“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”
The Generalist Podcast brings you weekly conversations with the people who live in these pockets of the future – visionary founders, prescient investors, and original thinkers. Each episode is designed to introduce you to new ideas, technologies, and markets and help you prepare for the world of tomorrow.
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Données mises à jour le 04/07/2026
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Own or Be Owned: Why Every Company Needs Its Own AI Model (Yash Patil, Co-Founder & CEO of Applied Compute)
mardi 23 juin 2026 • Durée 01:08:05
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 Compute is his answer to that problem, already serving customers including DoorDash, Cognition, and Mercor.
In our conversation, we explore:
Why “own or be owned” is becoming existential for any company that relies on frontier AI models
What it was like inside OpenAI the weekend the board fired, and then reinstated, its CEO
Why post-training is where competitive advantage is now being built, and what reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards actually is
Why evals have become the new production environment, and why companies will never share them with frontier providers
How a specialized model built for DoorDash outperformed frontier models on a narrow, high-value task
Why cost, not capability, is now the primary driver pushing companies toward custom models
Why Yash believes AI’s transformation of the economy will unfold over decades, and why near-term fears about mass job displacement are misplaced
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What America Is Missing Between Sanctions and Nuclear War (Bryon Hargis, Co-Founder & CEO of Castelion)
mardi 2 juin 2026 • Durée 01:16:20
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 Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet in roughly a year.
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In our conversation, we explore:
Why Bryon believes building missiles is paradoxically essential to maintaining peace
The game theory behind warfare and why tit-for-tat strategies require credible middle-ground responses
How China’s 2021 hypersonic test revealed not just a capability gap but a manufacturing and cost advantage
Why traditional aerospace processes—optimized for low risk and high cost—can’t compete with rapid iteration
What Bryon learned in his first week at SpaceX (after 12 years in traditional aerospace)
Why building a carrier-based, air-launched hypersonic missile as a first product was the hard but right choice
How focusing on manufacturability and cost over maximum capability can produce more effective deterrence
Why the person who adapts faster in warfare always wins, and how that shapes Castelion’s philosophy
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.
Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.
“Our Goal Is to Build an Electrical Engineer.” (Davide Asnaghi, Co-Founder & CEO of Diode)
mardi 19 mai 2026 • Durée 01:12:23
Davide Asnaghiis 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 the tech stack.
Since its founding just two years ago, Diode has landed Physical Intelligence and Saronic as customers and partnered with Anthropic to help Claude become a better electrical engineer. The company’s ultimate ambition: to make hardware as nimble as software.
In our conversation, we explore:
Why the West outsourced PCB manufacturing to Asia in the 2000s and why bringing it back matters for American competitiveness
What Shenzhen’s manufacturing culture does better than Silicon Valley (and what the U.S. can learn from it)
How Diode’s models can one-shot much of schematic design and compress hardware timelines from months to weeks
The three-week YC pivot that transformed Diode from a design validation tool into a full-stack manufacturer
Why circuit boards are the “forgotten middle child” between silicon and software
How Diode partners with Anthropic to make LLMs better electrical engineers
What it takes to build a hardware company in 2025—and why the talent bar must stay incredibly high
How Italian, American, and Chinese cultures shaped Davide’s approach to entrepreneurship and manufacturing
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Investing Like A Mystic: How Cyan Banister Finds Outliers (Co-Founder of Long Journey Ventures)
mardi 5 mai 2026 • Durée 01:13:22
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 mindset translates into investing, and why many of her best opportunities have come from observation, curiosity, and a willingness to look in unlikely places.
In our conversation, we explore:
Cyan’s philosophy of treating life as a series of experiments
The strange, profound experiences that led her to question and ultimately move beyond her atheism
How scanning Wi-Fi networks in a Four Seasons café led her to Flock Safety, last valued at $8.4 billion
Long Journey Ventures’ “Biz, Tizz, and Rizz” framework for identifying exceptional founders and why the trifecta is rare
How AI will enable the age of the polymath
Why she believes brain-computer interfaces are closer than most people think
Why she says Pokémon Go was “the closest we ever came to world peace”
Why she lives part-time in a retirement community and her vision for a more connected future
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.
The Future Of Drug Discovery Is 4 Billion Years Old (Viswa Colluru, Founder & CEO at Enveda)
mardi 21 avril 2026 • Durée 01:22:56
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 metformin, originated in nature, but there has never been a reliable, scalable way to systematically explore its chemistry. Colluru founded Enveda in 2019 with $55,000 of his own savings to change that. The company has since identified 18 drug candidates, with three now in clinical trials.
In our conversation, we explore:
Why the pharmaceutical industry abandoned nature (and why that was a massive mistake)
How Enveda built a system to decode unknown molecules in nature
The deeply personal story of his mother’s battle with leukemia and how it shaped his life’s work
Why old ideas, from immunotherapy to natural products, often hold the most latent potential
How Enveda developed 18 drug candidates for about $1 million each instead of $10-15 million
Enveda’s three leading drug candidates targeting eczema, obesity, and ulcerative colitis
Why first-in-class medicines capture the vast majority of returns in pharma
What competitive table tennis taught him about building companies
Persona Trusted identity verification for any use case.
