Explore every episode of the podcast The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft and one of the greatest CEOs of our time. Satya has been at the company for an astonishing 34 years. When he joined, Microsoft had a market cap of $23.5BN. 22 years later, the company was worth $300BN. At this point, Satya took the reins as CEO. Under his leadership, he has taken it from $300BN to $3.9TRN. 

AGENDA: 

03:08 Should We Assume Every AI Model Is Compromised?
04:13 How Do We Stop AI Agents From Causing Harm?
06:15 Can We Trust an AI Model's Chain of Thought?
07:05 Is China's Lead in Open-Source AI a Safety Risk?
08:28 Will Open or Closed Models Win the Next Two Years?
10:08 Why Should Every Company Own Its Intelligence?
12:12 Will Every Company Become AI Native?
13:22 Are We Entering an AI Implementation Economy?
15:10 Do You Need to Own the Entire AI Stack to Win?
16:49 Can the World Support $100 Billion AI Training Runs?
18:34 Can AI Radically Accelerate Global Economic Growth?
19:39 Will AI Transform Sales, Finance and Marketing Like Coding?

Quickfire round 

• What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

• What looks crazy today but will be incredibly common in 5 years?

• What's the exercise routine given the travel schedule?

• Favorite cheat meal on a rest day?

• What are you most excited for in the next 10 years?

AGENDA:

05:00 Will we run out of energy?
19:00 Will specialised chips threaten NVIDIA's dominance?
26:00 Can we trust AI agents more than humans?
31:00 Will data companies become commodities?
36:00 What comes after transformers?
41:00 Are software investors f****** in a world of infra and compute?
52:00 How big will the inference market be in 10 years?
53:00 Could robotics be 100x bigger than coding agents?
59:00 Why are coding agents the most overrated AI investment?

AGENDA: 

04:20 Billion-Dollar Bets or Nothing: Why VCs Are Rejecting Fast-Growing Startups
13:20 CoreWeave Sell-Off Sparks Fears of Cracks in AI Boom
18:50 Anthropic's IPO Valuation Could Fall From $2 TRN to $1.5 TRN
32:10 Modal Raises $750M at a $15.75B Valuation as Inference Booms
35:50 Town at $1B, Anduril at $90B: Have Startup Valuations Lost Touch?
42:15 Berkshire Hathaway Doubles Down on Bending Spoons
45:05 37signals' Profit Machine Challenges the Venture Capital Model
49:20 General Atlantic Eyes an IPO; Harvard's Endowment Hits $68B
54:15 Elon's Flying Roadster and $10B SpaceX Share Giveaway

Sameer Dholakia is a Partner @ Bessemer, the first that has just raised $5.75BN across a $1.75BN seed fund and $4BN growth fund. Sameer has led investments into the likes of Anthropic, Fireworks and Legora to name a few. Prior to venture, Sameer was the CEO of SendGrid, taking it from $30M in ARR to over $200M. 

AGENDA: 

04:55 Why This Is a Supercycle Like Never Before
07:40 Why We Backed Anthropic to Compete With the Hyperscalers
10:05 Why Anthropic Was One of Bessemer's Most Contentious Deals
11:05 Why Open Models Don't Destroy the Market for Closed Models
16:45 Does Price Matter in AI—and Which Metric Really Determines Value?
19:45 How Much Should Consumer Businesses Be Discounted for Their Revenue Quality?
20:20 Why Today's Gross Margins Matter Less Than You Think
23:00 Competition Hasn't Changed—but the Capital Behind It Has
24:00 Why Capital Is a Moat Today
25:55 Is "Triple, Triple, Double, Double" Dead?
28:00 Can You Still Succeed With a Small Seed Fund?
29:45 Who Wins and Who Loses in the Future of Venture Capital?
32:15 Why Founders Shouldn't Hate Being an "Option Bet"
34:35 Why Signalling Risk Doesn't Worry Me
51:55 Why Companies Will Stay Private Longer—and Why the IPO Window Could Reopen by 2028
56:00 How Should Retail Investors Participate in Venture Capital?
57:25 How Fireworks Could Become a $250 Billion Business
01:02:35 Why Bessemer Is Confident It Can Deliver 5x Returns on $5.75 Billion

Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, which helps developers build, test and deploy AI agents.
Backed by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and IVP, LangChain has announced approximately $160 million in funding with the last round at a $1.25BN valuation. The company works with 35% of the Fortune 500, has surpassed one billion open-source downloads and processes over one billion events daily through LangSmith.

AGENDA:

04:10 Why Is It Still So Hard to Build AI Agents?
08:50 Will the Model Labs Eat the Agent Stack?
16:25 Is Model Routing a Real Business or a Commodity?
25:45 Why Has No One Solved AI Memory?
35:45 Why Are AI Bills Exploding as Tokens Get Cheaper?
43:25 Should Companies Be Afraid of Chinese AI Models?
46:20 Where Would Harrison Not Be Investing Today?
53:05 Should Founders Take a Discount for Benchmark and Sequoia?
57:35 OpenAI at $1.5T or Anthropic at $2T: Which Would You Buy?

AGENDA:

04:00 Valar Atomics Sues Seed Investor Day One Ventures Over Pro Rata
17:00 Meta Returns to the AI Frontier With Muse Wonder
20:00 NVIDIA Eyes $30B Reflection Deal as Amazon Circles Decart
26:00 Jev Raises $870M at a $7.5B Valuation—Weeks After Launch
31:00 42 New Decacorns: The AI Boom Overtakes 2021's Record
36:00 Isomorphic Labs Eyes $50B Valuation in New Funding Talks
46:00 Anthropic Slashes Haiku Prices by 90% as AI Price War Intensifies
52:00 Bending Spoons Slashes Airtable's Team: What Do Founders Owe Employees?
57:00 Bumble to Go Private in $1.3B Deal: Can AI Transform Dating?
01:01:00 The SaaSpocalypse Deepens: Why $500M ARR May No Longer Be Enough
01:06:00 Flock Safety Cuts 270 Jobs Amid Privacy and Security Backlash

Mike Cannon-Brookes is the Co-Founder and CEO of Atlassian, the company behind Jira, Confluence, Trello and Loom.
Atlassian generated $6.5BN in ARR in 2026, and serves more than 350,000 customers, including over 85% of the Fortune 500. Today, Mike is leading its expansion into enterprise AI through Rovo and the Teamwork Graph, connecting company knowledge with AI agents.

