Latest Interviews
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NFTs and the Creator Economy
Foundation, a decentralized platform on the Ethereum blockchain, recently facilitated $60 million in artist sales and $250 million in bids by enabling non-custodial NFT minting and transparent global auctions. The event highlighted transformative market shifts through high-profile milestones, such as the $7.5 million Snowden collaborative auction won by a DAO and significant earnings for creators like Raphael Rosendahl and Ethiopian artist collectives. By leveraging immutable on-chain provenance and royalty standards, the platform is establishing a new ecosystem where creators bypass traditional gatekeepers while fostering collective investment and cross-platform interoperability.
- The Economist14 min
The remote-working revolution: how to get it right
Experts analyze the permanent integration of remote work, highlighting divergent global adoption rates and emerging legal complexities regarding tax liability and employment jurisdiction across nations like Finland and France. The discussion further examines operational risks such as workplace inequality, where junior staff face hurdles in networking and ergonomic safety, prompting corporate policy shifts including salary adjustments and office space reductions. Ultimately, the convergence of evolving national legislation and internal employer frameworks aims to establish sustainable boundaries for working hours, digital privacy, and future organizational structures.
- Milken Institute1h 1m
Walking the Talk: Investing in the Future of Black Banks, Entrepreneurship, and Opportunity
Eugene Cornelius, Jr, Henry Childs II, Emanuel Friedman, Tracy Gray, Joseph Haskins, Jr., Aron Betru
This panel examines the systemic barriers preventing Black entrepreneurs from accessing capital and reveals that closing the racial wealth gap could unlock $1.6 trillion in US economic potential. Experts advocate for a strategic shift from traditional inclusion to innovation by leveraging $9 billion in government-funded preferred stock to mobilize $90 billion in community lending and aggregating pension capital for diverse asset managers. The discussion concludes with a call to build a self-sustaining minority economy driven by global export opportunities, artificial intelligence, and direct financing models rather than reliance on historically exclusionary systems.
- The Economist11 min
GameStop: what it reveals about the US stockmarket
In early 2021, a coordinated surge by millions of retail investors on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets drove GameStop's stock price to over $450, triggering a historic short squeeze that forced institutional short sellers to absorb massive losses. The volatility caused significant market disruption, including trading restrictions by platforms like Robinhood and intense regulatory scrutiny regarding liquidity management and retail investor protection. While analysts view the event as an isolated phenomenon rather than a broad bubble, it permanently altered market dynamics by highlighting the growing influence of social media-fueled retail trading against traditional Wall Street institutions.
- The Economist14 min
Bill Gates: How to fund the green revolution
Bill Gates, Zanny Minton Beddoes
Bill Gates outlines the necessity of achieving net-zero emissions through massive technological innovation to solve hard-to-abate industrial sectors like steel and aviation, rather than relying solely on behavioral change. He argues that a $2 trillion global investment strategy must prioritize public R&D funding and venture capital to eliminate the green premium, with the United States serving as the essential exemplar and primary buyer to drive down costs. While carbon taxes remain politically elusive, the path forward requires governments and corporations to shift from symbolic actions to substantive financing of real decarbonization technologies alongside historical emission reductions.
- Y Combinator10 min
Designing Characters with Deep Learning: Spellbrush (W18) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020
SpellRush, a Y Combinator-backed studio, has developed an on-premises deep learning system using Generative Adversarial Networks to generate AAA-quality character art in seconds, effectively replacing hundreds of hours of manual labor. The company engineered its models to correct demographic biases found in training data, specifically increasing the representation of male characters and diverse skin tones, while reducing model training costs to approximately $4,000 per iteration through custom hardware. Now operating a team of five, SpellRush is applying these tools to produce the world's first AI-illustrated game and is actively recruiting additional animators and research interns to expand its capabilities.
- Y Combinator9 min
Synthetic Media: Virtual Influencers & Live Animation: Figments (S19) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020
YC-backed startup Figments, led by CEO Jay Rosenkranz, is building a virtual production platform that merges motion capture with live streaming to create fictional esports characters like Noralis competing in *Super Smash Brothers Ultimate*. The company successfully pivoted to a fully remote model during the pandemic, utilizing Unreal Engine and ARKit to drive viral growth and secure commercial partnerships with brands such as Reebok and Guayaquil Yerba Mate. As Figments expands its storytelling across Twitch and YouTube, it is actively recruiting talent to further develop its proprietary technology for digital product placement and character creation.
- Y Combinator10 min
Desining from Day One: Artists as Founders: Multiverse (S20) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020
Multiverse, a Y Combinator-backed platform founded by two MIT engineers and illustrator Sara, is developing a hybrid of Dungeons & Dragons and Roblox to digitize tabletop RPGs into a visual, streamable online experience. The company differentiates itself by prioritizing high-fidelity narrative art as a core business asset, recruiting top-tier indie creators from platforms like ArtStation and Twitch rather than traditional AAA studios to drive user engagement and market validation. By granting equity to its artistic co-founders and leveraging visual assets for fundraising, Multiverse aims to bridge the gap between scrappy entertainment storytelling and scalable platform economics.
