Latest Interviews

It's Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done - Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo

Sam Chaudhary, Karen Lien, Craig Cannon, Liam, Paul Graham, Jenna Klein, Chris Streeter, Carol Dweck

ClassDojo founders Sam Kiernan and Liam secured an investment from Y Combinator's Paul Graham by persistently demonstrating their platform's ability to bridge the gap between home and school communication while promoting growth mindset skills through collaborative content. Since its inception, the company has grown to serve over 300,000 schools globally with a lean team structure, relying on teacher-led adoption and radical transparency to maintain its human-centric mission. Now pivoting toward a direct-to-parent monetization model, ClassDojo aims to sustain its profitability while prioritizing educational equity and avoiding the surveillance capitalism practices common in the EdTech sector.

The Next 3 Billion in Financial Services

Angela Strange

Highly concentrated traditional banking coexists with a massive $320 billion alternative financial services sector that serves millions of Americans who rely on high-fee providers due to lumpy incomes, poor credit history, and cash flow volatility. Innovative fintech startups like Earnin, Payjoy, and LendUp address these specific market inefficiencies by leveraging payroll data, device telemetry, and behavioral metrics to offer fee-free wage advances, device financing without credit checks, and alternative credit scoring for the unbanked. These platforms are rapidly scaling by transforming high-frequency engagement into sustainable operating systems that challenge established financial institutions while extending credit access to billions of users globally.

MIT Self-Driving Cars (2018)

Industry experts analyze the transformative potential of autonomous vehicles to reduce traffic fatalities and transportation costs while addressing critical concerns regarding job displacement and algorithmic liability. Current research utilizing billions of data points compares sensor fusion strategies and evaluates human-machine interaction dynamics, revealing that full-scale commercial adoption remains a complex challenge estimated by futurist Rodney Brooks to occur in major U.S. cities only after 2032. Ultimately, the field prioritizes achieving near-perfect perception and control systems to safely navigate the ethical and technical barriers separating conditional automation from the goal of full driverless mobility.

Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media

Alex Blumberg, Craig Cannon

Gimlet Media acquires podcast talent by prioritizing visionary founders and magnetic hosts with at least 100,000 independent downloads, offering the human capital and marketing infrastructure needed to scale content quality. The company cultivates a non-partisan culture that values empathy and editorial execution, using practical hiring assessments to build teams capable of representing underrepresented voices. Driven by a strategy that leverages YouTube clips for discovery and adapts successful formats like true crime, Gimlet transforms independent audio concepts into sustainable, mainstream productions.

Talks at GS – Juan Enriquez: The Future of Humankind

Juan Enriquez, Tanya Cushman

Juan Enriquez posits that humanity has transitioned from natural selection to "human selection," granting the power to deliberately program the genetic code of all species and establishing the bio-economy as the dominant global force for the coming century. This biological revolution promises to eradicate diseases, regenerate complex organs, and replace animal agriculture through synthetic alternatives, while simultaneously raising ethical questions that Enriquez addresses by advocating for a 25% protected reserve of nature on Earth or in space. Looking further ahead, Enriquez predicts that non-invasive neural interfaces will soon bridge human consciousness with machines and that extraterrestrial life will likely be detected within five years, fundamentally altering our understanding of biology and our place in the universe.

Echoes of Fourier

The event explains how complex numbers and the Discrete Fourier Transform decompose audio signals into frequency components to enable the $O(n \log n)$ Fast Fourier Transform algorithm. It further details how the Convolution Theorem applies these principles to efficiently model acoustic environments and audio effects like reverb through multiplication in the frequency domain. Finally, the presentation addresses the numerical challenges of reversing these processes via deconvolution for applications such as echo removal and digital room correction.

MIT 6.S094: Deep Learning

Lex Friedman

Taught by Lex Friedman and a team of MIT engineers, the 6S094 "Deep Learning for Self-Driving Cars" course challenges participants to bridge perception and human interaction through competitions like Deep Traffic and CycFuse. The curriculum integrates technical foundations in neural networks with real-world case studies from industry leaders such as Waymo and Aurora, while addressing critical hurdles like adversarial examples and Level 5 autonomy. Participants must register by January 19th to join this rigorous program designed to foster the trust and cognitive reasoning necessary for the future of autonomous transportation.

Rise of the Super App: Mobile-First Product Ideas from China

Connie Chan

This presentation argues that Chinese consumer mobile trends, specifically the "Super App" model and true mobile-first design, will define the U.S. market within one to two years. Speakers highlight key examples like WeChat and Alipay, which consolidate diverse services and leverage smartphone sensors to create unified platforms that outperform traditional siloed applications. The event concludes with a call for Western companies to abandon legacy desktop constraints and adopt an ecosystem-based strategy that utilizes cross-service integration and hardware-specific features to maximize user retention.