AGENDA: 

03:00 Do AI Agents Turn Traditional Software Into Just Databases?
16:00 Will Enterprises Ever Trust Chinese AI Models?
20:00 Is Building Your Own AI Model a Losing Bet?
24:00 Can AI Startups Survive When They Finally Have to Care About Costs?
30:00 What Happens When AI Gets Cheaper Than Anyone Expects?
35:00 Is Company Context the Real Moat in Enterprise AI?
41:00 What Happens When OpenAI and Anthropic Come for Your Customers?
44:00 Why Are Young Founders Cashing Out More Than Ever?
49:00 What Does Nobody Tell You About Getting Rich?

Max Freeman is SVP of Sales at Ramp. He joined the company as its first sales hire. By 2025, he was leading more than 300 salespeople, helping build Ramp's sales organisation from the ground up. Ramp's latest reported revenue exceeds $1.7BN, with a valuation of over $40BN. 

AGENDA:

00:00 Inside Ramp's Sales Playbook
05:00 How Do You Find Exceptional Sellers—and Why Bankers Make the Best?
18:00 How Do You Build an Outbound Machine That Scales Beyond Your SDR Team?
24:00 How Do You Shorten Sales Cycles Without Slashing Your Price?
27:00 How Should You Pay Your First Reps—and Incentivise New Products?
34:00 How Do You Onboard Reps Who Can Actually Sell?
40:00 How High Should Quotas Be—and How Long Should Reps Get to Ramp?
44:00 How Do You Drive Customer Expansion and Forecast Revenue Accurately?
54:00 How Do You Grow as a Sales Leader Without Taking Over Every Important Deal?

Joinin the trio today we have Dev Ittycheria, CEO @ MongoDB. 

AGENDA: 

04:00 OpenAI Nears $70B Run Rate—Anthropic's Lead Under Threat
12:00 Factory vs Cognition: Silicon Valley's Talent War Turns Ugly
23:00 Vinod Khosla Blasts His Own Portfolio Company
25:00 Reflection Launches Beam: America Strikes Back in Open-Source AI
34:00 ElevenLabs Doubles Its Valuation to $22B
37:00 Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B—Sequoia Cashes In
46:00 Vercel Hits $600M ARR as Agents Drive Half Its New Business
55:00 Former Groq Engineers Sue Over Nvidia's $17B Deal
01:01:00 Meta's Muse Steals the Show as OpenAI's Dots Underwhelms
01:05:00 Oura Pulls Its IPO Despite 74% Growth—A Warning for VC

Venky Ganesan is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, whose portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora and Higgsfield, alongside earlier hits Uber and Roku. Venky's own investment track record includes Palo Alto Networks, Upwork, Poshmark and Rover. He is a three-time Forbes Midas List investor and former Chair of the National Venture Capital Association.

AGENDA:

07:00 Can You Still Do Seed Without a $1 Billion Fund?
11:00 How Much of AI's Revenue Growth Is Actually Real?
19:00 When Is "Overpaying" the Smartest Investment You Can Make?
25:00 Does Ownership Still Matter in a World of Trillion-Dollar Outcomes?
31:00 Is "Big Tech Will Buy Us" a Dangerous Investment Thesis?
36:00 Why Invest in Venture When You Can Just Buy the Magnificent Seven?
45:00 When Should You Sell a 40x Winner—and When Should You Double Down?
54:00 Can a $50 Million Fund Still Compete With the Venture Giants?
58:00 Quickfire: Is Benchmark Harder to Beat Than Sequoia?

Chase Lochmiller is the Co-founder and CEO of Crusoe. Crusoe builds and powers the data centres that companies use to train and run AI. It has raised approximately $6.4 billion in equity, including its latest $3.9 billion Series F at a $30.9 billion valuation. Its backers include NVIDIA, Founders Fund, Gavin Baker's Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

AGENDA:

04:40 What Does Climbing Everest Teach You About Building a Company?
17:40 What's Really Stopping Us From Building Enough AI Data Centres?
25:50 Are Data Centres Really Driving Up Your Energy Bills?
28:05 Will Half of Planned AI Data Centres Never Get Built?
32:10 How Quickly Can a GPU Pay for Itself?
38:35 Will Your GPUs Become Obsolete Before You've Paid Them Off?
44:20 What Does It Take to Produce the Cheapest Intelligence?
49:50 Will Companies Building Their Own Models Eat Into OpenAI's Business?
51:55 Can You Build a $30B Company and Still Be a Great Dad?

AGENDA: 

00:00 Highlights: Jack Altman Joins The Trio
05:00 Anthropic's S-1 Leaks: $8B Operating Loss and $518B in Compute Commitments
10:00 Instinct Raises $1B at a $10B Valuation to Take On Meta
25:00 AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B
39:00 Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO as Shares Plunge 20%
43:00 AI Startup Seeks $10B Valuation Just One Week After Seed
47:00 Modal Hits $15B Valuation as Baseten Eyes $26B
54:00 OpenAI Reopens Its $200 Plan—and Halves What You Get
57:00 Oura Pulls IPO After Targeting a $16B Valuation
01:03:00 Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover
01:08:00 Bessemer Raises $5.75B as NFX Switches to Its Own Capital
01:14:00 Anthropic Founders Move to Lock In 50.1% Voting Control

Alex Mashrabov is the Founder and CEO of Higgsfield, the third fastest scaling company to $1BN in ARR behind OpenAI and Anthropic. Reports suggest their latest funding round could place an $8BN valuation on the company. Prior to Higgsfield, Alex sold his prior company to Snap Inc for $166M. Alex was a competitive programmer as a kid, reaching third best in the world.

AGENDA: 

00:00 The Programming Prodigy Who Sold to Snap for $166M
09:00 Burning $10M: The Pivot That Saved Higgsfield
12:00 A $1B Revenue Run Rate in 18 Months; How Real Is It?
16:00 Will OpenAI and Google Wipe Out $20 AI Subscriptions?
21:00 Are AI Labs Gaming the Benchmarks?
28:00 Spending $4M a Month on AI; Genius or Insanity?
36:00 Are AI Moats Bullshit? The Great "Wrapper" Debate
43:00 One Full Day With His Son in Three Months: The Cost of Ambition
54:00 Quickfire: Is Snap Broken—and Will HubSpot Survive AI?
01:02:00 $10B in the Next 12 Months? Alex's Audacious Growth Bet

Parag Agrawal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Parallel, building web search infrastructure for AI agents.
Parallel has announced $230M in funding from Sequoia, Khosla, and First Round Capital. Previously, he was CEO of Twitter, succeeding Jack Dorsey after serving as CTO and becoming the company's first Distinguished Engineer.

