Yash Patil is the 23-year-old founder and CEO of Applied Compute, a $1.3 billion company helping businesses train custom AI models on their own data: smaller, cheaper, and purpose-built for the work they actually do. Before founding the company, Yash dropped out of Stanford and spent two years at OpenAI working on post-training infrastructure and Codex. He left with one core conviction: every company that runs its critical workflows on someone else’s model is building on shifting sand. Applied C...
Jun 23, 2026•1 hr 8 min
Bryon Hargis is the co-founder and CEO of Castelion, a defense startup building low-cost hypersonic missiles designed to be manufactured at scale. Before founding Castelion, Bryon spent more than a decade at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and nearly six years at SpaceX, where he worked on national security space programs and saw firsthand how iterative engineering and manufacturing speed could reshape aerospace. Castelion’s first missile, Blackbeard, is slated for integration on the Na...
Jun 02, 2026•1 hr 16 min
Davide Asnaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Diode , a Brooklyn-based startup using AI to design and manufacture circuit boards in the United States. Before Diode, Davide worked on Apple’s Special Projects Group and spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen studying Asia’s electronics manufacturing ecosystem. That experience convinced him that PCB design, despite powering everything from smartphones and satellites to medical devices and autonomous systems, remained one of the most overlooked layers of...
May 19, 2026•1 hr 12 min
Cyan Banister has built one of the most distinctive early-stage track records of the last fifteen years, with early bets on companies like Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Niantic, and Postmates. Today, she is co-founder and general partner at Long Journey Ventures , where she backs what she calls “magical weirdos.” Banister describes herself as a professional daydreamer, running constant thought experiments and paying close attention to signals others ignore. In this episode, she explains how that minds...
May 05, 2026•1 hr 13 min
For decades, drug discovery has shifted away from nature and toward biology-first approaches. Viswa Colluru believes that shift was a catastrophic mistake. His company, Enveda Biosciences, has raised over $500 million to build a “search engine for nature’s chemistry.” The mission is personal: he grew up around his father’s pharmacy in India and later lost his mother to a treatable cancer whose medicine his family couldn’t afford. Many life-changing medicines, including morphine, aspirin, and met...
Apr 21, 2026•1 hr 23 min
Tudor Achim is the co-founder and CEO of Harmonic, a startup working to solve one of AI’s hardest problems: mathematical reasoning. In July 2024, Harmonic achieved gold-medal-level performance on International Math Olympiad problems alongside systems from OpenAI and Google DeepMind—but with a key difference: every proof Harmonic submitted was formally verified. Tudor's path to Harmonic wound through competitive piano, computational biology, and autonomous driving. He studied at Carnegie Mellon's...
Apr 14, 2026•1 hr 5 min
Anil Varanasi, co-founder and CEO of Meter, is building a new kind of networking company for the AI era. Alongside his brother Sunil, he has helped raise more than $250 million to challenge incumbents like Cisco with a vertically integrated approach spanning hardware, software, deployment, and ongoing operations, all delivered through a utility-style model. His view is that networking has remained largely unchanged for decades, even as it has become foundational to everything from AI workloads t...
Apr 07, 2026•1 hr 11 min
Much of the fear around AI centers on misalignment – the idea that powerful systems might act against human interests. Vincent Weisser worries about something different: what happens if advanced AI systems are perfectly aligned with the interests of a small group of institutions? That concern led him to co-found Prime Intellect, a startup building open infrastructure for training and deploying advanced AI models. Before Prime Intellect, Weisser helped organize Vitalik Buterin’s Zuzalu experiment...
Mar 24, 2026•1 hr 19 min
Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence , a robotics company building a general-purpose “AI brain for the physical world.” The company has raised more than $1 billion in funding to develop foundation models that allow robots to operate across many machines, environments, and tasks rather than being programmed for a single purpose. The core thesis: the same scaling dynamics that transformed language models may also unlock robotic intelligence. But only if you resist every...
Mar 17, 2026•1 hr 14 min
For decades, America’s electrical system has rewarded utilities for building more infrastructure, not for lowering costs. The result is a grid that expanded but rarely improved. Zach Dell , co-founder and CEO of Base, is building a different kind of power company. In under three years, Base has grown into a vertically integrated business valued in the billions. It combines home batteries and software to store electricity when it is cheap and deliver it when demand spikes. Dell’s interest in ener...
