Giant Ideas – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Today on the Giant Ideas podcast we welcome Jeremy O'Brien, co-founder and CEO of PsiQuantum, a quantum computing company on a mission to deliver the first commercially useful quantum computers to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges. O’Brien has dedicated 25 years to this mission and was previously a Professor of Physics & Electrical Engineering at Stanford and Bristol University.

This is an episode for anyone curious to peer into the fascinating world of quantum computing, to understand the radical changes it will have on the world if it scales - and the opportunities to transform healthcare, climate technologies, finance, transportation, security and beyond. Their goal is to unlock problems that are fundamentally out of reach today, and reinvent whole industries.

In this episode, we talk about what quantum computing actually is, how soon it is coming, and what will happen when it scales.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Welcome back to Giant Ideas! Happy new year. We return to normal scheduling next week, but this week we are sharing an exclusive conversation with some of the best television writers in the world right now: Succession writer Lucy Prebble, and the creators of the HBO hit Industry, Micky Down and Konrad Kay.

This was conversation was recorded last year - chaired by the legendary Henry Mance, the FT's chief features writer - and was one of my favourites from our Giant Ideas event in London last year.

In this conversation they get to the core of the 'character of bad business’ -  what it's like to write about the worst characters in business? What draws them to these people? Is there is an inevitability to the moral descent of business leaders with too much power? And - perhaps most importantly - how can you, our audience, avoid becoming the next Kendall Roy?

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today on the podcast we have Narayana Murthy - Founder and former CEO of Infosys - a giant which reached $100BN, one of the largest companies in history, and transformed India’s economy.

Infosys - founded in 1981 - offers consulting, IT, and outsourcing services across the globe. Starting with a small loan, 18 years later it became the first ever Indian company to be listed on NASDAQ. 

Murthy has been listed among the 12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time by Fortune magazine. He has akso been described as the "Father of the Indian IT sector" by TIME.

Murthy is also the father-in-law of Rishi Sunak, the former UK Prime Minister.

In this episode, we talk about Narayana Murthy’s early life and values, how Infosys grew from $40,000 to a multi-billion dollar global enterprise, why he believes in hard work, and the role of entrepreneurship and capitalism in India.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today on the podcast we welcome Jeremy Chan. Jeremy is a British-Canadian chef who grew up between London and Hong Kong, and is the Co-founder of Ikoyi restaurant. In 2017, Chan joined forces with Iré Hassan-Odukale – a friend who had just left a career in insurance - and together they decided to build Ikoyi.

Ikoyi is now a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in London, and it has recently been voted one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. 

But Chan has not always been a chef. In fact he studied Philosophy with Cameron at Princeton, and worked briefly in finance. After leaving, he wrote to lots of restaurants asking them to take him on for some experience. He ended up working at restaurants like the two-starred Hibiscus, Dinner by Heston, and in one of the best restaurants in the world: Noma. He’s known for his creativity, innovation, and originality.

In this episode we talk about:

- The need for obsession and relentless drive when creating something new

- The importance of staying true to your creative vision and maintaining integrity in the face of external pressures

- The restaurant’s focus on creating meaningful, lasting experiences for guests and fostering a strong, values-driven team culture

- The challenges, discipline, and daily routines required to operate at the highest level

- The personal sacrifices required for success, and the reality of building a new business - from empty restaurants to finding new dishes

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today on the podcast we are joined by Sebastian Thrun - the “Godfather of self-driving cars”. He invented Google’s autonomous vehicle, now known as Waymo, which is doing a quarter of all rideshare journeys in SF.

Sebastian’s life has been full of moonshot ideas. He co-founded Google X, the moonshot factory at Google, and co-founded the flying taxi startup Kitty Hawk and Udacity, which democratised elite education online. He’s seen as one of the greatest computer scientists and roboticists of our time.

Tommy first met Sebastian 12 years ago, when he was researching his book co-authored with Lord John Browne, Connect.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today on the podcast we have Synthesia Co-founder and COO Steffen Tjerrild.

Synthesia is an AI company that allows you to create professional videos with just a few lines of text. It’s now used by over 1 million customers, including +80% of Fortune 100 companies. Synthesia is a UK unicorn, recently valued at $2 billion.

At the heart of Synthesia's exponential growth is Steffen. As the company’s COO, Steffen has seen the company through its inception to the latest funding round. Today we talk about text-to-video, product market fit, the future of deep fakes and how quickly you will be able to create your own Netflix shows... 

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today on the podcast we are joined by Floyd Steadman OBE.

Floyd Steadman’s journey began in North-West London as a 10-year-old runaway, surviving alone after escaping an abusive home. Rejected by his own father and placed into care, Floyd's early life was marked by hardship, racism, and resilience.

After discovering rugby, Floyd became the first Black captain of Saracens rugby club, rising through a sport where no one looked like him. Later, he became a respected headteacher (including of Tommy Stadlen & Cameron McLain's school!) an advocate for inclusion, and the man who first spotted the talent of a young Maro Itoje.

This conversation discusses:

• Growing up in care and rough sleeping 
• Breaking racial barriers in elite rugby
• Nurturing the next generation including England captain Maro Itoje
• Why representation still matters
• What it means to lead, and how you can be kind and decisive as a leader

Floyd was awarded an OBE for his services to education, rugby, and charity, but his real legacy lives in the lives he’s changed.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today on Giant Ideas we’re joined by General David Petraeus — arguably one of the most influential generals in American history. From leading coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to running the CIA, General Petraeus has shaped the world on and off the battlefield.

We explore his insights on global security, technological warfare, leadership under pressure, and what the future holds for geopolitics. This is a rare and wide-ranging conversation with a man who has stood at the centre of history. In this episode, we cover a lot of controversial topics, and there was not the necessary time to explore, follow up, and challenge all of them in this episode.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Welcome back to Giant Ideas! Today we are joined by Trip Adler, the Co-founder of Scribd - a company he co-founded with Jared Friedman, now Partner at Y Combinator. Scribd is a digital document library that hosts over 195 million documents, with billions of views a year.

Today we talk about Trip’s next act: Created By Humans, where he is Co-Founder and CEO, on a huge mission to champion AI rights for authors. 

Giant proudly led the seed round of Created by Humans, and we invited Trip on to talk about this giant idea that affects so many people: how can creativity thrive in the AI era?

In this episode, we talk about: what happens if we live in a world where only machines create art? Is AI the next IP frontier? We also talk about his early days pivoting at YC, why persistence matters, and the unusual way he earnt his first revenue…

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today on the podcast we are joined by tech titan ​Reid Hoffman. As the founder of LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $26 billion, Reid is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history.

He broke through as a founding board member of PayPal, one of the so-called PayPal mafia alongside Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Reid went on to become a legendary investor both as an angel and partner at Greylock. He invested in Facebook’s first round and led Airbnb’s Series A.

Reid operates right at the cutting edge of AI. He was one of the first backers and board members of OpenAI. He’s also on the board of Microsoft, which did a $650M+ deal with Reid’s startup, Inflection AI. You’ll remember Inflection from our interview with Deepmind’s Mustafa Suleyman, Reid’s co-founder.

Alongside all of this, Reid has forged a path as one of Silicon Valley’s public intellectuals. Following startup bibles like Blitzscaling, his latest book is "Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future.” Welcome Reid!

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.