Latest Interviews
Showing 1261–1275 of 3,136 interview transcripts.
- All-In Podcast1h 28m
Trump's Cabinet, Google's Quantum Chip, Apple's Flop, TikTok, State of VC
Trump, Keith Rabois, Jacob Helberg, Jason, Friedberg, TheZachEffect, Ferguson, Khan, Benedictevans, Chamath Palihapitiya
Hosts Keith Raboy, Jason Calacanis, and Chamath Palihapitiya analyze the appointment of Jacob Sachs as a top economic advisor, arguing that wealthy entrepreneurs will deploy "founder mode" thinking to dismantle bureaucratic inefficiencies and export US economic philosophy. The discussion contrasts this political shift with major technological milestones, including Google's Willow quantum breakthrough that threatens RSA encryption and Apple's strategic internalization of AI infrastructure amid concerns over organizational decay. Concurrently, the panel evaluates the bipartisan mandate for TikTok's divestment to mitigate national security threats, alongside a recovering venture capital market driven by optimism for AI, crypto regulation, and tariff-based industrial policies.
- Y Combinator38 min
2024: The Year the GPT Wrapper Myth Proved Wrong
Jared Harge, Diana, Harj, Lily Yang, Cheng Cheng, Suk Peng, Yiu, Francesc Campoy Flores, Priyanka Vergadia, Anan, Mark Mandelbaum, Melanie Warrick, Mark Mirchandani, Gary Miles, Leslie Kendrick Magnuson, Harjit
The 2024 startup landscape shifted toward capital-efficient growth, where companies like Opus Clip and Perplexity achieved tens of millions in revenue with under $5M in funding by leveraging open-source models and vertical-specific applications. Enterprise adoption accelerated as AI agents attained enterprise-scale reliability, driving a record-breaking aggregate weekly growth rate of 10% for YC batches while converting pilots to revenue at unprecedented speeds. This ecosystem revival was fueled by regulatory relief, a resurgence of in-person Silicon Valley activity, and a strategic pivot from model monopoly to multi-model orchestration that prioritized product execution over raw compute ownership.
- a16z40 min
Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
Elliot Horowitz outlines a transformative go-to-market strategy that prioritizes organic developer adoption and open-source stability to drive enterprise sales in the database sector. By combining guerrilla marketing, immediate value demonstrations, and a "bottom-up" approach where engineers validate technology before executive buy-in, this model bypasses traditional sales cycles to secure long-term viability. The resulting framework leverages cloud-based consumption pricing and community education to scale from hobbyist projects into critical, mission-critical enterprise infrastructure.
- Goldman Sachs33 min
Investing in Sports: Women’s Sports and the Future
Nicole Pullen Ross, Stacy Sonnenberg, Willow Bay
Goldman Sachs' Stacey Sonnenberg attributes the surging valuation of women's sports to decades of Title IX investment and rising media rights, projecting that WNBA and NWSL franchises could match men's league peers within two decades through patient capital. High-profile acquisitions like Angel City FC's $250 million sale to Bob Iger and Willow Bay highlight strategic shifts toward direct-to-consumer revenue and global expansion to address current market gaps. As ownership groups prioritize facility upgrades and diverse sponsorship activations, the industry anticipates converging growth rates despite a persistent valuation gap between current women's and men's teams.
- a16z25 min
Mastering Your Data with Sajith Wickramasekara
Sajith Wickramasekara, Jorge Conde, Jay Rughani
Founded in 2012 by a software engineer before CRISPR's mainstream adoption, Benchling has scaled into a platform serving over 200,000 scientists across 32 countries with $200 million in annualized revenue. The company evolved from a productivity tool into an essential data infrastructure provider, addressing the critical lack of structured data required to unlock AI's potential for accelerating drug discovery and manufacturing. Future strategies focus on unifying this aggregated data into a cohesive ecosystem to optimize therapeutic development from molecule design through clinical approval.
- a16z12 min
Jobs of the Future: Where Hardware Meets Software
A significant labor market reversal is driving demand for full-stack hardware-software engineers across defense, manufacturing, and energy sectors, yet university curricula remain ill-equipped to supply this hybrid talent. Major industry players including SpaceX, Tesla, and Skydio are bypassing traditional feeder schools to train engineers in-house, creating new roles for technicians and semiconductor specialists while addressing critical shortages caused by mass retirements. To overcome a predicted peak in the hybrid engineer gap within three to five years, startups and established firms are prioritizing vertical supply chain ownership to reduce reliance on imported components and build domestic autonomous manufacturing capabilities.
- The Economist26 min
Intel in slide: a chipmaker on the ropes
Jason Palmer, Shailesh Chitnis, Sarah Lorniuk, John Fasman
Following a $16.5 billion quarterly loss and a 60% stock decline, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger faces potential removal as the semiconductor giant struggles with missed technological inflection points and a failed foundry restructuring strategy. While the company seeks over $100 billion in public and private funding to maintain its role in advanced chip manufacturing, legal and political hurdles complicate potential acquisitions or spin-offs amid geopolitical tensions with China. Simultaneously, the International Criminal Court is examining a Lithuanian referral alleging crimes against humanity by the Belarusian regime, a move that could set a legal precedent for investigating non-signatory states while viral food trends continue to disrupt global supply chains and reshape the culinary entertainment industry.
- The Economist7 min
Could AI build cities in space?