AGENDA:

03:00 What Breaks When Agents Search the Web 1,000x More?
07:00 Speed, Cost or Accuracy: What Do Agents Really Need?
13:00 Will Tiny Models Catch Today's Most Powerful AI?
16:00 Is Model Routing a Commodity?
21:00 Is Amazon Making a Mistake by Blocking AI Agents?
23:00 Does the Ads Business Model Die in a World of Agents?
27:00 Can You Pay Publishers Without Killing Your Margins?
33:00 Why Parag Wants a Race to the Bottom on Price
43:00 What Stops Your AI Agent Breaking the Rules to Get Results?
45:00 Why AI Hacks Should Embarrass the Labs
52:00 What Parag Saw Working With Elon Musk

AGENDA:

04:35 Anthropic's $2 Trillion IPO Delayed. Cracks in the AI Boom?
10:30 OpenAI Faces $278 Billion Cash Burn. Out of Money by 2028?
12:55 Meta's Muse Hits No. 1. ChatGPT Finally Has a Rival?
17:05 Amazon Blocks AI Shopping Agents. Shopify Welcomes Them.
24:10 ChatGPT Inventor Launches Jev. Vercel's Fastest Launch Ever.
34:15 A $40 Million Seed Round. Is Traditional Seed Investing Dead?
39:00 Menlo Sounds the AI Bubble Alarm. Harry Calls BS.
54:00 Factory Triples Its Valuation to $5 Billion. Coding Is the Mother Lode.
1:00:20 Legora Hits $200 Million ARR. Is $11 Billion Too Rich?
1:03:50 Crusoe's $3.9 Billion Round. Is the Data Centre Trade Overheating?
1:08:55 Keith Rabois vs Airwallex. Fintech's Feud Escalates.
1:16:40 Sydney Sweeney for Airwallex? Lemkin's Wild PR Plan.

Daniel Dines is one of the greatest European founders of the last decade. As the Co-Founder of UiPath, he has scaled the business to a market cap high of $ 44BN in 2021, with the company now generating $1.72BN in revenue, growing 15% year-on-year. The company raised $2BN before its IPO, backed by Sequoia, Accel, CapitalG, Coatue and Kleiner Perkins. 

AGENDA: 

05:00 Why Dario is Wrong About Millions of AI Einsteins?
13:00 Is AI Safety Becoming an Excuse to Kill Open Source?
21:00 Does UiPath Really Need 4,000 Employees?
28:00 Would You Help Train the AI That Could Replace You?
32:00 What Percent of Salary Spend Does Daniel Spend on Inference?
34:00 Can You Really Vibe Code Your Way Out of Paying for Software?
37:00 Why Would Anyone Take Their Company Public Today?
39:00 Could an OpenAI–Anthropic Duopoly Break Nvidia's Business?
45:00 Will AI Models Capture the Value—or Will the Apps?
49:00 Is Fireworks Still Undervalued at $15 Billion?
56:00 Has Europe Already Lost—and Should Founders Leave?
1:03:00 What Could Kill UiPath—and How Is AI Changing the CEO's Job?
1:06:00 60 Supplements a Day: How Far Would You Go to Live Longer?

Thomas Sohmers is the co-founder and chairman of Positron AI, building chips to make running AI dramatically cheaper and more energy-efficient. The company recently announced an $875 million Series C at a $5 billion valuation, backed by investors including Gavin Baker's Atreides Management, NEA, Valor Equity Partners and Netscape co-founder Jim Clark.

AGENDA:

04:30 Why Does AI Inference Need Different Hardware from Training?

10:25 What Is Nobody Telling You About AI's Token Economics?

13:10 Should We Really Slow Down the AI Frontier?

16:55 What Happens If America Slows Down—and China Doesn't?

19:30 Should We Restrict China's Access to AI Chips?

20:15 Why Aren't Zuckerberg and Jensen Backing an AI Slowdown?

21:25 Are We Being Misled About Data Centers?

23:25 Can the West Beat China While Drowning in Regulation?

26:20 How Many Planned Data Centers Will Actually Get Built?

27:15 Data Centers in Space: Real Opportunity or Elon Hype?

28:10 Is Energy AI's Biggest Bottleneck?

29:55 Could the Debt Boom Derail AI?

31:25 What Is KV Caching—and Why Does It Change AI Economics?

35:25 Does Compressing AI's Memory Make It Less Intelligent?

41:05 How Do We Solve AI's Exploding Memory Demands?

43:45 Will Every Company Own Its Own AI Model?

47:10 Why Bet on Ever-Bigger Models?

48:20 If We Already Have AGI, What Comes Next?

53:25 What Happens When Every AI Lab Builds Its Own Chips?

57:30 If DeepSeek Can Slash Costs with Software, Why Build New Hardware?

59:50 How Cheap Will AI Tokens Be by 2028?

1:03:15 What Would Be the First Warning Sign of an AI Bust?

1:03:55 Could Open Models Break OpenAI and Anthropic's Growth?

1:05:55 Could Mercor and Surge Become $200 Billion Companies?

AGENDA:

03:40 Dario Calls to "Pace the Frontier"
11:30 Why the Fed Will Raid Anthropic if Needed 
21:50 Meta Launches Muse to Take On Instinct
28:30 Instinct Raising $1BN at $10BN—Would You Invest?
39:55 Miro Sells for $1.35BN After a $17.5BN Valuation
47:45 Could Sam Bankman-Fried Win His Freedom?
51:25 WordPress Power Struggle: Matt Mullenweg Ousted, Then Returns
1:01:20 Mistral Raises €3BN in Europe's Biggest-Ever Tech Round
1:05:00 Adobe's New CEO & Canva's Slowing Growth: SaaS Giants Under Pressure

David Morehead is one of the most respected CIOs in the endowment fund world as Chief Investment Officer at Baylor University, overseeing its $2.6BN endowment. Before joining Baylor in 2011, he was a senior portfolio manager at several Chicago hedge funds, investing across corporate securities, distressed debt and public and private energy.

AGENDA:

04:00 The Portfolio Construction of a $2.6 Billion University Endowment?

09:00 Why We Spend More Time on Porfolio Construction Than Manager Selection?

14:00 Should LPs Back VC's Biggest Names or Find the Next Breakout Manager?

21:00 How Baylor Made Millions in the SaaSpocalypse?

26:00 Are Public Markets a Casino or Are Private Valuations the Real Fiction?

34:00 How Do You Buy a Market Crash Without Catching a Falling Knife?

49:00 Would You Fire a Fund Manager Who's Making You Money?

57:00 Could the Backlash Against Data Centres Derail the AI Boom?

