Latest Interviews
Showing 46–60 of 3,131 interview transcripts.
- All-In Podcast1h 34m
The Fight Over Open Source AI, Anthropic's $1.5B Payout, NYC Socialists: Evictions = Violence?
Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, David Sacks
Following Moonshot AI's release of the cost-effective open-source Kimi K3 model, US markets now face a 45% probability of a government ban on Chinese open-source software by 2026, a move critics like Chamath Palihapitiya and White House official David Saks argue would be regulatory capture by Anthropic to protect its $70 billion business. As Google and Tesla report massive capital expenditure increases driven by AI infrastructure while SpaceX faces post-IPO valuation drops, hosts warn that banning distillation techniques or enforcing strict KYC protocols would force American enterprises to pay a prohibitive "token tax" compared to global competitors. Meanwhile, Anthropic's recent $1.5 billion copyright settlement highlights a contradiction in their stance on IP theft, just as New York housing policies by Zohran Mamdani are predicted to reduce supply and worsen living conditions for tenants.
- Y Combinator30 min
What Top AI Labs Are Really Doing With Observability
Founded by IBM veterans Olivier Pomel and Alexi Laurent, Datadog disrupted the monitoring industry by merging Dev and Ops into a single platform, overcoming initial Y Combinator rejections and regional venture capital biases to achieve a 2019 IPO. Under a leadership philosophy that prioritizes direct customer engagement over written values, the company has expanded its product suite to serve top AI firms while executing a radical shift where engineers will primarily automate code generation within two quarters. This strategic pivot aims to drastically increase development velocity and reorganize the company around smaller, high-autonomy teams, even as it navigates post-lockup valuation volatility and the rapid evolution of AI-driven observability.
- Y Combinator44 min
He Built the World's #1 Open-Source Coding Agent
Jay V, Gary Tan, Mark Mandelmann, Seth Vargoevic, Frank, Dax, Dylan Patel, Soyal, PG, Jay Poldinger
OpenCode, a sixteen-year-old platform founded by Jay Poldinger and Frank, has grown to 13 million monthly active users and processes 7 trillion daily tokens by serving as a neutral model harness that bypasses vendor lock-in. The company's strategy of supporting over 70 open-source models, which became critical after Anthropic restricted open usage, generated $160,000 in monthly subscription revenue and an estimated $33 million in inference revenue as of June. With significant adoption in China, Brazil, and the United States, OpenCode validates its product-market fit through enterprise organizations that proactively seek security agreements to integrate its agent loops into internal workflows.
BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum
Kim outlines a fundamental shift in the global technology sector where a $30 trillion hardware-centric economy is driven by a 10,000x increase in compute density and severe memory shortages known as the "Rampocalypse." Leading institutions are responding through silicon co-design and gigawatt-scale energy infrastructure while BlackRock allocates capital toward immediate compute needs and long-term bets on quantum and orbital data centers. The narrative concludes with strategic observations on China's robotics acceleration and the restructuring of traditional enterprises into AI-native entities through proprietary token flow architectures.
- Goldman Sachs12 min
Are Hedge Funds Still Bullish on AI Stocks?
Vincent Lin, Chris Hussey, Vinny Lin
Following a historic 32% drawdown in high-beta momentum strategies, the market has stabilized as hedge funds reduced semiconductor exposure from record levels while managing a four-fold surge in volatility. Despite the sharp correction driven by heavy selling pressure in technology sectors, equity funds have maintained healthy returns and are currently repositioning near median exposure to capitalize on dipping AI infrastructure valuations. Analysts now advise utilizing limited-loss option structures to navigate upcoming earnings for mega-cap hyperscalers, while monitoring the risk of rising stock correlations that could undermine the current low-correlation alpha opportunities.
- Y Combinator22 min
How Photoroom Trained Themselves To Dream Bigger
PhotoRoom, the largest Y Combinator company headquartered in Europe, leveraged a strategic pivot to e-commerce photography to achieve 300 million downloads and serve major clients like Amazon and Uber. Its founders attribute this exponential growth to a cultural shift fostered by YC, which replaced European risk aversion with a "failure-safe" mindset that treats a billion-dollar valuation as an attainable target. By enforcing English-only offices, prioritizing deep vertical focus, and utilizing aggressive resource constraints, the company instilled a mandatory ambition across its team to drive rapid scaling and execution speed.
- Stanford Online56 min
Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | The GPU Economy
Sunny Madra, Brad Gerstner, Apoorv Agrawal
Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Grok co-founder Sonny Maduro outline a transformative shift where AI distribution costs are now compute-intensive, driving the integration of deterministic architecture with Nvidia's GPU ecosystem to accelerate inference. This strategic fusion, which led to Nvidia's $20 billion acquisition of Grok, enables a 2.5x increase in token generation while addressing critical power and memory constraints to support the transition from chat-based tools to autonomous agents. As the industry approaches Artificial General Intelligence faster than anticipated, the convergence of these hardware innovations and emerging regulatory frameworks aims to redefine global economic output and the future value of human labor.
