Latest Interviews

Top Ways Startups Waste Money

Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel, Brad Flora

Early-stage founders frequently squander capital on premature hiring, marketing, and professional services before achieving product-market fit, a behavior driven by the "Sebastianism" fallacy of seeking external saviors rather than building internal foundations. The discussion outlines specific inefficiencies in seeking FAANG talent, over-relying on advertising and PR retainers, and granting unnecessary equity to advisors, all of which can be avoided by founders executing core tasks themselves. By prioritizing self-reliance and scrappy alternatives to validate hypotheses, companies can prevent costly mistakes and ensure that significant spending only occurs after proving the business model generates active customer demand.

War in Ukraine: the emerging global food crisis

Arkady, Ed, Shashank, Sasha Nauta

The ongoing war in Ukraine is precipitating a global food crisis by blocking critical export routes through Odessa, destroying domestic harvests, and disrupting fertilizer supplies, which threatens hundreds of millions in nations like Egypt and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Simultaneously, the prospective NATO accession of Sweden and Finland is expected to significantly strengthen Baltic security through Finland's substantial artillery capabilities, despite President Vladimir Putin leveraging the expansion to fuel narratives of Russian encirclement. This geopolitical shift occurs against the backdrop of US legislative uncertainty regarding escalating aid packages and potential changes in Washington's strategic posture ahead of the 2024 presidential election, raising concerns among European allies about future burden-sharing.

Risk-based Contracting for Value-based Care, a Founder's Playbook

Julie, Justin, Jack Stoddard, Rajay Bhatniji, Corbin Petro, Faye Rottenberg, Satish Jain, Mike Copco, Sunny Goyal, Sonny

This event analyzes the strategic transition from fee-for-service to value-based care models as a solution to unsustainable healthcare costs and the need for system resiliency. Industry leaders from organizations including Patina, Waymark, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC discuss the risk spectrum ranging from pay-for-performance to global capitation, emphasizing that success requires tailored glide paths, early partner alignment, and robust upstream metrics. The presentation outlines critical investment criteria for scaling risk-based contracts, including the necessity for specialized actuarial talent, sufficient capital reserves for statutory requirements, and clear roadmaps for managing total cost of care alongside clinical outcomes.

Election polling: why is it so difficult?

The presentation traces the evolution of election polling from unrepresentative 19th-century straw polls to modern scientific standards established after the 1936 Literary Digest failure and the 2016 U.S. state-level errors. It details how contemporary forecasting models combine polling data with economic fundamentals and run millions of simulations to generate probabilistic outcomes, a methodology successfully tested during the 2022 French presidential election. Ultimately, the analysis emphasizes that while these models cannot achieve perfect accuracy due to inherent sampling limitations and unforeseen external events, they provide increasingly reliable predictions as historical data accumulates.

War in Ukraine: is a peace deal possible?

Ed, Sally, Zany, Arkady

Ongoing negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow remain stalled over the core triad of territorial status, sanctions sequencing, and Crimea's strategic corridor, as Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov lacks final authority to offer concessions without President Vladimir Putin's direct approval. While Ukraine has hardened its stance by rejecting pre-1991 borders and exploring security guarantees akin to Finnish neutrality, Putin's strategy is increasingly driven by domestic consolidation rather than genuine security needs, reflecting a calculated worldview that prioritizes legacy over realistic military outcomes. This strategic deadlock, compounded by Putin's internal miscalculation and the reluctance of his kleptocratic inner circle to risk nuclear escalation, leaves both sides facing a stalemate with no substantive progress toward a comprehensive peace deal.

Antibiotic Resistance and Chronic Disease: Understanding the Challenges and Some Possible Solutions

Amanda Jezek, Jonathan Daniels, David Greenberg, Thomas Heyman, Kathy Talkington, Mark Williams, Tom Heyman

Hosted by Faster Cures in partnership with the Infectious Disease Society of America and other key organizations, this webinar examined the critical market failure hindering new antibiotic development and highlighted its severe impact on cancer, cystic fibrosis, and transplant patients. Panelists presented data showing thousands of annual deaths from antimicrobial resistance while advocating for the "Pasteur Act," a policy designed to de-link financial rewards from sales volume to incentivize the creation of novel drugs for critical pathogens. The event concluded by urging stakeholders to share personal stories and sign a letter to Congress to drive legislative action and secure funding for both antibiotic stewardship and research.

B2C2B in Digital Health, a founder's playbook

Julie, Jack, Jay, Chris Hogue, Kate, Saji, Jonathan, Amanda, Andrew Lay

Digital health startups are increasingly adopting a B2C2B motion to bypass traditional enterprise sales bottlenecks by securing direct consumer adoption before targeting senior executives. This dual go-to-market strategy accelerates product-market fit through rapid consumer iteration while generating the usage data required to de-risk large-scale enterprise contracts for investors. Although this approach demands careful resource allocation to balance competing consumer and corporate requirements, it ultimately creates a more defensible business model with faster capital deployment and validated ROI.

