Latest Interviews
Showing 301–315 of 3,000 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator32 min
Harshil Mathur: AI Is Compressing Every Moat
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.
- a16z23 min
Digital Freedom, AI Regulation, and the Fight for the Western Internet | The a16z Show
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.
- All-In Podcast1h 21m
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.
- The Economist6 min
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.
- Sequoia Capital27 min
Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy
Dmitri Dolgov, Konstantine Buhler
Dmitry Dolgov, Waymo's co-founder, outlines a 21-year evolution from DARPA challenges to a sixth-generation autonomous fleet that has achieved 200 million fully autonomous miles and delivered over 20 million rides with a safety profile 13 times superior to human drivers. The company's architecture utilizes a multimodal "Foundation Model" integrating physics reasoning and spatial understanding to power a structured, end-to-end system across 11 cities, now accelerating toward global expansion in London and Tokyo through the newly launched Waymo Origin vehicle. This mission-driven approach bypasses incremental improvements to rapidly scale commercial deployment, treating full autonomy as an existential imperative to eliminate the 13 million annual road fatalities while transitioning the core technology into a primary family transportation tool.
Figure's First Full HQ Tour: From the Lab to the Factory Floor
Brett Adcock, Molly O'Shea, Moritz
Figure AI is a Bay Area-based pure-play manufacturer with a 500-person engineering workforce deploying its flagship Figure 3 humanoid robot, which operates autonomously using the locally running Helix AI policy. The company has achieved record production output at its "Baku" facility while reducing unit costs by 90% compared to previous models, enabling deployments in settings ranging from the White House to BMW automotive assembly lines. Looking ahead, Figure aims to commercialize a lease-based home model and advance toward its "iPhone moment" with the upcoming Figure 4, which targets radical improvements in cost and usability while pursuing physical interaction-based AGI.
- Sequoia Capital28 min
OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck
OpenAI executives estimate they are 80% toward achieving AGI, a milestone driven by aggressive compute acquisition strategies and architectural innovations that currently enable AI to autonomously engineer software kernels. The organization is pivoting toward an enterprise and consumer model where a single AGI entity handles complex goals, urging startups to leverage agentic coding tools for massive productivity gains while navigating a landscape where human attention has become the primary bottleneck. This shift is underpinned by anticipated scientific breakthroughs in physics and biology, alongside internal reforms designed to manage the risks of autonomous agents within a future where humans oversee teams of AI rather than writing code manually.
- Sequoia Capital32 min
This is AGI: Sequoia AI Ascent 2026 Keynote
Pat Grady, Sonya Huang, Konstantine Buhler
This analysis outlines a $10 trillion market opportunity driven by a paradigm shift from information distribution to autonomous computation, where AI agents are rapidly replacing cognitive labor with agentic systems capable of long-horizon execution. Founders are advised to leverage the "MAD" model—focusing on customer moats, immediate affordance, and bridging the adoption diffusion gap—to capitalize on a timeline that compresses years of work into days. The event further projects that by 2026, the convergence of these technologies will trigger a cognitive industrial revolution, fundamentally redefining human value from task execution to relationship building and strategic oversight.
- Sequoia Capital20 min
Robotics' End Game: Nvidia's Jim Fan
NVIDIA Robotics is transitioning from language-centric VLA models to World Action Models like Dream Zero, which prioritize learning physical laws through video prediction to enable zero-shot generalization. This architectural shift is supported by a new data collection strategy replacing low-efficiency teleoperation with scalable egocentric video and neural simulators, establishing a log-linear scaling law between training hours and dexterity. Looking toward 2040, Jim Phan projects the industry will achieve a "Physical Turing Test," an orchestration "Physical API" for automated fleets, and "Physical Auto-Research" where robots autonomously improve their own designs.
