Dmitry Shevelenko is Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. He previously co-founded Tortoise, a robotics and commerce automation startup and held business development roles at Uber, LinkedIn, and Meta. He also serves on the board of Lazard. In this episode of Summation, Dmitry and Auren discuss: Why CEOs and executives are Perplexity Computer’s biggest power users and what that says about who wins the AI era Scaling Perplexity past $500M ARR with only 34% headcount growth The $34.5B Chrome bid a...
May 19, 2026•1 hr
Ben Miller is the co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, an alternative asset management platform that gives individual investors access to private real estate, private credit, and venture capital. In March 2026, he listed the Fundrise Innovation Fund on the NYSE under the ticker VCX, one of the first publicly traded venture capital funds. VCX gives retail investors direct exposure to private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and SpaceX. The fund manages over $650 million and has over 100,0...
May 12, 2026•1 hr 2 min
Ralph Goff is a 35-year veteran of the CIA, having served as a six-time Chief of Station across Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia. During his career, he also held the roles of Chief of Operations for Europe and Eurasia and Chief of the CIA's National Resources Division. Since leaving government, he advises on national security issues and speaks publicly on intelligence, geopolitics, and great power competition. In this episode of Summation, Ralph and Auren discuss: Why blackmai...
May 05, 2026•1 hr 5 min
Glenn Youngkin was the 74th Governor of Virginia. Before politics, he spent nearly 25 years at The Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, where he rose to co-CEO. During his four-year term, Virginia generated $10B in surplus revenue, delivered $9B in tax relief, attracted $156B in capital investment, and became one of the first states in the country to mandate cell-phone-free classrooms. In this episode of Summation, Glenn and Auren discuss: Why every Virginia state...
Apr 28, 2026•58 min
Marco Zappacosta is the co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, the home services marketplace he started in 2008. Thumbtack connects homeowners to 300,000+ local service professionals, with nearly 100M projects started on the platform. In this episode of Summation, Marco and Auren discuss: Why home services is bigger than groceries but barely any is booked online How AI collapsed Thumbtack's product pod sizes Why Silicon Valley underrates leadership and overrates management The single trait to screen e...
Apr 21, 2026•59 min
Eric Ries created the Lean Startup methodology and authored the bestselling book of the same name, which has sold over a million copies. He's also the founder and executive chairman of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the co-founder of Answer AI (an AI R&D lab), and the author of the upcoming book Incorruptible , releasing May 26th. In this episode of Summation, Eric and Auren discuss: why "bad governance" companies have outperformed "good governance" since 2008 financial gravity - the invisibl...
Apr 14, 2026•59 min
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg became Germany's youngest Minister of Defense in history, and previously served as Minister of Economics and Technology. He is the chairman and founder of Spitzberg Partners, an investment and advisory firm, a bestselling author, and co-founder of Open Minds Media, where he produces films and podcasts. He co-hosts one of Germany's most popular podcasts. In this episode of Summation, KT and Auren discuss: Why Germany's defense spending hovered at 1% of GDP for decades a...
Apr 07, 2026•1 hr 1 min
Pat Gelsinger is the former CEO of Intel and longtime Silicon Valley leader. He joins Auren to unpack the forces reshaping technology, geopolitics and leadership. After more than 30 years at Intel (including serving as its first CTO) and nearly a decade as CEO of VMware, Pat now sits at the intersection of deep tech and purpose-driven innovation as executive chair and head of technology at Gloo and general partner at Playground Global. In this episode of Summation, Pat and Auren discuss: Why the...
Mar 31, 2026•58 min
Vlad Tenev (Robinhood co-founder/CEO) and Tudor Achim (former helm.ai CTO) are the founders of Harmonic, an AI lab pioneering the path toward mathematical superintelligence. Together, they developed Aristotle, a model that eliminates hallucinations by reasoning in Lean code rather than natural language. By shifting from probabilistic guesses to formal logic, Aristotle produces 100% verified mathematical outputs. The model recently demonstrated its breakthrough capabilities by achieving gold-meda...
Mar 24, 2026•49 min
John Allen is a retired four-star Marine Corps general who commanded 150,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan and built a 65-nation coalition as Special Presidential Envoy to the Global Coalition Against ISIS. After retiring from the military, he led the Brookings Institution as its president. He co-invented the term "hyperwar," holds five AI patents, and co-authored Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence . He currently serves as a strategic advisor to Microsoft. In t...