When Biology Moves to Engineering

Vijay Pande

Positioning biological evolution as a source of accumulated "technical debt," the event frames modern healthcare challenges as engineering problems solvable through AI-driven precision rather than traditional trial-and-error discovery. Key advancements in automated circuit design and behavioral digital therapeutics demonstrate how this shift enables predictable, high-accuracy solutions for complex conditions like cancer and diabetes. Ultimately, the approach seeks to transform medicine by engineering the reversal of aging and optimizing systemic care coordination to move from reactive sick care to proactive health maintenance.

Leah Culver of Breaker and Tom Sparks of YC Answer Your Questions About Security and Podcasting

Leah Culver, Tom Sparks, Craig Cannon

This event examines the intersection of government surveillance, device security, and startup culture, highlighting Apple's resistance to backdoors while detailing best practices for developers to protect sensitive data through iOS Keychains and robust multi-factor authentication. Speakers contrast the convenience of biometrics with their permanent compromise risks, advising users to combine passcodes with strong passcode habits to mitigate law enforcement access. The discussion concludes by outlining Breaker's vision to transform podcasting into a serialized content platform and identifying emerging opportunities in IoT security and passive bio-sensing technologies.

Tim Urban of Wait But Why

Tim Urban, Andrew Finn, Craig Cannon

Author and researcher Tim Urban leverages his *Wait But Why* blog to catalyze a cultural shift that encourages high-intelligence individuals to pursue careers in artificial intelligence and technology as a strategic response to humanity's imminent existential challenges. By framing the "Page 500" moment—a critical transition where human survival depends on mastering AI safety and overcoming the Fermi paradox's great filter—Urban argues that redirecting top talent toward these fields offers the most effective multiplier for global well-being. This perspective is grounded in a rigorous, multi-source research methodology designed to synthesize complex topics like CRISPR, VR, and space exploration into actionable insights for both creators and future tech workers.

Talks at GS – Naval Ravikant: The Capital Play Behind Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Naval Ravikant

The event examines blockchain technology as a novel governance mechanism that solves consensus problems without central authority, highlighting applications ranging from Bitcoin to decentralized identity networks. It details the stringent technical expertise required to navigate high-risk investment environments marred by market manipulation, insider trading, and the complexities of ICOs replacing traditional capital formation models. Finally, the presentation analyzes how national competitiveness is shifting toward reserve currency status and regulatory adaptability as governments confront the legal challenges of enforcing laws on code-based speech and decentralized networks.

MIT Sloan: Intro to Machine Learning (in 360/VR)

Lex

A 360-degree video lecture for an MIT Sloan course examines the transition from current specialized machine learning to future general intelligence, highlighting the critical dependency on massive labeled datasets and the limitations of supervised learning in complex physical environments. The presentation details how deep learning's automatic representation learning has revolutionized tasks like computer vision, yet exposes fundamental fragility through adversarial attacks, energy inefficiency, and the inability to replicate human causal reasoning or planning. Ultimately, the analysis argues that commercial viability requires AI to surpass human performance in reliability and safety while navigating ethical policy challenges and the scarcity of labeled data necessary for robust real-world deployment.

Talks at GS –Jayne-Anne Gadhia: Driving Gender Equality in Business

Jayne-Anne Gadhia, Sir Richard Branson

Upon returning to Virgin Money in 2006, CEO Jane-Anne Gaddier orchestrated a high-stakes acquisition of the distressed Northern Rock under Richard Branson's direction, transforming the brand into a safe, long-term legacy asset. Gaddier subsequently led a rigorous gender equality initiative that dismantled structural barriers by rejecting bonus data skewed against women and enforcing aggregate statistical parity in pay distributions. Her leadership also established a culture prioritizing output over presence and leveraging the Virgin platform to support executive civic engagement through strategic institutional and spousal support systems.

Talks at GS – Scooter Braun: Disrupting the Music Industry

Scooter Braun

Scooter Braun leverages a "why not" philosophy to transform from an underdog college promoter into a global music mogul who discovered Justin Bieber on YouTube and secured Psy's "Gangnam Style" by honoring the artist's original language. His management strategy emphasizes translating creative genius for corporate partners, most notably negotiating a landmark partnership between Kanye West and Adidas that produced the brand's best-selling footwear. In a defining demonstration of his resilience, Braun proceeded with a high-risk benefit concert in Manchester following a 2017 terror attack, successfully rallying 60,000 attendees and 22 of the 23 victim families as a defiant response to violence.