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Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi. Kalshi is a regulated prediction market exchange valued at $22B in 2026 where people trade on the outcomes of real-world events – things like inflation prints, Fed decisions, elections, or weather events. Instead of betting against a house, users trade against each other in a market, and prices reflect the collective probability of an outcome happening. Before starting Kalshi, Tarek worked as a quantitative trader at Goldman Sachs as a structure...
Max Mullen is the co-founder of Instacart and an active investor having invested in 100+ companies including Gumloop, Mercury, Owner among others. He also runs a founder community in San Francisco called Workshop. We discussed the full arc of building Instacart from a contrarian idea that investors rejected to a $10B consumer marketplace. Max highlighted the scrappy early days, marketplace product-market fit, and key inflection points like retailer partnerships and the Amazon–Whole Foods moment....
Brad Lightcap serves as OpenAI's COO, overseeing its business, operations, and strategic partnerships across Research, Applied AI, and go-to-market. He also manages the OpenAI Startup Fund. Previously, Brad was part of Y Combinator Continuity and led finance and operations initiatives at Dropbox. We discussed the shift from chat-based AI to agents that can take action, and what that means for software and the broader economy. We also covered how these systems are being built and deployed, how to...
Ron Conway is the Founder and a Managing Partner of SV Angel. He has been an active angel investor since the mid-90s and has received wide recognition for his role in the tech ecosystem. He has been included on Vanity Fair’s 100 most influential people in the Information Age, awarded Best Angel at the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards, and has been named on Forbes Magazine's Midas list of top “deal-makers” since 2011. Prior to founding SV Angel, Ron was with National Semiconductor Corporation in marke...
At 23, with no legal background, Max Junestrand co-founded Legora to transform how lawyers work. Legora recently (March 2026) raised $550 million at a $5.55 billion valuation in a Series D funding round to accelerate its expansion across the United States. Over the past year, Legora has grown from 40 to 400 team members across the globe and the platform supports tens of thousands of lawyers each day across 800 customers in more than 50 markets. Max shares the story of building Legora, what it re...
In this episode, the team behind Y Combinator reflects on what has — and hasn’t — changed since the early days of YC, and how AI is reshaping what it means to be a founder. They discuss how they evaluate builders now, why execution still matters more than competition, and what YC is prioritizing as the startup landscape evolves. At its core, the mission remains the same: increase the number of great startups in the world. Garry Tan is president and CEO of Y Combinator and a group partner. He was...
Bret Taylor is the founder and CEO of Sierra, an AI agent company transforming customer service. Bret’s legendary career includes being CTO of Meta, co-CEO of Salesforce, chairman of the board at OpenAI, co-creating both Google Maps and the Like button, and founding three companies. We unpacked the so-called “SaaS-pocalypse” and what AI agents mean for the future of enterprise software. We talked through the shift from systems of record to autonomous agents, outcome-based pricing, platform trans...
In this episode, the Benchmark partnership explains why they’ve resisted scale, eliminated residual economics, and built an equal partnership designed to endure. We talk about what that choice enables – for founders, for decision-making, and for practicing venture as a craft rather than a factory. Peter Fenton is the longest-serving full-time general partner at Benchmark. Over the last two decades, Peter led investments in Twitter, Yelp, Elastic, Docker, Zuora, and many others. More recent inves...
Vinod Khosla and Keith Rabois are Managing Directors at Khosla Ventures. Vinod is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist. In 2004, Vinod formed Khosla Ventures to focus on both for-profit and social impact investments that have included OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and many more. Vinod previously co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers, which led to an IPO. He later went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in ...
Daniele Perito is Co-founder and Executive Chairman of depthfirst, an AI-native security platform that understands your code, business logic, and infrastructure to find real vulnerabilities, slash false positives, and give developers actionable fixes in their workflow. Daniele is also Co-founder and Board Member of Faire, where he previously served as Chief Data Officer and helped build the company’s data, risk, and analytics foundations from the early days to a multi-billion dollar valuation. B...