Mar 17, 2026•55 min
Adrian Aoun helped found Torch, a health data platform that was acquired by OpenAI earlier this year. He's also the co-founder of Seneca, which raised $60 million to build autonomous drones for wildfire suppression. Adrian previously founded Forward Health. He previously led special projects for Larry Page at Google, where he founded Sidewalk Labs and helped build Google's AI division. In this episode of Summation, Adrian and Auren discuss: Why curing all cancer adds only ~3 years of life but in...
Mar 10, 2026•54 min
Tod Sacerdoti is the CEO and co-founder of Pipedream, which recently sold to Workday. Tod is also a general partner at Flex Capital, where he's invested in over 400 companies including Chime, Vercel, Replit, CodeRabbit, Mercury, and many others. He previously founded BrightRoll, a programmatic video advertising platform that sold to Yahoo for $640 million in 2014. In this episode of Summation, Tod and Auren discuss: Why seed investing has the highest annualized returns of any venture asset class...
Mar 03, 2026•1 hr 2 min
Nirav Tolia is the co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor (NYSE: NXDR), the neighborhood social network with over 105 million users across 350,000 communities worldwide. After stepping down as CEO in 2018, he returned to lead the company in 2024. In this episode of Summation, Nirav and Auren discuss: Why success kills innovation The death of physical community Why Nextdoor had to change their stock ticker Insider vs Outsider entrepreneurs You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @ auren and Nirav Tolia on X a...
Feb 24, 2026•58 min
Lieutenant General Mike Fenzel recently retired as a three-star Army General. He most recently served as the United States Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, navigating one of the world’s most complex geopolitical landscapes. His career is defined by high-stakes leadership, ranging from the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, where he was stationed in the bunker alongside Vice President Dick Cheney, to multiple deployments to Afghanistan, to commanding ...
Feb 17, 2026•42 min
Martin Shkreli is the co-founder of DL Software, the parent company of Godel Terminal , a Bloomberg competitor for financial data. He previously founded the biotech companies Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals and the hedge fund MSMB Capital Management. In this episode of Summation, Martin and Auren discuss: The structural reasons fintech is less competitive than other industries How drug discovery actually works (and doing it from prison) Why AI labs are now out-recruiting hedge funds What Ma...
Feb 11, 2026•1 hr 2 min
World of DaaS is now Summation with Auren Hoffman. While we’re proud of our roots in the data world, our conversations have evolved. Summation better reflects our obsession with finding the non-obvious ideas that shape our world. What’s changing? Just the name. You’ll still get the same insights from the world’s most influential founders, investors, and thinkers. If you’re already a subscriber, you’re all set. If you’re new here, welcome. Hit subscribe and join us! Our first episode as Summation...
Feb 09, 2026•1 min
Jonathan Siddharth is the founder and CEO of Turing, a $2.2 billion AI company that provides coding and reasoning data to train frontier models for OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic and more. Turing’s mission is to accelerate superintelligence to drive economic growth. In this episode of World of DaaS, Jonathan and Auren discuss: How Turing creates expert data for frontier models Why SaaS is dying in the age of AI agents Disrupting the $30 trillion market for digital knowledge work Building a stag...
Feb 03, 2026•42 min
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz is the co-founder and CEO of Chapter, an AI-powered Medicare navigation platform valued at $1.5 billion that helps seniors navigate coverage and enrollment. In this episode of World of DaaS, Cobi and Auren discuss: Why medicare fraud costs over $100 billion annually How 24,000 medicare plans create impossible choices for seniors Why government tech keeps failing with Accenture contracts Provider network data accuracy and AI solutions You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @aure...
Jan 27, 2026•42 min
Hans Swildens is a partner and Head of Industry Ventures at Goldman Sachs. Industry Ventures is one of the pioneers in the secondary market for venture capital, managing several billion in assets across LP stakes, direct secondaries, and primary fund investments. In October of 2025, Goldman Sachs announced they were acquiring Industry Ventures in a deal worth over $900 million dollars. In this episode of World of DaaS, Hans and Auren discuss: The evolution of secondaries from distressed deals to...
