture of rapid reinvention and meritocracy, where over 200 legal professionals transition into product and engineering roles to build vertical-specific solutions for high-growth sectors like finance and pharmaceuticals. The company differentiates itself from traditional legal tech and generic AI labs by prioritizing granular ROI proof per token and rejecting legacy technology acquisitions in favor of acquiring high-performing teams to fuel its current 12-to-13 trillion token monthly usage projections.

We just launched Paxel!

Paxil is a locally executed tool that generates a five-dimensional builder profile analyzing how developers utilize AI coding agents like Cursor within their own Docker environments. Y Combinator encourages Startup School applicants to integrate this data into their submissions to identify high-potential "no-resume" talent by shifting evaluation focus from final outputs to specific building methodologies. Developed to aggregate global patterns on AI-assisted software creation, the service remains free for developers seeking actionable insights into their engineering workflows.

Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Walks Us Through His AI Coding Setup

Charlie Holtz

Charlie, co-founder of Conductor, leads a team developing a macOS application that orchestrates multiple coding agents to generate software primarily in TypeScript and Rust. The platform enforces a strict non-terminal workflow where AI handles code generation while humans intervene only through specific review modes to maintain quality and prevent error cycles. With a strategic focus on high-efficiency model selection and a future roadmap emphasizing malleable, modifiable agents, Conductor positions itself as a tool that shifts software value from code itself to human-authored prompts and descriptions.

Tom Mueller: SpaceX's #1 Employee Built the Merlin Engine. Now He's Building Impulse Space

Tom Mueller, Molly O'Shea

Former SpaceX founding employee Tom Mueller founded Impulse Space to revolutionize intra-orbital transport with its fleet of advanced spacecraft, including the orbital transfer vehicle Mira and the heavy-lift Helios. The company leverages proprietary Nova Light alloy and additive manufacturing to produce the Deneb hydrocarbon engine and lightweight composite tanks, achieving performance metrics that could significantly boost payload delivery to the Moon and Mars. Currently advancing lunar infrastructure efforts through successful rendezvous tests and an active lander contract bid, Impulse Space combines in-house manufacturing with AI-driven design to support a future lunar economy.

Inside PsiQuantum: The Photonics Chip Never Seen Before

Er-Xuan Ping, Pete

Leveraging Molecular Beam Epitaxy within a Class 1,000 cleanroom, engineers fabricate high-precision Barium Titanate on Strontium Titanate films atop 300mm silicon wafers to support single-photon quantum computing architectures. The ultra-high vacuum process employs rigorous environmental controls and automated transfer systems to ensure crystalline integrity while facilitating immediate integration into high-volume manufacturing lines with partners like GlobalFoundries. Ongoing characterization using RHEED and optical interference validates these substrates for future dual utility as qubits or storage vectors within scalable quantum systems.

Will AI cause mass unemployment? Maybe not.

Benjamin Todd

Amid widespread fear of AI-driven job displacement, the event analyzes historical automation trends to reveal that wages may rise significantly until 2037 before facing a decline if full task automation is achieved without human oversight. Experts identify four categories of skills likely to increase in value, including complex physical tasks, AI deployment capabilities, and roles producing scalable goods, while warning against exclusive specialization in routine knowledge work. The presentation concludes by advising professionals to cultivate transferable leadership and technical abilities that bridge human decision-making with AI efficiency to navigate a shifting labor market.