Latest Interviews
Showing 91–105 of 2,999 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Y Combinator50 min
Blake Scholl: How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jet
Founded by Blake Scholl in 2014, Boom Supersonic successfully developed the XB-1, the first privately built jet to break the sound barrier, using a lean team and software-driven engineering to overcome decades of aviation stagnation. This historic flight directly catalyzed a shift in US federal policy, prompting an Executive Order that legalized supersonic flight over land and clearing the path for the upcoming Overture airliner. By vertically integrating manufacturing and creating revenue through ground-based engines, the company aims to double global travel speeds while eliminating the traditional sonic boom barrier.
- Y Combinator39 min
Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"
Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Garry Tan
Sam Altman and Y Combinator highlight an exponential shift in startup capabilities where coding agents reduce development time to mere seconds while hard tech representation in the portfolio surges to 25%. The organization positions itself as a decentralizing force to prevent single-entity control of AI power, explicitly rejecting the "live action role play" mindset in favor of heretical, high-conviction building. Altman warns of safety risks regarding surveillance and model concentration but maintains that widespread founder agency and distributed innovation will ultimately prevent economic collapse or catastrophic safety incidents.
- Milken Institute52 min
Tradewinds: Navigating Economic Uncertainty | Global Conference 2026
Gerard Baker, Whitney Baird, Xavier Bettel, John Denton, Francisco Pérez Mackenna, Michael Roberts, Jerry Baker
A global economic panel consensus identifies a critical inflection point where geopolitical volatility and policy unpredictability are driving nearly $250 billion in annual lost activity while compelling nations to prioritize supply chain resilience over pure free trade. Amidst rising food security threats from conflicts in the Middle East and evolving US-China de-risking strategies, leaders are exploring plurilateral arrangements and technological solutions to manage these disruptions. Ultimately, the event highlights a shift toward strategic autonomy and green energy innovation as essential mechanisms to mitigate inflationary pressures and narrow the widening gap between the Global North and South.
- Y Combinator36 min
Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code’s Prompt
The Opus 5 model release demonstrates a 30% score on the ARC AGI benchmark and unprecedented autonomous endurance by eliminating over 80% of legacy system prompts through an empirical ablation methodology. This shift enabled dynamic workflows where thousands of agents autonomously rewrote complex software stacks like the Bunn runtime and Cloud Code desktop app in mere days. Strategic advice for developers emphasizes replacing rigid prompt engineering with context design and verification protocols to leverage these emergent agentic capabilities effectively.
- Goldman Sachs20 min
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.
- Bank of America21 min
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.
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.
- 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.
- RAISE Summit39 min
The Trillion Dollar Question: Financing AI's Infrastructure | Modular, IREN & More | RAISE 2026
Tim Davis, Kent Draper, James B. Krellenstein, Wayne Nelms, Erwan Menard, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Jeremy, Tim Buckley, James Kallenstein
The AI infrastructure sector is undergoing a structural shift toward extreme capital intensity, prompting neoclouds like Iron and Crusoe to adopt complex financing models that blend investment-grade debt, Microsoft prepayments, and diverse revenue streams such as token sales. Simultaneously, industry leaders are addressing asset lifecycle mismatches and energy bottlenecks by leveraging software-driven fungibility for non-NVIDIA silicon and securing "behind-the-meter" nuclear uprates to bypass regulatory delays. This evolving landscape enables lenders to backstop sub-investment grade counterparts while hyperscalers vertically integrate to capture higher margins, ultimately transforming compute into a standardized, tradable commodity.
- RAISE Summit21 min
Energy and AI: Sustainable, Sovereign Industrial Campuses | Alain Wilmouth, 2CRSi | RAISE 2026
2CRSI advances its direct liquid cooling technology through the ITER consortium to power a French AI gigafactory while addressing energy mandates and carbon sovereignty via biomass gasification. The company plans to scale operations from 42 to 400 megawatts across 17 decentralized European sites by 2030, offering on-premise infrastructure that protects intellectual property against geopolitical restrictions. This strategy leverages unused agricultural land to generate jobs and targets space-deployable server models, positioning the firm as a leader in sustainable, sovereign high-performance computing.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Building Africa's AI Factory: Cassava, Rafay and Sovereign AI | RAISE Summit 2026
Cassava Technologies, a digital solution provider serving over 40 countries, has secured direct investment from NVIDIA and Google to deploy a GPU-rich compute infrastructure across Africa, Latin America, and India. The company distinguishes itself through a custom orchestration layer that democratizes access to AI for students and startups, enabling the development of localized language models and critical sector applications in agriculture and healthcare. With a strategic focus on expanding dark fiber connectivity and green energy integration, Cassava aims to drive economic growth and job creation in emerging markets over the next five years.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Zero Flaps, Zero Excuses: Network Reliability at AI Scale | Credo x TensorWave | RAISE 2026
Credo SVP Phil Kuhman and Tensorwave Co-founder Jeff Tatarchuk discussed the critical role of high-reliability networking in scaling AMD-exclusive GPU clusters, citing a deployment of 8,192 MI325 GPUs supported by Tensorwave's two-gigawatt North American infrastructure. The dialogue highlighted Credo's Zero-Flap transceiver technology, which utilizes rigorous thermal hardening and in-band telemetry to reduce deployment cycles from six weeks to one and eliminate the costly downtime caused by link failures in hyperscale environments like Oracle's. By driving the industry toward a standardized "Purple Cables" architecture that combines copper for short-range reliability with advanced optics for long-haul connectivity, the companies aim to transform networking from a bottleneck into a table-stakes foundation for rapid AI infrastructure revenue.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Inside the AI Inference Cluster: Measuring What Matters | Mansour Karam, Aria Networks | RAISE 2026
The AI infrastructure sector is pivoting from homogeneous general-purpose systems to specialized architectures that optimize distinct model training and serving economics, with high-throughput inference offering potential cost savings of up to 100x. This shift demands deep networking solutions capable of managing dynamic, unpredictable traffic patterns and microsecond-scale latency requirements for complex agent workflows. Leading this transition, ARIA proposes a multi-layered AI agent architecture that integrates full-stack telemetry to dynamically coordinate hardware, software, and network operations across immediate physical reactions and long-term strategic planning.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Where We're Going We Don't Need Keyboards, Just Voice | Neil Zeghidour, Gradium | RAISE 2026
Gradium, a spin-off of the frontier research lab Qtize, is commercializing full-duplex voice AI models like "Moshi" to replace traditional keyboard interfaces with natural, real-time human-machine interaction. By utilizing single audio-to-audio architectures that eliminate turn-taking latency, the Paris-based company enables seamless agentic tasks ranging from customer support to industrial robotics in noisy environments. With recent funding to expand into San Francisco and open-source model access, Gradium aims to establish voice as the primary operating system for always-on, asynchronous agent networks.