Latest Interviews
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Clear all filters- a16z47 min
Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Erik Torenberg, Chris Best, Katherine Boyle, Andrew Chen
Amidst the 2020–2021 media crisis marked by mass de-platforming, Substack emerged as a critical infrastructure protecting free speech by enabling independent writers to monetize directly through a full-stack network of newsletters, podcasts, and video tools. Capitalizing on a $100 million investment to rebuild its internal systems, the company differentiates itself through an "exit-right" policy, an algorithm designed to surface long-form content rather than drive engagement, and AI integrations that lower production barriers without sacrificing quality. By fostering a "rebundling" of media where top creators earn multi-million dollar salaries independent of corporate hierarchies, Substack aims to establish a permanent alternative to the addictive, algorithmic dominance of legacy social platforms.
- Goldman Sachs23 min
After a Summer of Stablecoins, What’s Next?
Brian Brooks, Barry Eichengreen, Allison Nathan
The U.S. "Genius Act" establishes a comprehensive federal framework for stablecoins that mandates full backing by high-quality assets like U.S. Treasury bills while subjecting issuers to national bank-style supervision. Key figures Brian Brooks and Barry Eichengreen debate the legislation's efficacy, with Brooks advocating for private innovation and treasury demand growth while Eichengreen warns of systemic risks to the singleness of money and potential taxpayer liabilities. Despite these conflicting views on financial stability, the regulatory clarity is expected to dismantle existing market monopolies and accelerate mass adoption across savings, remittances, and commercial payment sectors.
- Sequoia Capital50 min
Deal Velocity, Not Billable Hours: How Crosby Uses AI to Redefine Legal Contracting
Crosby, Ryan Daniels, John Sarihan, Josephine Chen
Crosby operates as an AI-first law firm that replaces traditional software models with an integrated service where lawyers and engineers collaborate side-by-side to automate contract review. By rejecting the billable hour in favor of per-document pricing and deploying specialized AI agents alongside human oversight, the firm accelerates negotiation lifecycles to enable single-turn resolutions. This structural innovation targets the underserved "long tail" of legal work, democratizing high-quality contract services while redefining junior attorney roles as managers of autonomous AI systems.
- Milken Institute1h 0m
The Evolving Landscape of Asset-Based Finance and Securities Products | Global Conference 2025
Ted Seides, Matt Miller, Jack Neumark, Madelaine O'Connell, Jason Steiner, Edwin Wilches
Leading Asset-Based Finance managers including representatives from PGM, PIMCO, HPS, Fortress, and Bayview defined the sector as "private credit 2.0," focusing on securitizable income-generating assets like real estate and esoteric receivables to diversify beyond traditional corporate loans. While the panel consensus identifies homeowner resilience as a key defense against downturns, experts warn of rising subprime auto risks, FICO score distortions, and dangerous spread compression driven by record capital influx from insurers and pension funds. To navigate these dynamics, the group outlined divergent strategies ranging from maintaining "rent" models with originators to pursuing complex illiquid structures, all while emphasizing the necessity of rigorous forward-looking scenario analysis to manage deteriorating covenants and liquidity premiums.
Apple in China: Tim Cook’s $275B Pledge | Patrick McGee
Tim Cook, Patrick McGee, Molly O'Shea
Patrick McGee analyzes Apple's $275 billion projected investment in China against Tim Cook's data-driven management style, arguing that the tech giant's reliance on a unique manufacturing ecosystem has inadvertently enabled Chinese competitors like Huawei and Xiaomi to dominate the global smartphone market. While Apple trained its supply chain to meet rigorous design standards that defied local capabilities, the speaker contends this strategic partnership has created an inescapable dependency where China "encircled" the company by leveraging transferred technology and a massive floating workforce. Consequently, the analysis suggests that relocating production to the U.S. or India remains unfeasible due to the maturity of these competitors, leaving Apple exposed to geopolitical risks despite its efforts to bypass joint ventures with direct investment pledges.
- Milken Institute1h 2m
M&A Metamorphosis: How Private Capital and Tech Are Reshaping Financial Markets | Global Conference
Romaine Bostick, Anu Aiyengar, Aly Alibhai, Vanessa Dager, Jason Greenberg, Andrea Guerzoni, Ali
Driven by political uncertainty and tariff-related volatility following the new U.S. administration's policies, global M&A volumes have declined significantly despite a previously robust 57% CEO appetite for deals. Current market dynamics favor selective, smaller transactions under $5 billion and continuation vehicles as corporations prioritize internal resilience and navigate heightened regulatory scrutiny across tech and cross-border sectors. While deal processes have stretched to years due to valuation renegotiations, industry experts maintain cautious optimism that activity may normalize in the second half of the year once policy clarity emerges.
- Milken Institute1h 2m
Investing in a Shifting Economic Climate: The Asia-Pacific Outlook | Global Conference 2025
Sarah Williamson, Mohamed Albadr, David Elia, Kate Galvin, Vasyl Nair, Pandu Sjahrir, David Allier
Global institutional investors from Mubadala, Host Plus, Victorian FMC, Danantara, and TeamSuper convened to discuss diverging portfolio strategies amid US political uncertainty and a strategic pivot toward Asia-Pacific growth. Key participants outlined shifts ranging from Mubadala's 25% target for Asia exposure and Danantara's $1 trillion consolidation to Victorian FMC's active hedging of dollar risk against geopolitical fragility. The panel ultimately advised maintaining multi-decade horizons while prioritizing valuation discipline and geographic diversification to navigate a market defined by sector rotation and enduring reserve currency dynamics.