01:02:00 Which Asset Class Is Overhyped—and Where Is the Next Big Opportunity?

AGENDA: 

04:30 How Do You Hire Exceptional People in the AI Era?
08:00 What Actually Works in Growth—and Why Can't You Trust Meta's Numbers?
17:00 How to Run Hundreds of Millions in Marketing with Zero Employees 
19:30 "Our Engineers Stopped Coding": What Stack Does Eight Sleep Use?
24:00 Is China Leaving the Rest of the World Behind?
35:00 How Do You Turn Superstar Athletes into Investors and Brand Ambassadors?
43:00 What Happens When Your Co-Founder Is Also Your Wife?
51:30 Should You Match Anthropic's Salaries—or Let Your Best People Leave?
59:30 Will Children Born Today Ever Need to Work?
01:05:00 What Drives You to Succeed—and Why Can't You Ever Switch Off?

AGENDA: 

00:00 Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived
04:05 Instinct and GrokBot Ignite the AI Assistant War
13:32 OpenAI's GPT Astra Redefines What AGI Means
26:00 GPT Astra and Fable 5.1 Accelerate the Model Race
30:38 OpenAI's Chief Scientist Calls for Enforced AI Safety Limits
40:50 Tesla Launches Cybercabs as Travis Kalanick Returns to Robotaxis
45:55 Index Pulls Out of Town Deal Following Instinct Conflict
49:45 Anthropic Abandons $6BN Descartes Acquisition After Due Diligence
56:18 Robinhood Earns First Underwriting Role in Oura IPO
01:00:28 Wonderful Doubles to $5BN and Approves $170M in Secondaries
01:09:02 Thinking Machines Targets $40BN Valuation in $6BN Funding Round

Jean-Denis "JD" Grèze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, the AI work assistant reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $1BN valuation. Before founding Town, JD spent seven years as CTO of Plaid. Before Plaid, he was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. He is also a prolific angel investor backing companies including Modal, BaseTen, Merge and NexHealth.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why AI Assistants Are Silicon Valley's Hottest Market
07:00 How Does Town Compete With Grokbot, Instinct and Big Tech?
11:00 Will We Have One AI Agent or Different Agents for Every Part of Our Lives?
17:00 How Many Mistakes Can AI Agents Make Before We Stop Trusting Them?
20:00 How Does Town Choose the Best Models Without Destroying Its Margins?
29:00 Is the AI Assistant Market Already Too Crowded?
37:00 Can Apple Win the Agent Race—and Are We Entering a Cybersecurity Nightmare?
41:00 What Does a Successful Town User Look Like—and Which Pricing Tier Makes Money?
47:00 What Will AI Agents Be Able to Do in Three Years That They Cannot Do Today?
54:00 Is the Skepticism Around Billion-Dollar AI Assistant Companies Justified?
58:00 What Needs to Happen for Town to Become a $100BN Company?
1:02:00 How Has AI Changed Hiring—and Why Does Town Spend $75K Per Engineer on AI Tools?
1:06:00 What Is JD Most Excited About Over the Next Decade?

Cliff Weitzman is the co-founder and CEO of Speechify, the world's leading AI voice and text-to-speech platform, used by more than 60 million people globally. Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, Cliff first built Speechify at Brown University to help him consume written material through audio. 

AGENDA: 

00:00 Cliff Weitzman Reveals His Biggest-Ever Strategic Mistake
03:08 Why Speechify Is Paying Millions to Build Their Own Data Centres
09:59 What No One Knows About Buying Chips That Everyone Should Know?
20:19 The AI Data Gold Rush Has a Brutal Business-Model Problem
23:42 How ElevenLabs Leapfrogged Speechify—and Why It Was Cliff's Fault
31:00 The $15M AI Talent War: Can Startups Still Compete for the Best Talent?
36:57 The New 10X Engineer: Ten Killer Decisions Every Day
46:12 The Voice-AI Bloodbath: Who Survives Commoditisation?
53:21 The Screen Is Dying—and Voice Will Replace It
57:58 How Cliff Plans to Use AI to Cure His Brother's Disease

AGENDA: 

00:00 Nvidia crushes $96.2B quarter and nears $12.9B Hugging Face deal
13:52 OpenAI cuts off Cursor as the Altman–Musk feud escalates
17:40 OpenAI's 1,000-agent cyberattack triggers an industry wake-up call
22:58 Instinct hits $2.5B valuation as AI assistants gain spending power
36:39 Cognition targets $1.6B ARR as the coding-agent market explodes
40:31 AI forces every startup to become a compound company—or get left behind
52:42 Salesforce embraces Claude and outcome-based pricing in major AI reset
1:00:52 Stripe–PayPal deal collapses as both sides clash over price
1:02:31 Clay hits $7B and Linear reaches $100M ARR as agents choose their tools
1:11:52 Texas pauses Flock cameras as police-surveillance backlash grows

Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the real-time analytics database powering companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Microsoft. ClickHouse just surpassed $350M in ARR and raised over $1B from investors including Dragoneer, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, 20VC and Benchmark. Previously, Aaron was CRO at Elastic, where he helped scale revenue from approximately $5M to $500M and led the company through its IPO. Before Elastic, he spent 12 years at Salesforce, working alongside Marc Benioff and helping transform it from a 200-person startup into a global software giant.

AGENDA:

4:05 Are we in an AI bubble?
13:40 How does software change when agents—not humans—make buying decisions?
22:28 Will 90% of tokens flow through open models; can enterprises trust them?
31:09 Why did ClickHouse sponsor Fulham; and could sports teams become $20B assets?
35:49 When will ClickHouse hit $1B ARR? 
38:31 Can startups still win elite talent from OpenAI? Biggest remote work mistake?
44:54 Is zero-to-$100M ARR now table stakes; or is durable growth what matters?
48:51 Is college still worth it;  which jobs will survive AI?
57:58 When will ClickHouse go public; and why not next year?

Eno Reyes is the co-founder and CTO of Factory, the agent-native software development platform building autonomous "Droids" for enterprise engineering teams. Factory has raised $220 million, most recently a $150 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, from investors including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, 20VC, NEA, Blackstone, Insight Partners and Nvidia. Before founding Factory, Eno worked as a machine-learning engineer at Hugging Face, training, optimizing and deploying large language models for enterprise customers.

AGENDA:

00:00 Are We Underestimating AI by an Order of Magnitude? 

06:35 Why Can the Smartest AI Model Be the Cheapest? 

18:51 Is Anthropic's Coding Business Really Worth $2 Trillion? 