How a 20-Person Startup Won Gold at the Math Olympiad—Tying With OpenAI & DeepMind (Tudor Achim, CEO of Harmonic)
mardi 14 avril 2026 • Durée 01:04:43
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 music preparatory school, worked on machine learning at Quora, briefly pursued a PhD before dropping out, and then co-founded an autonomous driving company, Helm.ai. Harmonic's core product, Aristotle, uses reinforcement learning and the programming language Lean 4 to solve problems and verify solutions.
In our conversation, we explore:
Why Tudor believes math is the fundamental toolkit to understand the world
How Harmonic uses hallucinations as a feature, not a bug
How Aristotle works and the applications beyond pure mathematics
The reinforcement learning process that lets Harmonic generate synthetic training data and solve problems humans have never attempted
Why Tudor believes AI could surpass human mathematicians on specific tasks within 2–3 years
Why the future of mathematics looks more like GitHub than academic journals
The alternating pattern between intellect leaps and data leaps throughout scientific history
How studying piano under an extraordinary teacher taught Tudor discipline and the value of sticking with hard problems
Stop wasting time on admin tasks, build your startup faster.
30% Of Network Engineers Are Retiring. What Happens Next? (Anil Varanasi, Co-Founder & CEO of Meter)
mardi 7 avril 2026 • Durée 01:10:45
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 to real-world infrastructure. Meter’s ambition is not just to improve existing networks, but to make them autonomous over time. Before starting the company, Anil and Sunil were deeply involved in filmmaking, a background that still shapes their philosophy of building with cathedral-level craft across every layer of the stack.
Together we explore:
The “burden of knowledge” and why progress is getting harder across fields
Why most companies over-index on technology and ignore business model innovation
The three ways companies create advantage: technology, delivery, and business model
How Meter’s trade-in model borrows from the automotive industry
Why networking should function like electricity or water—not hardware
Lessons from Japanese vending machine logistics for infrastructure deployment
The hidden coordination problem behind vertically integrated companies
Why Anil believes “common knowledge” is often wrong
How COVID forced Meter to abandon geographic constraints and scale nationally
The case for fully autonomous networks in a world of exploding demand
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.
Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings.
The intelligent finance platform.
Why One Superintelligence Is More Dangerous Than a Thousand (Vincent Weisser, CEO & Co-Founder of Prime Intellect)
mardi 24 mars 2026 • Durée 01:19:00
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 and worked in decentralized science, where he helped unlock roughly $40 million in funding for unconventional research. Today, he’s applying that same open ethos to AI, working to ensure the tools that shape superintelligence remain broadly accessible rather than concentrated in the hands of a few.
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In our conversation, we explore:
Why Vincent believes multiple superintelligences are safer than one
The intellectual influences that shaped Vincent’s thinking about intelligence and progress, including David Deutsch and Nick Bostrom
Prime Intellect’s evolution from distributed compute infrastructure to frontier model training and reinforcement learning tools
Why Vincent believes open and decentralized science could accelerate discovery
The Zuzalu experiment and what it suggests about the future of scientific communities
The role of aesthetics and craft in building technology
Why Europe might have a cultural advantage in a post-superintelligence world
Vincent’s predictions for the next five years of AI
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings.
: Stop wasting time on admin tasks, build your startup faster.
Why Robots Still Struggle With Simple Tasks (And What Might Finally Change That) | Karol Hausman, Co-Founder & CEO of Physical Intelligence
mardi 17 mars 2026 • Durée 01:14:20
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 commercial pressure pushing you toward specialization. The central challenge isn’t mechanical design. It’s intelligence: how robots learn, generalize, and interact with a physical world that is far harder to simulate than it is to describe. Before launching Physical Intelligence, Karol worked at Google Brain and Stanford University, studying robot learning alongside researchers Sergey Levine and Chelsea Finn, who later became his co-founders.
In our conversation, we explore:
How growing up in a small town in Poland and watching Star Wars sparked Karol’s fascination with robots
The moment a lecture from Sergey Levine convinced him to abandon his PhD research direction and pivot fully to deep learning
Why robotics has historically lagged behind breakthroughs in language models
The case for building a general “AI brain” for the physical world rather than a single specialized robot
The role of real-world data in training robots, the limits of simulation, and how deployment could create a powerful data flywheel
The return of reinforcement learning and the parallels between human learning and robot training
The unique challenges of physical intelligence and why robots must operate with far higher reliability than language models
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
America’s Electric Power Grid Is Broken. This Startup Is Trying to Fix It. (Zach Dell, co-founder & CEO of Base)
mardi 10 mars 2026 • Durée 01:11:47
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 energy began long before Base. In college, he tried to lease a Hawaiian lava field for a solar project. He also experimented with anaerobic digestion systems in India and worked at Blackstone and Thrive Capital, where he met his co-founder. His bet is simple but ambitious: the next phase of the grid will come from increasing utilization rather than constantly building new infrastructure.
In our conversation, we explore:
How a failed college solar project and early energy experiments in India pulled Zach into the power industry
The lessons he absorbed from his parents, including truth-seeking, reinvention, and competitive endurance
How the U.S. grid’s regulatory structure discourages innovation and why Texas’s deregulated market creates space for new power companies
Why batteries are best understood as a time-shifting technology that increases grid utilization and reduces total system costs, not simply as energy generators
Base’s “make, move, store, sell” framework for thinking about the full power stack
How Base aims to become the first beloved energy company
How Zach identified Justin as a world-class operator and built the trust needed to go all-in together on a non-obvious idea
How aggressive AI adoption is compressing cycle times and why slow adopters risk falling behind
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings
The intelligent finance platform.
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