- Milken Institute51 min
Bending the Cost Curve: Understanding the GLP-1 Era | Global Conference 2025
Josh Barro, Michael Ferro, Simon Johnson, Lisa Stevens
A panel of industry leaders and medical experts analyzed GLP-1 drugs as a transformative treatment that significantly improves cardiovascular health and reduces long-term healthcare costs, provided patients adhere to therapy. The discussion highlighted a critical adherence gap where global discontinuation rates reach 50%, contrasting with a UK pilot program that achieved 98% retention through AI-driven telehealth and mandatory screening. While facing challenges like high initial costs, supply chain fraud, and societal stigma, successful employer-led programs are emerging as essential mechanisms to manage access, ensure safety, and align financial incentives for sustained workforce productivity.
- Y Combinator41 min
Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis projects Artificial General Intelligence will emerge around 2030, contingent on inventing specific architectural breakthroughs in continual learning and structured memory rather than merely scaling current methods. While deep tech startups are warned to anticipate AGI disrupting their decade-long cycles, the organization is simultaneously deploying efficient, modular "Flash" and open-source nano models to power edge devices and accelerate scientific discovery in fields like drug design and materials science. Ultimately, DeepMind advocates for interdisciplinary collaboration between AI and physical sciences to overcome current reasoning limitations and drive the next generation of autonomous agents.
- a16z58 min
Aaron Levie on AI Adoption and Enterprise Workflows | The a16z Show
Aaron Levie, Steven Sinofsky, Martin Casado
Organizations are pivoting from failed centralized AI mandates to integrating autonomous agents directly into legacy workflows, necessitating significant architectural shifts beyond traditional hybrid software models. While token-gaming and system integration bottlenecks currently stifle productivity gains, the resulting increase in infrastructure complexity and code volume is projected to drive sustained demand for engineering talent rather than reduce it. This transition requires years of organizational change management to modernize fragmented data environments, ultimately creating a multi-decade opportunity for system integrators to bridge the gap between probabilistic machine users and rigid enterprise security protocols.
Are SaaS Companies Cooked: Which Thrive & Which Die | Aaron Levie
Aaron Levy argues that the current AI shift represents a commercial race requiring fundamental business process redesign rather than simple tool layering, predicting that human capacity will become the primary constraint in regulated sectors like law and healthcare. As enterprise technology spending is projected to rise from 10-12% to 20% of revenue, this transformation will generate 500,000 to 1 million new "Agent Operator" roles while driving a 100x to 1,000x increase in API calls to handle the headless consumption of unstructured data. Ultimately, success will depend on professional services firms managing complex data curation and workflow integration over a 20-year diffusion cycle, as enterprises adopt multi-vendor strategies to avoid lock-in and leverage agentic security for liability management.
- Milken Institute41 min
Conversation with KKR Co-Founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts | Global Conference 2025
Henry Kravis, George Roberts, Jason Kelly
Founded by Henry Kravis and George Roberts, KKR currently manages $664 billion in assets while deploying capital at a rate exceeding $30 billion annually, with a strategic focus on infrastructure and Asian markets. Co-CEOs Scott Nuttall and Joe Bay are driving a retailization strategy that has tripled the firm's alternative asset offerings to $21 billion, aiming to democratize private equity access for 401(k) investors. Amidst rising tariff concerns, the firm prioritizes linear capital deployment and global self-reliance trends, particularly in Europe and India, while maintaining a balanced portfolio structure distinct from real estate or highly leveraged ventures.
- Milken Institute46 min
Time to Build: Accelerating & De-risking Israel's Economic Growth, Recovery | Global Conference 2025
Glenn Yago, Tilli Kalisky-Bannett, Eugene Kandel, Michael Kashani, Seffy Zinger
Organized by the Milken Innovation Center, the "Time to Build" panel convenes policymakers and financiers to detail Israel's strategy for accelerating economic recovery while de-risking the high-tech sector following the October 7 attacks. The session highlights resilience metrics such as the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's outperformance during wartime, alongside new regulatory initiatives like Yozma 2 and blended finance models designed to mobilize domestic capital and diversify away from foreign dependency. By integrating underrepresented populations into the labor market and leveraging AI for reconstruction, the panel frames a generational opportunity to transform the national economy through a coordinated public-private-philanthropic approach.