The Post-COVID Recovery: California's Lagging Employment Rate

Grace Gedye, Julian Cañete, Reign Free, Manuel Pastor, Somjita Mitra, David Lesher, Matt Horton

California's Department of Finance, labor experts, and business leaders analyze the state's persistent 7.3% unemployment rate and structural labor shortages driven by childcare gaps, early retirements, and workforce migration to inland regions. Panelists project a 3.9% to 4% employment growth rate for the coming year, contingent on federal investments in the care economy and housing affordability while addressing risks from inflation and potential political shifts. The discussion highlights a fundamental recalibration of work where demand is shifting toward non-automatable sectors like elder care and cooperative business models rather than returning to pre-pandemic norms.

Accelerating Securitization in Africa to Finance the SDGs

Alison Harwood, Lade Araba, Samuel Chasia, Juan Pablo de Mollein, John Schellhaus, Sam Chasia

The Milken Institute has launched the African Securitization Alliance, bringing together regulatory bodies from Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Côte d'Ivoire to mobilize private capital for Sustainable Development Goals. Participants will utilize a framework of internal and external credit enhancement mechanisms, such as tranching and third-party guarantees from entities like GARANTCo, to mitigate risk and improve market access. Upcoming activities include a specialized workshop in Ghana and a strategic shift toward replicable structures in renewable energy and affordable housing to overcome data gaps and legal barriers.

Small Business Community: What Happened to Mom and Pop?

Nigel Duara, Lenore Estrada, Isabella Casillas Guzman, Eugene Cornelius, Jr., Carolina Martinez, Mark J. Robertson, Sr., David Lesher

Co-hosted by CalMatters and the Milken Institute, this strategic discussion examined the critical recovery challenges facing California's four million small businesses with special attention to the stark disparities affecting communities of color and women-owned enterprises. Featuring newly appointed SBA Director Isabella Casillas Guzman, the event analyzed how the agency's portfolio expansion to over $1 trillion was initially skewed by banking biases, prompting a pivot toward a "Five C's" framework that prioritizes coaching, diverse capital, and community navigation to address exclusion. Looking forward, the SBA is repositioning to connect small businesses with the $500 billion federal infrastructure marketplace while implementing a $100 million Community Navigator pilot to streamline access for underserved entrepreneurs.

Lessons Learned from COVID-19: Are There Silver Linings for Biomedical Innovation?

Esther Krofah, Francis Collins, Richard Moscicki, Ellen Sigal, Janet Woodcock

Hosted by Faster Cures, a webinar convened NIH officials and industry leaders to analyze the COVID-19 pandemic's acceleration of biomedical innovation, highlighting achievements such as the ACTIV partnership's master protocols and the RADx initiative's diagnostic scaling. The discussion detailed how the crisis forced a shift toward competitive collaboration, decentralized trials, and the successful achievement of diverse vaccine trial enrollment, while simultaneously exposing critical infrastructure gaps in clinical trial execution and real-world data integration. Panelists concluded with a consensus that emergency-driven reforms must be institutionalized through permanent policy changes and public-private partnerships to sustain preparedness for future health threats.

Technology and the Opening of Trade

Eugene Cornelius, Marianne Jason, Mary Yang, Kevin Smith-Ramos, Fred Hogberg

A panel of experts from the OECD, Canada, Mexico, and the US Ex-Im Bank emphasized that modernizing trade agreements like USMCA and reforming the WTO are critical to helping SMEs overcome financing barriers and digital divides. The discussion highlighted a divergence in national strategies, contrasting the US's fragmented agency approach with Canada's consolidated model while stressing the need for domestic policies to bolster workforce readiness alongside international market access. Ultimately, participants agreed that sustainable global growth requires addressing social inequities and leveraging digital tools to democratize trade participation for smaller enterprises and developing economies.

Clock Synchronization with Chris Perl

Chris Perl, Ron Minsky

Responding to MIFID 2 regulations, Jane Street engineered a hybrid time synchronization system that combines GPS-driven Precision Time Protocol with Linux-based NTP Interleaved Mode to achieve sub-100-microsecond accuracy across its infrastructure. By leveraging hardware timestamping at the network interface and cross-verifying local and distant time sources, the architecture mitigates standard PTP vulnerabilities while maintaining a simple, inspectable network topology. This design successfully reduces worst-case synchronization errors to approximately 35 microseconds, effectively balancing regulatory compliance with robust fault tolerance.

America’s pandemic election: what could go wrong?

Jon Fassman

Amidst the global pandemic and systemic barriers to voting, the 2020 U.S. presidential election faces unprecedented risks of chaos due to a sitting president's refusal to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power and widespread concerns over mail-in ballot processing. With 228 pending legal challenges and a high probability of an information vacuum on election night, experts warn that a close result could trigger civil unrest if the loser, projected to be Donald Trump, rejects the outcome. While early voting strategies aim to mitigate logistical failures, the convergence of disinformation campaigns and external interference threatens to destabilize American democracy globally.

Real Numbers – Episode 14, Finals Week

Jayden, Sawyer

In this Real Numbers episode, the host explores expected value applications by challenging listeners to calculate the average interval between randomly scheduled final exams and reviewing a previous problem on the expected number of distinct snowboards used over six days. The snowboard scenario is resolved by demonstrating two distinct approaches using indicator variables and the linearity of expectation, both confirming that a user will sharpen approximately 3.99 different boards on average. The episode concludes by inviting the audience to submit their own solutions and alternative problem ideas for future episodes focused on mathematical expectation.