33:41 Will Continuous-Learning Models Help or Hurt Factory? 

40:43 Will 80–90% of Neo-Labs Die in the Next 18 Months? 

44:33 Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models? 

55:42 Must AI Founders Radically Rethink What a Great Outcome Looks Like? 

1:04:30 Do Pedigree and Credentials Still Matter in AI Hiring? 

1:19:17 Which Is the Biggest Threat: Claude Code, Codex, Cognition or Cursor? 

1:24:20 What Seems Crazy Today but Will Be Obvious in Five Years?

AGENDA: 

00:00 NVIDIA Launches a Three-Deal Blitz Across the AI Stack
04:31 NVIDIA's $12BN Poolside Deal Exposes Frontier AI's Capital Wall
15:39 NVIDIA Moves to Back Mercor at $20BN and Perplexity at $30BN
26:55 OpenAI Confirms 2027 IPO as Anthropic Seizes the Lead
40:42 Hugging Face Draws $13BN Takeover Interest as Open Models Boom
44:56 Citadel Cashes Out 80% of Its Leopold Aschenbrenner AI Trade
51:51 AI Boom Is "Less Than One-Third Over"—But Token Addiction Has a Price
01:04:07 Stripe Reaccelerates to 41% as AI Reshapes Software's Leaderboard
01:07:45 Instinct Security Scare Exposes Why AI Agents Still Cannot Be Trusted
01:23:55 VCs Name AI's Biggest Bubbles: Support, Defense, Humanoids and Roll-Ups

Julien Bek is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most renowned venture firms in the world.  At Sequoia, he has partnered with companies including Rillet, Tacto, and Auctor. Before joining Sequoia, Julien spent five years at Accel, where he worked with companies including Miro, Melio, and BeReal. He is also an angel investor in Revolut and Attio.

AGENDA:

06:35 – What did Julien only discover about Sequoia after joining the firm?
08:05 – What does everyone get wrong about Sequoia?
13:00 – Is Series A the hardest stage at which to invest today?
14:00 – Is Sequoia less focused on ownership as outcomes become larger?
19:20 – Does Sequoia simply pay more than everyone else to win deals?
22:00 – Is the "triple, triple, double, double" growth model dead?
25:00 – What is Sequoia's investment process really like behind the scenes?
27:15 – Can a partner still invest when the rest of Sequoia votes against them?
30:00 – Why can a flawless founder pitch actually be a warning sign?
31:00 – How do you judge whether a founder is exceptional in just 30 minutes?
33:00 – How can investors tell whether a founder's story is genuine?
35:10 – Is arrogance a bad trait in a founder?
36:00 – Which great founder did Julien completely misread?
37:15 – How should investors adjust their founder assessment across different cultures?
39:00 – What does a founder's childhood reveal about their future trajectory?
40:30 – What has Julien learned from Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Alfred Lin and Shaun Maguire?
47:00 – What does it mean when "agents become the new customer"?
49:00 – Does UI become irrelevant in an agent-first economy?
50:15 – Will answer-engine optimisation become larger than SEO?
52:00 – Will AI agents destroy software margins and brand loyalty?
53:00 – How quickly will enterprises allow agents to make purchasing decisions?
54:00 – Is AI infrastructure a safer investment than applications?
56:00 – Do software margins matter less when the potential outcomes are larger?
58:00 – Could the next trillion-dollar company masquerade as a services business?
01:00:00 – Which service industries can AI truly automate end-to-end?
01:02:00 – Are enterprises simply crying out for more help implementing AI?
01:03:10 – Will AI lead to dramatically smaller teams?
01:06:15 – Is traditional private equity screwed?
01:07:00 – The most overfunded and underfunded categories in venture
01:08:15 – What is the best AI agent company outside Sequoia's portfolio?
01:09:00 – Which missed investment still haunts Julien?
01:09:45 – Which founder trait will Julien never compromise on?
01:10:00 – Which competing fund makes Sequoia bring its A-game?
01:10:45 – How Julien missed Revolut—and helped his mother retire by investing anyway
01:14:00 – What does Julien believe that other Sequoia partners might disagree with?
01:15:00 – What is Julien most excited about over the next five years of AI?

Jerry Murdock is the Co-Founder of Insight Partners, which manages over $90 billion in assets. Jerry personally backed companies including Twitter, Nest and Docker, while Insight's portfolio includes giants such as Shopify, Wiz and monday.com. Across three decades, Insight has helped produce 55+ IPOs and become one of the most powerful technology investment firms in the world. 

AGENDA:

00:00 — Is the AI Bubble About to Burst?

11:00 — Will Half of All Neoclouds Disappear Within 36 Months?

13:00 — Can Open Source Models Actually Beat OpenAI and Anthropic?

22:00 — Are We Entering the Golden Age of Cybersecurity Attacks?

32:00 — Have AI Valuations Completely Lost Touch With Reality?

42:00 — Is AI About to Wipe Out an Entire Generation of SaaS & Private Equity?

47:00 — Should We Ban U.S. Chips From Being Exported to China?

48:00 — Should We Be Fearful of Open-Source Chinese Models?

49:00 — Will Continuous Learning Kill Every AI Model We Use Today?

53:00 — Why Microsoft Remains a Mega Buy

56:00 — Which Mag 7 Giant Would You Short — and Is Apple's AI Strategy a Disaster?

AGENDA:

04:20 Elon's Deal of the Decade: SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60BN
06:10 Why Cursor Was Surprisingly Cheap at $60BN
07:00 Why Zuckerberg Failed to Buy the AI Prize Elon Secured
12:00 Elon vs Zuck: Who Would You Rather Work For?
14:00 Will Microsoft or Amazon Now Race to Buy Cognition?
17:05 Stripe's $7BN OpenRouter Deal Creates Huge VC Winners
25:00 OpenRouter's Fatal Risk: Enterprises Don't Want 10 Models
28:15 Anthropic Turns Its First Profit on $11.5BN of Quarterly Revenue
32:15 Can Anthropic Really Reach $600BN in Revenue?
37:00 Why Every Elite Engineer Could Soon Get $100K in AI Tokens
39:30 Would Rory Buy Anthropic at a $2.5TN Valuation?
44:50 Silver Lake's $43BN Workday Bet: SaaS Isn't Dead, It's Mature
53:00 How Silver Lake Could Make $30BN From Workday
57:00 Lovable vs Higgsfield: Similar Revenue, Radically Different Valuations
58:00 Is Lovable's $13.3BN Price Actually Cheap?
63:30 Why the DOJ Is Coming After Andreessen Horowitz
69:00 Why A16Z Has "50 Legal Battles" Happening at Once

Andrew Macdonald (Mac) is the longest-serving employee at Uber. Today, he is the President and COO. No one on the planet has spent more time mastering ride-sharing than Mac. Uber now does 300M rides per week, has 200M users, and is one of the most recognised brands on the planet. Mac never does interviews and so this was a rare look behind the scenes at the Uber machine. 