Jan 20, 2026•54 min
Glenn Hubbard is Dean Emeritus and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School. He served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003 and was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at the U.S. Treasury. He has served on the boards of BlackRock, ADP, MetLife, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In this episode of World of DaaS, Glenn and Auren discuss: Why consumer sentiment contradicts economic ind...
Jan 12, 2026•42 min
Omar Tawakol is the CEO and founder of Rembrand , an AI-powered virtual product placement company. He founded BlueKai, a data management platform acquired by Oracle for $400M+ in 2014, and Voicera, an AI meeting assistant acquired by Cisco in 2019. He currently serves on the board of The Trade Desk and as a General Partner at super{set} . In this episode of World of DaaS, Omar and Auren discuss: Why virtual billboards work better than 3D product placement How AI eliminates two-year product place...
Jan 06, 2026•53 min
This episode is a rebroadcast of Auren's appearance on the We the Builders podcast . We The Builders: https://twitter.com/WeThe_Builders Host Suffiyan Malik: https://twitter.com/suffiyanmalikk Substack: https://wethebuilders.us --------------------------------------------------- This week I sat down with Auren Hoffman founder, builder, prolific investor, and one of the most connected people in Silicon Valley. Today’s episode features Auren Hoffman founder of LiveRamp ($RAMP), Flex Capital, Dialo...
Dec 30, 2025•1 hr 44 min
Craig Fuller is the founder and CEO of FreightWaves, a freight media company, and SONAR, a supply chain data platform. He’s also the founder of Firecrown, which owns more than 50 publications across aviation, marine, and supply chain sectors, and he recently released his first book, Moving the World: How the Supply Chain’s Evolution Affects Us All . In this episode of World of DaaS, Craig and Auren discuss: How FreightWaves predicted the 2022 freight recession Why pricing data businesses trade a...
Dec 23, 2025•52 min
Tanay Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow , a voice-first AI assistant that recently raised $56 million in Series A funding. In this episode of World of DaaS, Tanay and Auren discuss: Why Apple and Google's dictation tools fail What AI-first devices will actually look like Pivoting from hardware to software Voice replacing nearly three-quarters of keyboard usage Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and ...
Dec 16, 2025•36 min
Microsoft is investing $17.5 billion to turn India into a global AI powerhouse — from training 20 million workers to building new data infrastructure. We break down what this means for the future of AI talent, innovation, and digital sovereignty. Listen to this short podcast summary, powered by NotebookLM.
Dec 12, 2025•13 min
Vinicius Vacanti is the co-founder and CEO of YipitData, an alternative data intelligence platform that analyzes billions of consumer data points daily for institutional investors and corporations. The company reached unicorn status with a $475 million Series E from Carlyle Group in 2021. In this episode of World of DaaS, Vin and Auren discuss: Why hedge funds dominate data usage versus corporations How AI is transforming data processing costs The durability of data businesses over 120 years Why...
Dec 09, 2025•52 min
This week’s World of DaaS LM Brief: MIT’s new research reveals how large language models can be fooled by their own grammar. By prioritizing sentence structure over sense, these systems risk producing confident but misleading outputs—and even ignoring built-in safety rules. Listen to this short podcast summary, powered by NotebookLM.
Dec 05, 2025•15 min•Ep. 17
Patrick McGee is the author of Apple in China , which was named one of the most notable books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. The book is a deeply reported investigation into how Apple and China built each other over 25 years—and what that means for technology, supply chains, and geopolitics. Patrick has been a reporter with the Financial Times since 2013. In this episode of World of DaaS, Patrick and Auren discuss: Why Foxconn bet everything on Apple when others walke...
Dec 02, 2025•57 min
Dave Morin is co-founder and managing partner of Offline Ventures, a venture fund and studio backed by Apple as anchor investor. He was an early employee at Facebook, then founded the mobile social network Path. In this episode of World of DaaS, Dave and Auren discuss: Why Meta's AI ads work while Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify fail at recommendations How Offline runs its venture fund/studio hybrid Parasocial relationships and the loneliness crisis Depression as the #1 disease by 2030 and breakthr...
Nov 25, 2025•1 hr 2 min
This week’s World of DaaS LM Brief highlights a Forbes piece on enterprise AI infrastructure, where the author examines why data pipelines, not the models themselves, are becoming the real bottleneck. Listen to this short podcast summary, powered by NotebookLM....
Nov 21, 2025•17 min•Ep. 16
