Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 131 transcripts.
Clear all filters- a16z50 min
How to Spot Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else
Erik Torenberg, Josh Elman, Olivia Moore, David Booth
Cosign is a new digital platform designed to formalize professional reputation by replacing binary social connections with granular, peer-to-peer endorsements that validate career impact, crisis-level trust, and future potential. Leveraging AI to aggregate public data and a strictly positive feed, the system constructs durable professional profiles that allow early endorsers to build social capital as their mentees succeed. Unlike existing networks, Cosign targets the tech and startup ecosystem with a "living directory" model that prioritizes relationship depth over volume, aiming to make talent discovery a permanent and searchable asset.
- a16z43 min
Why Education Has to Change
Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg, Gagan Biyani
Horowitz and Jason Academy is launching a for-profit educational entity in the San Francisco Bay Area under CEO Gagan Biyani to train Gen Z builders through an immersive, output-driven curriculum aligned with AI era demands. The program partners with industry leaders like Nvidia and Stripe to integrate real-world problem-solving and leadership development, replacing traditional lectures with a "pull model" that prioritizes tangible creation over memorization. By operating as a market-aligned entity, the Academy aims to produce high-impact graduates capable of launching companies or securing elite roles, ultimately serving as a scalable blueprint for future educational innovation.
- Jane Street1h 6m
Trustworthy Human-AI Collaboration in a Live Type-Theoretic Computational Commons
Hazel addresses the "gap problem" in traditional programming by implementing a live execution environment that uses visual "holes" for error recovery and instant probes to provide immediate feedback on code changes. The system enforces a pure functional design with incremental memoization to enable real-time data flow analysis, while integrating advanced security measures like object capabilities and formal verification to safely coordinate human-AI collaboration. Future iterations aim to solve scalability challenges in multi-agent development through content-addressed versioning and semantic models, ultimately supporting a computational commons where code and data evolve together in a shared, verifiable state.
Inside the Factory Building America’s Autonomous Navy
Austin-based maritime autonomy firm Ceronic is deploying a $3.2 billion capital injection to construct Port Alpha in Brownsville, Texas, a massive new shipyard designed to scale U.S. shipbuilding capacity from 100,000 to over 2 million gross tons. Backed by a total valuation of $9.25 billion and a recent $392 million U.S. Navy contract, the company aims to create over 10,000 jobs while deploying its proven Corsair and Mirage autonomous vessels for critical defense operations. This strategic expansion leverages a "hardware-software co-design" philosophy to address the nation's shipbuilding deficit and replicate production capabilities across allied nations.
- Y Combinator15 min
The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew
Gustaf Alströmer, Anders Forslund, Clara
Heart Aerospace successfully flight-tested the world's largest electric airplane, a 100-foot wingspan aircraft capable of carrying 36 passengers on short-haul routes with minimal operating costs. Led by CEO Anders Forslund and co-founder Clara, the Los Angeles-based team utilized a hybrid configuration to achieve a 500-mile range while significantly reducing maintenance and noise through the replacement of traditional jet engines with electric motors. This clean-sheet design, which marks the first new American airliner in 18 years, aims to replace inefficient regional jets by leveraging existing airport infrastructure and capitalizing on current advancements in battery technology.
Inside Bridgit Mendler’s New 185,000 sqft Northwood Space Factory
Northwood has secured over $136 million in funding and a nearly $50 million government contract to deploy a modular ground network designed to modernize neglected satellite infrastructure with cost-effective, cellular-grade components. Operating from an 180,000-square-foot El Segundo facility equipped with an anechoic chamber, the company integrates full-stack antenna and software engineering to provide flexible, geographically diverse connectivity for both commercial and sovereign space programs. Under CEO Bridget Menler's leadership, the organization aims to transition to self-sustaining revenue by solving legacy procurement gaps and supporting the upcoming surge in tens of thousands of satellites.
RKLB Factory Tour: Satellites, Spacecraft & Mission Control
Sir Peter Beck, Peter Beck, Molly O'Shea
Founded in 2006 by Sir Peter Beck, Rocket Lab has grown from a New Zealand startup into a global space platform provider with operations across five continents and a $1 billion valuation achieved in 2017. The company distinguishes itself through vertically integrated manufacturing and full supply chain control, enabling reliable 12-year missions for NASA's Artemis and Mars programs while avoiding the pitfalls that doomed heavily funded competitors. Following its 2021 public listing, Rocket Lab now manages a multi-generational strategy that supports complex interplanetary exploration and undisclosed national security programs alongside its Neutron rocket development.