AGENDA:

05:39 – How was Mac the only survivor from the Travis era?
10:39 – How does Uber decide what to include in Uber One membership?
11:45 – How does Uber decide which new products to pursue?
16:08 – What does Uber need to do to reach 500 million users?
20:37 – Why Uber was right to focus on its core business and divest autonomy?
24:08 – Why India and Brazil will delay Uber's autonomous future?
28:34 – The craziest story from Uber's battle in China
29:27 – Why Travis Kalanick believed money was the moat?
31:17 – Was Uber structurally disadvantaged in China from day one?
35:48 – Inside Uber's SWAT team of its 30 best AI engineers
37:55 – How companies need to extract real efficiency from AI?
42:00 – Will Uber have more or fewer employees in five years?
43:52 – Will companies that do not work with frontier models be disaggregated?
46:02 – Will AI agents disaggregate Uber's interface and customer relationship?
48:26 – Why Brian Chesky was right: chat is not the best interface for everything
55:52 – Why it is bullshit to say DoorDash would not be number one if Travis were still CEO
59:13 – The single biggest lesson from Travis Kalanick
1:00:07 – The second biggest lesson from Travis Kalanick

Matt Swulinski is one of the best growth leaders in AI. He is currently Head of Growth at Viktor, the Accel-backed AI coworker. Previously, he was Head of Growth at Wispr Flow, where he was marketing hire #1 and built the growth function from pre-launch to millions of users. Matt also built the AI-powered marketing OS that automated 100 newsletter sponsorships a month and enabled a lean team to scale dramatically faster. Before Wispr Flow, Matt worked in growth at Superhuman.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why SaaS Founders Should Steal the E-Commerce Growth Playbook
04:47 How Does PLG Change When AI Agents Become the Customer?
07:46 When Should an Early-Stage Founder Start Spending on Paid Growth?
10:36 How Do You Build the Tracking Stack to Know Whether Paid Is Working?
17:38 How Much Should You Spend on Creative—and How Do You Produce 500 Ads a Month?
23:10 How Long Should You Test Paid—and How Do You Scale Meta, Google and YouTube?
39:38 How Do You Build Referral, Paywall and AEO Loops That Compound?
49:46 How Do You Hire and Structure an AI-Native Growth Team?
1:04:27 Which Growth Channels Are Most Underrated—and Most Overrated?
1:09:28 How Do You Build an AI Operating System That Makes Your Work Compound?

AGENDA:

• 05:00 Canva's Growth Gets Slashed as AI Costs Explode
• 20:00 The Great Software Reset: Why 2026 Will Punish AI Hesitancy
• 29:00 Canva's Valuation Reality Check—and the LP Liquidity Trap
• 35:00 Google's AI Brain Drain: Jeff Dean Leaves, Demis Steps Back
• 43:00 Why Google Can't Afford to Cure Alzheimer's
• 50:00 The Data-Centre Revolt: Can AI Survive the Political Backlash?
• 55:00 Elon Musk's $55BN Terrafab Bet to Break Free from TSMC
• 57:00 Revolut's $50BN CEO Pay Package—and the Return of Founder Control
• 01:13 AI Shopping, Atlassian's Revival, and Airtable's Brutal Sale Reality

Alex Atallah is the Founder and CEO @ OpenRouter, the unified interface for LLMs. The company has raised over $153M in funding, with the latest valuation pricing the company at $1.3BN. OpenRouter is reportedly in an acquisition process with Stripe for $10BN. 

AGENDA:

00:00 Is OpenRouter Selling to Stripe for $10 Billion?
04:05 What Did Alex Learn From Scaling OpenSea?
06:38 What Did OpenRouter's Founding Thesis Get Wrong?
14:47 Is AI Model Routing Already Being Commoditized?
19:12 Do Falling Token Prices Help or Hurt OpenRouter?
27:16 Should America Be Alarmed by Chinese Open Models?
32:43 Will US Open-Source Models Compete With Chinese Models in the Next 12 Months?
39:26 Will the Router Be Swallowed by the Agent Framework?
48:56 Is Distillation Wrong—and How Should We Look at It?
50:01 Is the Reported $10 Billion Stripe Deal Actually Happening?

David Frankel is one of the great seed investors of our time. As the Co-Founder of Founder Collective he has backed the likes of Uber, Coupang, Suno, PillPack, Airtable, Whoop, Shield AI and many more. In a world of expanding fund sizes, David and Founder Collective are one of the only successful franchises to truly stick to small, boutique funds. 

AGENDA:

00:00 The Bubbles Are Getting Bigger—and There Will Be a Lot of Roadkill

05:21 The Worst-Performing Funds Will Be the $50M–$100M Seed Funds

25:06 "We're Greedy for Returns, Not Management Fees"

30:10 "Pro Rata Is the Original Sin"

32:59 "A $1BN Valuation Is the New Series A"

46:39 "I Have Never Seen Secondary Markets This Liquid"

58:03 Microsoft Has Done a Crappy Job of AI—and Another Dot-Com Crash Is Inevitable

01:08:25 OpenAI and Anthropic Will Be Disrupted—and China Could Do It

01:16:12 "Anyone Who Claims They Knew Is Full of Shit"

01:19:56 Our Children Won't Need to Drive—and Chemotherapy Will Look Prehistoric

Special Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO @ Palo Alto Networks. 

AGENDA:

04:50 Airtable Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.285B 
17:00 Leo Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up as Citadel Buys His $16BN Book
22:30 Anthropic's AI Models Breach Three Companies as Cyber Threat Accelerates
33:35 Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B as Chinese Models Crush AI Prices
38:05 Valar Atomics Triples to $6B as Sequoia Bets on Nuclear Power for AI
42:50 OpenAI and Anthropic Could Trigger a Massive Public-Market Dislocation
52:55 Big Tech and Palantir Earnings Ignite the Next Phase of the AI Gold Rush
1:04:30 Procore Buys DroneDeploy for $900M in a High-Stakes 12x Revenue Bet
1:10:55 Scale AI Hits $1.5B ARR After the Meta Deal Left It for Dead

Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.7BN. Arena recently surpassed $100M ARR just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, powered by more than 30 million monthly users.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Intro: "Kimi beat every American model": What Nobody Wants to Admit…

05:20 – Is this the true commoditization of models? Are they just a utility layer now?