- All-In Podcast1h 32m
Trump Takes On the Fed, US-Intel Deal, Why Bankruptcies Are Up, OpenAI's Longevity Breakthrough
Trump, Jason, Chamath, Biden, Warren, Hickenlooper, Friedberg
The fourth annual All-In Summit brings together venture capitalists and policymakers in Los Angeles to debate the political control of the Federal Reserve following President Trump's firing of Governor Lisa Cook and a government equity stake in Intel. Panelists including David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya criticized central bank independence while discussing a potential shift toward sovereign wealth funds and emerging AI-driven breakthroughs in aging research. The event also featured announcements for Foundry University's expansion into Riyadh and highlighted pressing economic challenges such as the commercial real estate debt wall and rising corporate bankruptcies.
- Milken Institute56 min
Mindfulness as Medicine: A Path to Resilience and Inner Peace | Global Conference 2025
Avanti Kumar-Singh, Mary Fisher, David Kessler, Hala Khouri, Big Sean
Four experts including Mary Fisher, David Kessler, Hala Khoury, and Big Sean convened to redefine mindfulness as an active, embodied practice essential for healing, social justice, and connecting across generational divides. The panelists argued that isolation is a primary trauma, advocating instead for community-based holding and reframing conflict as a catalyst for growth to transform personal loss into collective resilience. Drawing on their respective experiences with the HIV crisis, the grief process, systemic inequality, and parental legacy, the speakers promoted specific grounding rituals and resources like Grief.com to support post-traumatic growth.
- RAISE Summit13 min
Alison Wagonfeld @ Google Cloud: Marketing in the AI Era
Google Cloud marketing is pivoting from theoretical planning to active AI execution, targeting key challenges like staffing shortages and budget constraints through tools such as generative asset creation and the VO3 video model. This shift has redirected 75% of team focus toward strategic work while replacing expensive traditional production with self-service agents and real-time personalization features like location-aware digital billboards. As the industry enters a predicted "golden age of marketing," leaders are urged to embrace these transformative capabilities beyond simple workflow digitization to redefine customer interaction within the next two years.
- Y Combinator13 min
OpenAI vs. Deepseek vs. Qwen: Comparing Open Source LLM Architectures
OpenAI, Alibaba Cloud, and DeepSeek have each launched significant open-weight language models featuring distinct Mixture of Experts architectures and advanced long-context capabilities. While OpenAI's GPT-OSS prioritizes inference efficiency on consumer hardware, Alibaba's Qwen 3 introduces flexible dense and sparse variants with dual reasoning modes, and DeepSeek's V3.1 achieves superior memory efficiency through Multi-Head Latent Attention. Despite differing engineering strategies for scaling and alignment, all three families demonstrate comparable performance benchmarks derived from trillions of tokens and complex post-training pipelines.
Inside the $750B+ Thiel Fellowship
Thiel, Danielle Strachman, Molly O’Shea
Launched in 2010 to challenge the necessity of traditional higher education, the Teal Fellowship provided unrestricted $100,000 grants to under-22-year-olds based on their ambition and ability to execute immediately rather than academic credentials. The program generated over $550 billion in value through its diverse cohort, featuring notable figures like Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Figma founder Dylan Field, and Anthropic co-founder Chris Ola who leveraged the opportunity to pursue high-impact ventures outside the conventional corporate or academic paths. By validating a direct patronage model and popularizing the gap year, the initiative has influenced global youth funding strategies and paved the way for future funds like the 1517 Fund to support even younger deep-tech founders.
- All-In Podcast13 min
The Brutal Truth About Ending The Ukraine War - David Sacks
David Sacks, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Nick, Jake
President Trump is credited with reestablishing U.S.-Russian diplomatic channels to negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement grounded in Ukraine's exclusion from NATO, acceptance of territorial realities, and recognition that a return to pre-war borders is unfeasible. This initiative challenges the current Ukrainian leadership and European allies to align with a shifting public mandate that has seen willingness to continue fighting drop from 70% to 24% over two years. While strategic pressure on global oil markets and increased arms sales bolster the United States' leverage, the summit's success remains contingent on the Ukrainian elite's willingness to compromise on territorial and security concessions.
- Sequoia Capital15 min
The $10 Trillion AI Revolution: Why It’s Bigger Than the Industrial Revolution
Sequoia Capital frames the current AI landscape as a "cognitive revolution" poised to expand the $10 trillion U.S. services market by applying the "specialization imperative" to transform general-purpose infrastructure into specific high-value applications. The firm targets startups like Harvey, Factory, and Nominal that deliver tangible leverage in professional roles, while anticipating a shift in investment metrics toward real-world performance, reinforcement learning, and compute efficiency per knowledge worker. Looking 12 to 18 months ahead, Sequoia prioritizes breakthroughs in persistent memory, autonomous agent communication protocols, AI voice interfaces, and comprehensive security layers to accelerate the creation of large-scale public service companies.
- Jane Street1h 1m
Will Crichton: Rust for Everyone!
Will Creighton's research at the Cognitive Engineering Lab applies human-centered design and formal cognitive theories to address fundamental learning and debugging barriers in Rust. By developing three core tools—Aquascope for visualizing ownership permissions, Argus for interactive trait solver trees, and Flow History for precise program slicing—the team achieved a 9-point score increase in learner assessments and a threefold speedup in error localization during user studies. Future efforts are now directed toward resolving async/await complexities and promoting extensible IDE frameworks like CodeMirror to further advance a scientific approach to programming language design.