- Y Combinator15 min
Circleback CEO Ali Haghani: Why Your Company Should Be Recording More Meetings
Circleback, a YC Winter 24 batch company, functions as an AI-driven "company brain" that records, transcribes, and orchestrates team conversations to automatically generate notes and update CRM systems. Founder Ali employs the platform to manage recruitment pipelines and partner relationships while utilizing a specialized workflow that combines AI-generated code with strategic oversight to accelerate product development. The organization is simultaneously establishing rigorous governance protocols for autonomous agents and shifting its operational focus toward high-leverage decision-making as it transitions from manual coding to AI orchestration.
- Y Combinator56 min
How To Design In The Agent Era
Led by Stephen Haney, Paper is an AI-native design platform currently ranking as the third most-used tool behind Figma and Sketch, utilizing a native HTML and CSS rendering engine to facilitate precise agent collaboration. The application distinguishes itself by treating code as the single source of truth, offering features like direct React component handoff and an MCP server that allows autonomous agents to manipulate local repositories and design canvases. While the team prioritizes human curation to maintain design quality against common AI aesthetic pitfalls, the platform is rapidly evolving into a visual coordination layer for the broader agent ecosystem by integrating tools like Paper Shaders and multi-model image generation.
- a16z13 min
The Nuclear Renaissance - Radiant | a16z American Dynamism
Tori Shivanandan, Doug Bernauer
Radiant Energy is developing the transportable Kaleidos micro-reactor, a modular nuclear power unit designed to replace aging infrastructure and support applications ranging from AI data centers to deep space exploration. Founded by former SpaceX engineer Doug Kim, the company leverages a factory-built assembly line model to deliver plug-and-play energy modules with a five-year fuel cycle, aiming to conduct its first full-power test at Idaho National Laboratory's Dome by 2026. This initiative seeks to restore U.S. energy independence and accelerate nuclear innovation by overcoming historical regulatory stagnation through a commitment to aggressive safety testing and mass production.
Inside the Factory Behind Base Power's $1B Series D
Base Power recently secured a $1 billion Series D funding round led by Ribbit and JPMorgan Chase, establishing a $13 billion valuation to accelerate production of its high-capacity BaseCore home battery system. The vertically integrated manufacturer is scaling operations at its Austin facility to 4,000 units weekly, featuring a modular design that enables full-home backup power in under two hours per unit. This growth supports a strategic rollout of both direct consumer sales and utility partnership models across key regional markets as the company prepares to open a second factory near the Austin airport.
- 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 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.
- RAISE Summit19 min
What's New for Startups with Google DeepMind? | Omar Sanseviero | RAISE Summit 2026
Omar Sanseviero of Google DeepMind outlined the strategic expansion of the Gemini ecosystem, highlighting the release of Gemini 3.5 Flash, the imminent Gemini 2.5 Pro, and advanced GenMedia models like NanoBanana 2 Lite for rapid image generation. The presentation detailed critical infrastructure updates including the Gemma 4 open model family, which achieved over 250 million downloads on consumer hardware, alongside new real-time APIs for low-latency voice translation and live visual analysis. These advancements collectively aim to accelerate the transition from prompt to production by empowering developers to build complex agentic workflows and specialized applications in sectors ranging from robotics to environmental monitoring.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Running Secure Agents on Multi-Tenant Sovereign AI Infrastructure | Protopia AI x HPE | RAISE 2026
Eiman Ebrahimi, María Ridruejo, Maria Redrojo, Imon Ibrahini
Protopia AI and HPE AI Services have introduced the Stained Glass Transform, a privacy-preserving technology that converts sensitive data into randomized, non-reversible representations before they enter multi-tenant AI factories. This innovation, integrated through the SafeClaw subagent architecture, enables agentic workflows to run on shared infrastructure without compromising security or suffering the GPU underutilization associated with traditional hardware isolation. Consequently, sovereign providers and neoclouds can unlock significant revenue by processing high-volume sensitive workloads with near-baseline latency, addressing the critical gap between data ownership and economic efficiency in modern AI deployment.