07:30 – Do Chinese open source models cannibalize the closed frontier labs?

10:30 – Why has America's open source community lagged so badly behind China?

17:20 – Will Chinese models be banned in the US — and does hosting locally really kill the backdoor risk?

23:20 – Are enterprises really terrified of working with the frontier labs?

27:20 – Why hasn't inference got cheaper — and what happens when Anthropic's "disgustingly high" margins go public?

30:20 – Who should decide if a model is safe to release: the government, a neutral body, or nobody?

33:10 – Are we about to see cyberattacks like we've never seen before? (The fake candidate who passed every interview)

37:00 – 75 Neo labs: what separates the winners from the two-thirds worth nothing?

40:45 – Is data actually a commodity — and can data providers be $100BN companies?

48:00 – Can you be the referee when the players are paying you? (And Arena's real revenue)

50:45 – Will the model providers eat the application layer? Are Harvey, Lagora and Figma in trouble?

54:10 – Quickfire: Why hasn't NVIDIA bounced on the rise of open source, who hits $10 trillion first, and does the compute debt cycle end in insolvency?

Joon Sung Park is the Founder and CEO of Simile, the AI simulation company building foundation models of human behaviour; allowing companies to test how real people may think, decide and act before making a decision in the real world. Simile has now raised $300 million in total, including a $200 million Series B announced last week at a $2 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks and Index Ventures.

AGENDA:

00:00 We Will Pay $100M for a Single Query on Some Models

10:00 Why Stock Markets May Not Exist in 5 Years Time

15:00 The Best Companies All Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies

19:00 The Best AI Companies Have Clear and Fast Reward Functions

24:00 How We Sign Fortune 500 Companies for $10M Contracts in Weeks

32:00 Does Similie Kill Kalshi and Polymarket? Prediction vs Changing the Future

42:00 Inside Similie's $300M Raise; What Every Founder Needs to Know

AGENDA:

05:00 Jensen's Open-Weights Letter Puts Anthropic on an Island
10:00 OpenAI's Model Targets Hugging Face in a Cyber-Security Scare
18:00 America's Open-Model Push Accelerates as China Looms Large
30:00 Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia
34:00 Google Cloud Grows 82%—So Why Did the Market Panic?
41:00 Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms and Physical AI
51:00 Francisco Partners Raises $21B: Can Private Equity Still Save SaaS?
1:00:00 Mark Pincus Says Quit When It's Too Hard—Jason Lemkin Erupts
1:07:00 Stripe vs Revolut: Which $100B+ Fintech Would You Own?

Matt Murphy is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, who just raised $3 billion in fresh capital, its largest pool ever. Matt's portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora, OpenRouter, Chai Discovery, Axiom, OpenEvidence and more.

AGENDA: 

00:00 Why Menlo Broke All Its Investing Rules to Back Anthropic
09:00 Why Ownership Matters Less in an Outlier-Driven Venture Market
13:00 Do We Have an SPV Problem in Venture Today?
20:00 Do Margins Still Matter in AI?
23:00 Why Open Source Won't Derail Anthropic's Growth
26:00 Does Every Model Provider Need to Build Its Own Chips?
29:00 Why Anthropic Is Not a Threat to Legora
32:00 Why Series A Is the Hardest Place to Invest Today
36:00 Why Signalling Is B.S. and Every Fund Is Going Full Stack
42:00 Why Building a Company in Europe Is Hard Mode
47:00 Why Triple-Triple-Double-Double Is No Longer Venture-Scale Growth

Osvald Nitski is the Chief Product Officer at Mercor, the AI-training and expert-data marketplace powering frontier-model development. Mercor last raised a $350 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation, and is reportedly in discussions for a new round at a $20 billion valuation. Mercor crossed $2BN in ARR in June; doubling from $1 billion in only four months.

AGENDA: 

00:04:00 Will open-source models kill the data-provider business?

00:07:00 Are enterprises still terrified of working with frontier model companies?

00:09:00 Does every company end up with its own specialised AI model?

00:10:00 Do enterprises actually have an AI ROI problem?

00:11:00 How should founders balance AI performance against exploding token bills?

00:14:00 Does AI mean product teams build 10x more—or ruthlessly simplify?

00:15:00 What does it now take to be a great product manager in an AI-native world?

00:20:00 Is the boom in AI services and forward-deployed engineers here to stay?

00:37:00 Can Mercor escape its dependence on a handful of frontier-model customers?

00:47:00 Are AI-generated code and agents creating a cybersecurity arms race?

00:56:00 When will robotics have its real "ChatGPT moment"?

AGENDA:

00:04 China's Kimi and Qwen Put Frontier AI on Notice
00:08 Washington Debates Whether Chinese AI Models Should Be Banned
00:17 Can America Build a Profitable Open-Weight AI Champion?
00:21 OpenRouter's Moment: Is This the Perfect Time to Sell?
00:31 Fireworks' $1.5B Raise Signals the Real AI Money Is in Infrastructure
00:39 Why Every Great AI App May Need to Build Its Own Model
00:50 Stripe's Bold Play to Buy PayPal
01:01 The AI Funding Frenzy: Why Late-Stage Venture Is Winning
01:12 Nuclear Startups Go Wild While Databricks and Stripe Stay Private
01:15 The AI Supply Chain War: TSMC, ASML, DRAM—and Nvidia's Next Move

Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, the leading specialized intelligence and AI inference platform that last week raised $1.5BN at a whopping $17BN valuation. With just 200 people, the company has hit $1BN in ARR and expects to hit $2BN before the end of the year. Prior to Fireworks, Lin spent several years at Meta including on the founding team of PyTorch. 

AGENDA:

00:07 — Why Did Fireworks Bet on Inference When Everyone Else Was Chasing Training?

00:13 — Can Open-Source Models Turn AI Infrastructure into a Commodity?

00:19 — Should Enterprises Trust Chinese Open Models With Their Most Sensitive Data?

00:25 — Will Model Progress Keep Moving This Fast—or Are We Nearing a Plateau?

00:28 — Will the Multi-Model World Create a $100BN Routing Layer?

00:37 — How Much Will AI Token Usage Explode Over the Next Two Years?

00:43 — Will Token Costs Fall 10x—and Unleash 100x More Demand?

00:49 — Does Fireworks Eventually Have to Build Its Own Data Centres?

01:02 — What Is the Real Bottleneck Holding Back the AI Economy?