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that manages $60 billion in assets under management. He is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are. Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Onlin...
Saam Motamedi is a General Partner at Greylock Partners working with enterprise software entrepreneurs at the seed and early stages who are focused on new opportunities in intelligent applications, cybersecurity, AI, and data infrastructure. In 2019 at just 26 years old, Saam became the Greylock’s youngest General Partner in its 54-year history – a remarkable achievement at an institution that had backed Airbnb, AppDynamics, Coinbase, Discord, Figma, Instagram, LinkedIn, among others. Saam’s por...
Pat Grady and Alfred Lin are partners at Sequoia and were recently named as the storied firm’s new co-stewards. Alfred joined the firm in 2010, where he has led major investments into category-defining companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Kalshi. Pat has been a partner at the firm for nearly 19 years and has led Sequoia’s growth-stage investing since 2015, backing companies like Snowflake, OpenAI, and Harvey. In this episode, we unpack how Sequoia actually works: their partnership model, how the...
Trae Stephens is a Partner at Founders Fund. He is also Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril, a defense tech company focused on autonomous systems, and Co-founder of Sol, a next generation wearable e-reader. Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion. He was also an integral part of the product team, leading the design and strategy for new product offerings. Pri...
Mel Williams is a co-founder and Partner at TrueBridge Capital Partners, a fund of funds with $8 billion in AUM focused on venture capital. Since 2007, Mel’s team has backed firms like Thrive, Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Alt Capital, and powers the data behind the Forbes Midas List. Before TrueBridge, Mel co-founded UNC Management Company (UNCMC), where he worked closely with the President/CIO to manage over $2 billion of endowment capital for the University of North Carolina. We covered: Invest...
Vlad Tenev, Robinhood CEO, traces the history of online brokerages and details Robinhood's disruptive innovations, including mobile-first design and commission-free trading. The conversation explores how Robinhood aligns incentives with customers, envisions itself as a financial super app, and is leveraging prediction markets and AI to enhance user experience and engagement across generations.
Kyle Vogt is a serial entrepreneur and engineer often recognized as the co-founder and former CEO of Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by General Motors for $1 billion. Before Cruise, he co-founded Twitch, which transformed how people watch and share gaming online. Kyle is now building a new company at the frontier of intelligent home automation, aiming to bring advanced robotics into everyday life. A few highlights: Labs beginning to see their ChatGPT moment Most robots will be sp...
Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, a design software company that went public in July 2025. Founded in 2012, Figma transformed how people design, prototype, and build products together. After a $20 billion acquisition attempt by Adobe collapsed in 2022 because of regulators, Dylan helped Figma rebound stronger than ever. Just three years later, Figma listed its shares at nearly $20 billion and its stock price more than tripled on its first trading day. A few highlights: Expanding a ...
Alex Pall is half of the Grammy Award-winning duo The Chainsmokers. Beyond music, Alex is entrepreneur and co-founder of Mantis VC, a venture firm that invests opportunistically in early stage tech-enabled startups. Some of their investments include Alchemy, Chainguard, Kalshi, Roblox, and Rogo. We had a wide ranging conversation that broke down the creative stories behind a few of their top hits including “Closer,” “Something Just Like This,” and “Don’t Let Me Down.” We also explored the creati...
Thomas Laffont is the co-founder of Coatue, one of the world’s largest technology investment platforms active in both the public and private markets. Thomas leads the firm’s private investment platforms across early-stage and growth, and oversees their software investments across private and public markets. Coatue has partnered with some of the most enduring and impactful companies of the last two decades, including Applied Intuition, Canva, Databricks, Figma and Rippling. Thomas began his caree...
Roelof Botha joined Sequoia in 2003 and serves as the managing partner and steward. Roelof led early investments in YouTube, Instagram, Natera, and MongoDB among others. He currently sits on the board of Natera, Unity, Block (fka Square), MongoDB, Ethos, Pendulum, Airtime, and Flow Engineering. Roelof also co-led Sequoia’s backing of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) in 2022. Prior to Sequoia, Roelof was the CFO of PayPal and led the company’s IPO at the age of 28, and later through its...