- The Economist7 min
Elon Musk on Europe, the far right and civil war in Britain | The Economist
Elon Musk, Zanny Minton Beddoes
Elon Musk and an interviewer clashed over the classification of his political views and his claims that civil war in Britain is inevitable due to demographic shifts. While Musk defended his promotion of a film depicting vigilante violence and rejected accusations of racism by citing his personal relationships, the interviewer challenged his assertions with crime statistics and labeled his influence on UK politics as irresponsible and based on a distorted American perception. Despite Musk's dismissal of his critics as a minority, the discussion highlighted a fundamental disagreement over his role in shaping public discourse and the validity of his warnings regarding Western safety and immigration.
- Sequoia Capital1h 9m
The Philosopher CEO | Clay Co-Founder Kareem Amin
Clay Co-Founder Kareem Amin, Kareem Amin, Varun, Nikolai, Mike Vernal, Pete Caputa, Jack Dorsey, David Solomon, Tarek
Clay CEO Kareem guides his company through a "long strange trip" of pivoting from broad ambitions to the specific niche of Go-to-Market Engineering, where he prioritizes radical transparency and usage-based pricing to align with technical users. By rejecting standard management dogmas in favor of "momentum detective" leadership and "deep work" practices, Kareem fosters a culture of devotion that withstands pricing backlash and drives a unique product philosophy valuing flexibility over simplicity. This strategy successfully established a new market category while navigating a five-year period of ambiguity to achieve product-market fit without relying on external validation.
- Y Combinator31 min
How Supabase Became One Of The Fastest Growing DevTool Companies In The World
Supabase founder Paul Copplestone recently secured a $500 million round at a valuation exceeding $10 billion, propelling the company to decacorn status with a 10 million developer base driven largely by AI agents launching 60-90% of new databases. The fully distributed organization leverages its open-source PostgreSQL strategy and a shift toward Infrastructure as Code to achieve exponential usage growth, reducing time-to-value from minutes to seconds while bypassing traditional marketing channels. Moving beyond standard user interfaces, Supabase is now building self-driving database capabilities and "Infrastructure for Platforms" to support enterprise labs managing millions of ephemeral instances autonomously.
- a16z1h 32m
Building a Company in Stealth | Travis Kalanick with a16z
Travis Kalanick, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg
Travis Kalanick, reflecting on lessons from his 2017 departure from Uber, is now leading ADAM, a stealth-backed venture that digitizes physical manufacturing and logistics to drive meal costs down to $8–$10. By integrating over 300 dark kitchen facilities and autonomous mining operations acquired from Pronto, the company leverages robotics to transform heavy industries while avoiding the external pressures that previously hindered Uber's scalability. Kalanick applies an "Industrial AI" framework focused on internal correctness and management capacity constraints to scale operations in food, mining, and transport simultaneously.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Indexing Humanity: A Fireside With the Simulation Company | Simile | RAISE Summit 2026
Joon Sung Park, Sahir Azam, Jun
Simile, founded by former Stanford researchers including CEO Jun, has launched a foundational model of human behavior that replicates individual subpopulations with 85% accuracy for enterprise clients like CVS and Fortune 500 companies. Leveraging strategic partnerships with Gallup and Dynata to access a 20-million-person data panel, the company differentiates itself by prioritizing human imperfections and biases over pure algorithmic efficiency to augment corporate decision-making in market research and product development. Supported by Index Ventures, Simile operates on a four-stage simulation hierarchy ranging from individual dynamic testing to society-wide forecasting, while adhering to strict ethical principles regarding data consent and transparency.
- Y Combinator29 min
Why Ambitious Startup Ideas Are Actually Easier To Sell
PostHog is transitioning from an open-source analytics platform to an AI-driven service that autonomously fixes engineering issues and solves customer support tickets by generating production-ready pull requests. Co-founders James and Tim restructured their operations to align with this new "self-driving software" vision, delegating management duties to the latter so the former can focus exclusively on AI product architecture while the company doubles in size. This strategic pivot replaces traditional manual product management with a system where AI configures workflows and implements fixes based on deep user data, aiming to secure massive market valuation through "insane" ambition rather than conservative growth.
- The Economist6 min
The art of deception in modern war | The Economist
The event analyzes how modern deception strategies now target an adversary's intent rather than mere presence to neutralize overwhelming surveillance, drawing on historical precedents like D-Day alongside recent intelligence failures in Ukraine, Israel, and Russia. It further details how transparent battlespaces compel forces to deploy resource-intensive drone operations that paradoxically increase human density and logistical footprints, requiring teams of five and nearly two tons of equipment per unit. By forcing enemies to waste munitions on decoys, these tactics aim to degrade capabilities, though the summary notes their inherent vulnerability and limited operational endurance of roughly three days.
David Friedberg Explains America's Economic Crisis in 60 Minutes
David Friedberg warns that the United States faces potential social collapse within two years due to policy failures that exclude the bottom 50% from capital ownership, a structural gap he estimates represents a $33 trillion wealth disparity. He advocates for replacing Social Security and Treasury-bond-heavy pension systems with equity-based individual accounts, while proposing a 40% capital gains tax and a national goal of shifting 2% of Americans to capital ownership annually. Friedberg argues these reforms, alongside closing inheritance loopholes and eliminating income tax for the bottom earners, are essential to prevent a socialist death spiral and restore economic mobility before the chaotic political landscape of 2028.