Mar 10, 2026•1 hr 12 min
Eve Bodnia is the co-founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence, which is developing energy-based reasoning models (EBMs) as an alternative to large language models. She argues that LLMs, which operate by recognizing and recombining patterns within language space, are structurally incapable of genuine reasoning. Eve's alternative: Kona — an EBM that reasons in abstract latent space, learns rules about the world rather than surface patterns, and can interface with language models as one output chann...
Feb 24, 2026•1 hr 8 min
In 2013, on an Estonian island of just 10,000 residents, a teenager borrowed €5,000 from his parents and decided to take on Uber. Twelve years later, Markus Villig leads Bolt , a company operating in 50+ countries, generating nearly €3 billion in revenue, and standing as one of the only European tech companies competing at true global scale. Rather than going head-to-head with incumbents in their strongest markets, Bolt expanded through underserved cities, emerging economies, and overlooked segm...
Feb 19, 2026•1 hr 20 min
Roughly 20% of the U.S. power grid runs on nuclear energy. A quarter of the fuel behind it is headed toward a hard stop. In this episode, I sit down with Scott Nolan , founder and CEO of General Matter, to unpack why uranium enrichment has quietly become one of the most consequential industrial bottlenecks of the 21st century. While at Founders Fund, Scott spent over a year searching for an American enrichment company to back. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to build it himself. Less than ...
Feb 03, 2026•1 hr 16 min
Most energy conversations start with scarcity. This one starts with abundance. Sunlight powers nearly everything on Earth, directly or indirectly. And yet we have almost no control over when or where we get it. Ben Nowack thinks that’s a solvable problem. Ben is the founder and CEO of Reflect Orbital, a company building satellites designed to redirect sunlight from space—not as a thought experiment, but as a product. The company nearly died before it worked. Eight months in, Ben had $300 left an...
Jan 20, 2026•1 hr 19 min
Carl Pei is the founder of Nothing, the consumer electronics company known for its distinctive transparent design language across smartphones and audio products. Before launching Nothing in 2020, Carl co-founded OnePlus, where he spent seven years helping build it into a major smartphone brand. But Carl’s instincts as a builder showed up much earlier. As a teenager, he taught himself to code by building Pokémon fan sites, all while moving between China, the U.S., and Sweden. That combination of ...
Jan 13, 2026•1 hr 19 min
Two decades ago, Aydin Senkut was a first-time fund manager with a thin track record to show prospective backers. LPs didn’t believe a solo GP, especially one without experience at a legacy firm, could build a lasting franchise. They were wrong. Today, Felicis is a Silicon Valley mainstay on its 10th fund, a $900M vehicle. Across its history, Felicis has backed a slew of winners, including Shopify, Canva, Crusoe, and dozens of other billion-dollar outcomes. Rather than specialize over time, Aydi...
Dec 09, 2025•1 hr 17 min
Prediction markets are no longer a fringe curiosity. They are becoming one of the most revealing instruments in modern finance. Platforms like Polymarket, once a niche corner of crypto, now regularly clear billions in monthly volume as traders speculate on everything from political outcomes to sports to cultural events. Few people saw this future as early, or as clearly, as Joey Krug. A decade before prediction markets went mainstream, Joey dropped out of college to co-found Augur, the first dec...
Dec 02, 2025•1 hr 16 min
In the summer of 2022, Parth Garg woke up in Bangalore to discover that his co-founder had fled the country and emailed their investors to tell them their company was dead. Just over three years later, Aspora is one of fintech’s fastest-growing startups. The company, which makes it faster and cheaper for India’s diaspora to send money home and access banking services, now processes close to half a billion dollars in volume every month and has earned a $500 million valuation with backing from eli...
Nov 18, 2025•1 hr 9 min
What if you could redesign the rules of society? Not tweak the margins, but start over entirely. That’s the question driving Erick Brimen, founder and CEO of Próspera, a private charter city in Roatán, Honduras. Próspera is a radical experiment in governance: a platform that lets governments and entrepreneurs build cities with new legal systems, regulatory frameworks, and institutions from the ground up. Brimen believes that governance itself can be innovated upon. That cities, like software, ca...
Nov 11, 2025•1 hr 24 min
Often called the godfather of NYC tech, Kevin Ryan is one of America’s most influential entrepreneurs and investors. He co-founded MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Transcend Therapeutics, and continues to build and back new companies each year through AlleyCorp. Earlier in his career, he led DoubleClick from a 20-person startup to a global leader, taking it public before its acquisition by Google. In this episode, Kevin shares his insights on two surprising pockets of the future...