- Jane Street1h 4m
Building a Functional Email Server with Dominick LoBraico
Faced with the security risks and operational rigidity of a legacy mail server, Jane Street engineers replaced the system with MailCore, a homegrown server implemented in OCaml where configuration is expressed as composable code. To ensure safety during the one-year migration, the team deployed a parallel shadow instance that continuously diffed outputs against the legacy system, effectively reverse-engineering implicit knowledge while eliminating memory-safety bugs common in C-based alternatives. This architectural shift transformed email management into a software culture practice, allowing generalist engineers to safely modify routing and filtering logic using standard OCaml tools rather than relying on specialized knowledge of opaque custom domains.
- Milken Institute1h 7m
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.
- Milken Institute1h 8m
The Credit Recovery: Uneven, Unequal, Uncertain?
Mike Divavar, Bill Friend-Carrstairs, Leslie Cowan, Joe Nagar, Jim Zelter
Panelists from Fortress, GoldenTree, Apollo, and Varday outline a K-shaped credit recovery driven by deep dislocations between equity valuations and distressed debt spreads across sectors like aviation, energy, and commercial real estate. These institutional investors are leveraging specialized infrastructure to acquire undervalued assets in emerging markets and structured credit, targeting high returns while navigating central bank dependency and the risks posed by zombie companies. The consensus projects a multi-year reconstruction phase where private credit expansion and complex asset management strategies will capture significant market share as traditional markets transition from liquidity crises to solvency challenges.
- Milken Institute1h 8m
The Impact Revolution: From Sustainable Development Goals to Solutions
Glenn, Sir Ronald Cohen, Eugene Kendall, Bhaskar, Alex Wayne
Facing a $2.5 trillion annual financing gap and a global economic contraction caused by the pandemic, experts at this event proposed leveraging impact-weighted accounting and blended finance to mobilize the estimated $32 trillion in private capital required for the Sustainable Development Goals. Leaders including Sir Ronald Cohen and representatives from the Syngenta Foundation detailed strategies to quantify corporate social and environmental costs through Harvard Business School's Impact Weighted Accounts while scaling smallholder agriculture via the Agripreneur model and digital de-risking tools. The consensus emerged that governments must mandate impact transparency to bridge the financing divide, aligning the "triple helix" of risk, reward, and impact to transform profit and purpose from mutually exclusive goals into a unified growth engine.
- Milken Institute1h 7m
Africa: Economic Recovery and Transformation
Raj Kumar, Aruma Ote, Paula Ngabiri, Vivian Nwaka
Moderated by DevEx President Raj Kumar at the Milken Institute Global Conference, a panel of African leaders and financiers including former World Bank official Arumna Ote and Rwanda's Minister Paula Ngabiri analyzed the continent's post-pandemic economic trajectory. The discussion highlighted Africa's demographic potential and the urgent need to boost intra-continental trade through the AfCFTA while addressing a critical $130 billion annual funding gap exacerbated by investor risk perception and inadequate fiscal stimulus. Panellists proposed a strategic shift toward blended finance, agile regulatory frameworks for sectors like health tech and agribusiness, and data-driven governance to attract private capital and foster inclusive growth for the projected 2.3 billion population.
- Milken Institute12 min
The Future of Market Structure
Kym Arnone, Rick McVey, Annette Nazareth, Aine O'Flynn, Jared Carney, Anya O'Flynn
Moderated by Lightdale CEO Jared Carney, the 2020 Milken Institute Global Conference "Future of Market Structure" panel featured SEC former commissioner Annette Nazareth, BMO Capital Markets' Anya O'Flynn, and Market Access CEO Rick McVeigh to analyze market dynamics during the pandemic. Nazareth highlighted the unexpected robustness of U.S. markets and a surge in retail participation, while McVeigh addressed the paradox of uneven liquidity creation across global fixed income sectors. Together, these leaders evaluated how technology and regulation interacted to maintain investor confidence despite significant economic disruption.
- Milken Institute1h 15m
A Season of Playoffs: Redefining Sports in Challenging Times
Linda, Todd Boley, Chris Paul, Kim Tagula, Richard Sherman
During the 2020 season, prominent athletes and leagues like the NBA, WNBA, and MLS shifted from a traditionally apolitical stance to active social justice advocacy, utilizing platforms such as the Orlando bubble and player-initiated jersey messages to address systemic racism following high-profile incidents involving Black Lives Matter. Concurrently, the sports industry navigated severe economic disruptions caused by the pandemic, which forced salary cap reductions, operational volatility, and a reevaluation of revenue streams while simultaneously sparking increased fan engagement and voter registration initiatives. Experts project a recovery by 2022 driven by scalable testing protocols and a renewed focus on community connection, with organizations prioritizing long-term financial literacy and diversity funding over short-term profit to sustain the sector.