Latest Interviews

Advancing a Modern Regulatory Framework: SEC Chairman Paul Atkins Conversation | Global Conference

Paul Atkins, Michael Piwowar, Mike

The SEC is executing a strategic pivot from enforcement-heavy regulation to a framework prioritizing economic materiality, aiming to reverse the decline in public companies and revitalize the IPO market through simplified disclosure rules and reduced litigation barriers. Parallel efforts are establishing clear jurisdictional boundaries with the CFTC for digital assets while modernizing fund structures to enhance tax efficiency and expanding 401(k) access to private credit markets. Guided by Enforcement Director David Woodcock's focus on substantive fraud over procedural technicalities, the agency seeks to restore investor confidence and preserve the United States' competitive standing in global capital formation.

What Actually Makes A Startup Durable

Paul Graham and YC partners outline a strategic framework for navigating the AI era, emphasizing that while AI increases individual productivity by 1,000x, founders must target "hard" problems with durable moats to survive market saturation. The session advises building companies through co-founders who provide essential emotional support rather than just complementary skills, noting that human judgment remains critical for community building and navigating high-stakes pivots. Finally, students are offered over $25,000 in AI credits to neutralize geographical disadvantages, reinforcing the program's focus on rapid execution and deep market engagement over theoretical development.

Can Markets Withstand AI Risks, Fed Hikes, and Oil Shocks?

Tony Pasquariello, Josh Schiffrin, Dominic Wilson

Dominic and Josh analyze how supply shortages in AI infrastructure and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East are creating a complex investment environment driven by oil market friction and Federal Reserve policy shifts. While the S&P 500 remains near record highs, the duo warns that diverging market performance from lived economic reality, combined with intensifying inflation pressures and a move away from central bank guidance, signals potential volatility ahead. Consequently, they highlight a strategic pivot toward the long end of the yield curve and credit markets, suggesting that concentrated asset exposure is prudent as liquidity is expected to thin in the coming months.

What Big Tech Missed And How Startups Can Still Win

Alexandre LeBrun, Zuckerberg, Jan, Alex

Ami Labs is raising approximately one billion euros in seed funding to develop foundational world models that train on sensory data rather than text, addressing the limitations of current large language models for robotics applications. Co-founded by Alex K. and Yann LeCun following their shared history at Meta and various startups, the Paris-based company aims to build general-purpose robots capable of operating safely in open environments by solving the compute bottlenecks and latency issues inherent in existing vision-language-action architectures. While the venture tackles the high capital demands of securing thousands of GPUs and top-tier talent, it operates under a strict strategic constraint where failure to deliver visible progress within two years could render the company unsustainable due to the intense external expectations created by the massive funding round.

Why Physical AI Is the Next Platform Shift

Eric Landau, Francois Chollet

Anchored, founded by former quantitative trader Eric Landau, constructs the data layer for physical AI by managing petabytes of multimodal data to power robotics and autonomous systems. After pivoting from healthcare vision to broader industrial applications, the company established a production-ready facility in the Bay Area and refined its sales culture through iterative hiring challenges. With the post-ChatGPT market accelerating demand for specialized physical AI infrastructure, Anchored now leads a crowded sector by offering scalable data collection that moves clients from proof-of-concept to enterprise production.

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.

What Top AI Labs Are Really Doing With Observability

Olivier Pomel, Alexi

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.

Global Rates & FX Views: Hyperscalers, credit, & rates

Mark Cabana, Yuri Seliger, Meghan Swiber, Yuri Sigler

U.S. credit markets remain resilient despite a 30% year-over-year supply surge, though hyperscaler bonds have uniquely widened due to Amazon's weak 2.5x subscription and shifting issuance dynamics. While net bond supply remains neutralized by a Treasury bill shift, investment funds are extending duration in IG spreads even as the Federal Reserve faces a 35% probability of an unexpected July rate hike to combat inflation. Future market stability hinges on upcoming hyperscaler earnings and whether issuers maintain aggressive capital raising despite emerging signs of investor demand fatigue.

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

Tony Kim, Molly O'Shea

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.

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.

How Photoroom Trained Themselves To Dream Bigger

Gary Tan, Elliot

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 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.

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.

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.