Oct 28, 2025•1 hr 8 min
Navin Chaddha has spent three decades at the forefront of innovation—first as a founder, and now as managing partner at Mayfield, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest venture firms. A 17-time member of Forbes’ Midas List, Navin has guided generations of entrepreneurs through waves of technological change, from the dot-com boom to the AI era. At Mayfield, he champions a philosophy rooted in the firm’s founding ethos: investing in people, not markets. That approach has shaped his perspective on what it ...
Oct 21, 2025•1 hr
From a child prodigy in a genetics lab to building a company that can pause life itself, Laura Deming has made a career out of chasing time. At just eight years old she became obsessed with aging. At eleven, she joined Cynthia Kenyon’s pioneering longevity lab. At seventeen, she launched The Longevity Fund—one of the first venture firms dedicated to extending human healthspan. Now, she’s tackling her boldest challenge yet: building a “pause button” for biology. As the co-founder of Until, Laura ...
Oct 14, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Martin Casado has lived through multiple tech waves—first as a founder, now as a16z’s leading voice on AI and infrastructure. He helped pioneer software-defined networking, then moved from academia to entrepreneurship, and today backs founders building at the frontier of technology as a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In this conversation, Martin shares his unique perspective on the AI boom, his market-first investment philosophy, and why he believes we’re still in the early days of AI’s...
Oct 07, 2025•1 hr 25 min
Cate Hall is the CEO of Astera, a private foundation focused on AI risk and frontier technology. Before leading Astera, Cate’s unconventional career path took her from practicing law (including work on Supreme Court briefs) to becoming the world’s top-ranked female poker player in 2016. After overcoming personal struggles with addiction, she co-founded Alvea, a biotech company developing shelf-stable vaccines for pandemic response, before joining Astera. In this conversation, Cate shares insight...
Sep 30, 2025•1 hr 11 min
David Krakauer is a leading complex systems researcher and the president of the Santa Fe Institute, a unique institution dedicated to studying complex systems across disciplines. In this episode, David challenges conventional wisdom about AI, arguing that large language models pose a more immediate threat to humanity than commonly discussed existential risks—not by destroying us directly, but by eroding our cognitive capabilities through addictive, low-quality information. We explore: • Why Davi...
Sep 23, 2025•1 hr 21 min
Salar al Khafaji is the CEO and founder of Monumental, a company building autonomous robots that assemble buildings, starting with its bricklaying system. After selling his previous software company to Palantir, Salar took time to explore big industries ripe for disruption before landing on construction—a sector that represents a significant portion of GDP yet has seen decades of productivity stagnation. We explore: • Why construction represents a massive opportunity for technological innovation...
Sep 16, 2025•1 hr 20 min
Sara Walker is a theoretical physicist who studies the origins of life and the author of Life as No One Knows It . As AI prompts us to rethink what consciousness, intelligence, and life really mean, Sara’s work offers a provocative framework for understanding these questions. In this conversation, Sara shares how she developed assembly theory—a revolutionary approach suggesting that complex objects like DNA molecules (and even microphones) are evidence of life’s processes. We explore: • Why Sara...
Sep 09, 2025•1 hr 17 min
Eli Dourado is Head of Strategic Investments at Astera Institute, a foundation funding transformative science and technology across energy, aerospace, AI, and other frontier sectors. Before joining Astera, he worked as a "regulatory hacker" at Boom Supersonic, where he helped navigate complex aviation regulations to make supersonic flight viable again. In our conversation, we explore: • How Eli's refusal to be pigeonholed led to a career reviving forgotten technologies • How lifting the 1973 ban...
Aug 19, 2025•1 hr 11 min
Hemant Taneja is the CEO and Managing Partner of General Catalyst, a venture capital firm that has evolved into what he describes as a "strategic conglomerate with venture capital at its core." Under his leadership, GC has expanded beyond traditional investing to become an organization focused on transforming entire industries from healthcare to call centers to insurance. In this conversation, Hemant unpacks General Catalyst's unusual structure and ambitious mission. He shares why his firm acqui...
Aug 12, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Jesse Walden is the founder and managing partner of Variant Fund, an early-stage crypto fund backing projects like Uniswap, Phantom, World, Morpho, Flashbots, Farcaster, Blockaid, Blackbird, and many more. Before launching Variant in 2020, he was an investor at a16z crypto, where he supported early-stage builders shaping the future of Web3. In this episode, Jesse offers a wide-ranging view of where crypto stands today, and where it’s headed. He unpacks the rise of stablecoins, the role of meme c...
Aug 05, 2025•1 hr 13 min