Ed Mayer, Mark Woods, Alok Jha
Leading aerospace organizations and private innovators like Machina Labs and Relativity Space are deploying AI-guided robotics to establish autonomous manufacturing capabilities essential for constructing a trillion-dollar space economy by 2040. These dual-robotic systems and advanced 3D printing technologies address critical communication latency and maintenance challenges by enabling independent decision-making for infrastructure projects on the Moon and Mars. Ultimately, this technological paradigm shift facilitates NASA's Artemis program and private ambitions to transition from temporary exploration to a permanent, multi-planetary human presence.
- a16z32 min
How Zapier Became Profitable in 3 Years and Scaled to $5B with Wade Foster
Founded in 2011 by Wade Foster, Brian, and Mike while at Veterans United, Zapier emerged from a hackathon to help non-technical users integrate SaaS tools like Salesforce and MailChimp. The team achieved early traction by manually engaging forum users, securing their first paying customer Andrew Warner through rapid custom development, and eventually validating demand to gain entry into Y Combinator. By prioritizing a functional, "hand-to-hand" customer obsession over polished products, the founders built a repeatable growth engine that allowed them to scale from a Missouri side project to a national success without traditional venture capital.
- The Economist20 min
Bye, cell: inside a notorious Syrian prison
Jason Palmer, Rosie Blore, Gareth Brown, Henrietta McFarlane, Anne Hanna, Heather Jones, Cristina Chiwin, Oliver Jones
Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime, Syrian rebels and civilians have liberated Saydnaya Prison to uncover evidence of mass executions and systematic torture affecting over 30,000 detainees while Hayat Tahrir al-Sham moves to establish a transitional government. Concurrently, a global surge in spiritual tourism is driving India's sector toward a $59 billion valuation by 2028 and doubling pilgrim numbers on Spain's Camino de Santiago route despite the decline of organized religion. Meanwhile, Manchester City faces a dual crisis as its seven-year domestic dominance ends amidst a five-game losing streak attributed to player exhaustion, compounded by an independent investigation into alleged Premier League financial breaches by its Emirati ownership.
- Goldman Sachs15 min
Marc Benioff on how Salesforce is seizing on AI opportunities
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff positions the company's new AgentForce platform as a critical industry shift designed to replace ineffective AI pilots with autonomous agents that augment existing workforces without requiring proprietary model training. By leveraging a foundational data cloud strategy, the system aims to boost revenue and operational efficiency across sales, service, and marketing while specifically addressing issues like healthcare worker burnout. With the platform set for public release next week, Benioff anticipates an immediate industry-wide adoption as clients gain the ability to deploy custom, high-performing agents that operate with significant speed and security.
- The Economist23 min
Bringing up Bibi: Netanyahu testifies
Bibi, Netanyahu, Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, Anshul Pfeffer, Mark Johnson, Rachel Lloyd, John Fassman, Alexandra Sewich-Bass, Caitlin Tolbert
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a dual crisis as he becomes the first serving Israeli prime minister to testify in a domestic corruption trial while managing war crimes allegations from the International Criminal Court and domestic protests over the Gaza conflict. Concurrently, research reveals that master's degrees in the United Kingdom offer no net financial benefit by age 35, while nearly 40% of US graduate programs yield negative returns after accounting for tuition and opportunity costs. In cultural news, The Economist highlighted four notable 2024 publications ranging from biographies of wartime figures to dystopian satires, underscoring a broader push for greater transparency and regulation in higher education financing.
- Sequoia Capital52 min
Cracking the Code on Offensive Security With AI ft XBOW CEO and GitHub Copilot Creator Oege de Moor
Oege de Moor, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang
Former Oxford professor and GitHub Copilot creator Uge Demore's company Expo deploys an autonomous AI system to automate offensive security testing, achieving an 85% success rate on proprietary benchmarks while matching top human penetration testers in 28 minutes instead of 40 hours. The platform continuously identifies critical vulnerabilities in major financial institutions and replaces traditional $18,000 manual tests with a scalable, subscription-based service designed to outpace AI-assisted cyber threats. Operating on a foundation of proprietary training data and strict cloud-based guardrails, Expo aims to transform web security standards by making continuous, automated offensive testing accessible to organizations of all sizes.
- Goldman Sachs21 min
What investors expect from Trump
A Goldman Sachs survey of over 500 investors reveals that the market anticipates a universal tariff as the primary 2025 macro risk while expecting the 2017 tax cuts to be extended alongside a stabilization of net immigration near 750,000 annually. Although investors assign a 35% probability to a universal tariff and project modest additional tax cuts, their outlook suggests that the inflationary pressure from policy shifts will remain contained, allowing the Federal Reserve to prioritize growth and pursue rate cuts. Goldman Sachs concludes that while temporary growth drag may occur in 2025 due to the earlier implementation of immigration and tariff measures, the long-term growth trajectory will remain largely unchanged as fiscal constraints limit further significant tax or spending expansions.
- a16z13 min
The 2025 AI Search Race
Amidst a $200 billion search market where Google retains 90% share despite a recent monopoly ruling, competitors like Perplexity are surging with 25–30% monthly query growth by offering ad-free, conversational interfaces. This shift is driven by changing consumer behavior, as 60% of users now rely on chatbots for purchase decisions and 10% view AI tools as their primary search engine. While vertical applications and enterprise integration are expected to carve out niches, the long-term forecast predicts a return to digital advertising models that monetize high-intent, AI-generated queries more effectively than traditional keyword searches.