Vince Hankes is a Partner at Thrive Capital where he’s worked on investments in OpenAI, SpaceX, Databricks, and Stripe among others. Vince invests across all stages and currently sits on the board of Airtable, Benchling, Console, Isomorphic, Lattice and Rogo. Prior to joining Thrive, Vince was an investor at Tiger Global. We covered: Non-consensus investing Writing billion dollar checks Buying Carvana at the bottom The value of compounding What matters most to Thrive --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro...
Ali Rowghani is the founder of First Harmonic, a go-to-market program purpose-built for seed stage founders. Ali has had a long, distinguished career in tech. He worked with Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull at Pixar for nine years holding various roles including CFO and SVP of Strategic Planning, took Twitter from $0 in revenue through IPO as the CFO and COO, and most recently was the founding Managing Director of Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund where he led investments in DoorDash, Stripe, Coinbase, Za...
Lulu Cheng Meservey, founder of Rostra, discusses the evolving landscape of communications, highlighting why it's becoming crucial for founders. She delves into mastering narrative arcs, understanding reputation's "homeostatic set point," and the strategic use of language, drawing parallels from history like Napoleon's recruiting tactics. Lulu emphasizes authenticity in personal branding and predicts that human persuasion will remain the ultimate irreplaceable skill, even as AI advances. The episode also touches on her unique advisory approach and the future relationship between tech and media.
Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, and WSJ bestselling author of The Network State. He is currently the founder of The Network School, a frontier community for techno-optimists. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he is an early investor in many successful tech companies, including Anduril, Perplexity, OpenSea, Alchemy, StarkWare, Dapper Labs, Benchling, and Polymarket to name a few. Balaji also led the launch of USDC as Coinbase CTO, and w...
Martin Casado is a general partner at a16z, where he leads the firm’s $1.25 billion infrastructure practice. Martin has led investments in Cursor, dbt Labs, and Fivetran to name a few. Prior to joining a16z in 2016, he was the co-founder and CTO of Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26B. While at VMware, Martin was the SVP and GM of network and security, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business. Martin started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he work...
Greg Rosen is a Partner at BoxGroup. Greg was the first hire at BoxGroup outside of the founders, David Tisch and Adam Rothenberg. After moving to the West Coast to work with Benchmark and Bedrock, Greg rejoined BoxGroup and currently invests out of their San Francisco office. An engineer by training, Greg built iOS games in high school before dropping out of college at 19 to join Jim Pallotta's venture fund in New York City. BoxGroup is an NYC-based seed stage venture capital firm that has inve...
Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency company that provides exchange, brokerage, and custody services to 100M+ verified users in over 100 countries. Founded in 2012, Coinbase went public in 2021 on the NASDAQ under the ticker COIN and as of August 2025 has a market cap of $83 billion. Brian is also the co-founder of New Limit, a longevity biotech company on a mission to significantly extend human lifespan that recently raised a $130M Series B led by Klei...
Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, delves into the current state and future implications of AI for developers, highlighting the shift from code generation to the critical need for trust and rigorous code review. He explores the potential of "vibe coding" for broad users and agent-assisted engineering for experienced developers, stressing the importance of vertically integrated platforms to ensure quality and security. The discussion also touches on the internet's inherent vulnerabilities, the emergence of generative UI, and the future skills centered around idea visualization and taste in product building, contrasting it with the discipline required to overcome challenges.
In his early twenties, Dwarkesh Patel has become one of the leading podcasters with nearly 1 million YouTube subscribers excited to consume his deeply-researched interviews. Dwarkesh has caught the attention of influential figures such as Jeff Bezos, Noah Smith, Nat Friedman, and Tyler Cohen, who have all praised his interviews – the latter describing him as “highly rated but still underrated.” In 2024, he was included in TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI alongside the likes of Ilya Sutsk...