Fred Turner is the Founder and CEO @ Curative, one of the wildest stories in tech. Fred scaled a COVID testing business from $0 to $5BN in revenue and took the team from 7 to 7,000 employees in just 9 months. They did over 206,000 COVID tests in a single day and signed contracts in the 100s of $Ms with several of the largest states. Today, Curative is a unicorn health insurance business taking on the incumbents for one of the largest markets in healthcare. 

AGENDA:

00:00 How Did a Spare-Time COVID Test Become a $5BN Business?

07:00 How Do You Go From Testing Cows to STDs, Sepsis and COVID?

21:00 When Did Fred Realise COVID Was Massive—and How Did Curative Scale to $5BN?

36:00 Why Pivot Into Health Insurance—and What Is Broken About US Healthcare?

40:00 How Is AI Rebuilding Curative—and Which Departments Go to Zero?

45:00 Is SaaS Dead? Why Is Curative Cutting 80% of Its Software Spend?

48:00 Are Legacy Insurers Screwed? What Will Anthropic Be Worth in Three Years?

59:00 Will AI Make Companies Smaller? Which Jobs Will Survive?

1:10:00 Why Nuclear—and Could Subcritical Become Bigger Than Curative?

1:17:00 What Have Marriage and Fatherhood Taught Fred? What Has He Changed His Mind On?

AGENDA:

• 00:00 – Apple SUES OpenAI: Did They Steal Apple's Biggest Secrets?
• 05:10 – Is OpenAI's $6BN Hardware Bet Already Dead?
• 12:50 – Zuckerberg Is Back: Meta Finally Takes On OpenAI
• 18:05 – The AI Spending Bubble Nobody Is Talking About
• 23:45 – Claude Is Coming for Designers, Product Managers & Figma
• 27:15 – Anthropic's $50BN Explosion: Have We Already Hit AI's TAM?
• 36:00 – The $26BN AI IPO Powering the Entire Industry
• 40:00 – Seed Investing Is Dead? Jason Calacanis Changes Strategy
• 57:00 – SaaS Is in Trouble: AI Is Accelerating Terminal Decay
• 01:15:00 – Why Greylock Said No to Billions of Extra Dollars

Avishai Abrahami is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wix, the NASDAQ-listed website creation platform serving millions of businesses worldwide. Today, Wix generates more than $2BN in ARR and has a market capitalization of approximately $2.1BN, after reaching a peak valuation of $17BN over the past two years. The company also acquired Base44, one of the fastest-growing AI application-building platforms, scaling it to $150M in ARR in record time.

AGENDA:

00:00 The SaaS Apocalypse: What Does Wall Street Still Not Understand About Wix?

07:00 Is the Market Valuing Wix's Core Business at Less Than Zero?

12:55 Will AI Kill Wix... or Make Base44 Bigger Than the Entire Company?

19:15 "You Are NOT Going to Vibe Code Shopify" — Why Everyone Is Getting AI Wrong

23:00 Would You Really Pay $80M for a One-Person Startup?

24:15 The Buyback Disaster: Would Avishai Do It All Again?

31:00 Why Every AI Customer Support Startup Keeps Failing (According to Wix)

37:00 Should a 22-Year-Old Still Learn to Code in the Age of AI?

42:20 Has AI Been Overhyped? Avishai's Most Controversial Prediction Yet

49:00 The Hardest Lessons on Leadership, Marriage & Building Through Chaos

Arvind Jain is the Founder & CEO of Glean, the enterprise AI leader valued at $7.2 billion after raising more than $770 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, DST Global, and more. Before Glean, Arvind co-founded Rubrik, helping build it into one of the world's leading cloud infrastructure companies before its successful IPO. Prior to that, he spent over a decade at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, working across Search, Maps, and YouTube.

AGENDA:

00:00 – The Shocking Truth About Frontier AI: 90% Is Already a Commodity
02:04 – Can OpenAI & Anthropic Own Enterprise AI? The Battle for the Workplace Begins
10:18 – Will OpenAI and Anthropic Win the App Layer
18:03 – Microsoft Is the Real Enemy… Not OpenAI?
20:53 – "Where's the ROI?" Why Enterprises Are Starting to Question the AI Hype
26:00 – Will AI Replace Your Job? Harry & Arvind's Heated Clash Over the Future of Work
33:43 – The Billion-Dollar Mistake Every AI Company Is Making on Token Spend
39:20 – The AI Land Grab Is On: Why Founders Must Move Now or Lose Forever
42:20 – China vs America: Who Really Wins the AI Race?
47:20 – Rapid Fire: The Future of Computer Science, Hiring, Fundraising & AI's Biggest Winners

AGENDA:

05:00 Washington Just Put Frontier AI on a Leash
06:30 Sam Altman's Wild 5% Government Stake Idea
19:00 The AI Funding Bubble: Why Founders No Longer Fear Dilution
28:00 Alex Karp's Brutal Warning: Enterprises Don't Trust Frontier AI
33:00 Meta's Shock Pivot: Has Zuck Accidentally Built the Next CoreWeave?
41:00 Nvidia's Dangerous New Game: "Compute Now, Pay Later"
45:00 Anthropic & DeepSeek Go After Nvidia's Crown
48:00 Kling vs Sora: Did China Just Win AI Video?
52:00 Is China Secretly Winning the Open Source AI War?
01:02:00 Microsoft & Amazon's $6B Bet: AI Still Needs Humans
01:11:00 Ashton Kutcher Walks Away From Sound Ventures
01:16:00 The New Startup Talent War: No Liquidity, No Chance
01:20:00 Final Thoughts: Who Wins the AI Endgame?

Mike Mignano is a General Partner at Union Square Ventures, one of the most iconic venture firms in the world, whose investments include Coinbase, Stripe, Etsy, Twilio, Cloudflare. Before joining USV, Mike was a Partner at Lightspeed, where he backed breakout AI companies including Granola and Suno. Prior to investing, he co-founded Anchor, acquired by Spotify. 

AGENDA:

00:00 Is Fear of Failure the Secret Weapon Behind Great Founders?

07:20 Why Leave Lightspeed for USV — and Is Thesis-Driven Venture Still Alive?

09:50 Is the Real AI Money Still in Infrastructure, or Are Apps Finally About to Explode?

13:00 Who Wins the AI Model War: OpenAI, Anthropic, Open Source, or the "Rebel Alliance"?

19:00 Are We About to Hand Our Entire Lives Over to AI Agents?

21:00 Can Anthropic Keep Growing Like This — or Will Token Spend Break the Model?

26:00 Can AI Routing Become a $50BN Company, or Is It Just a Commodity Pipe?

30:00 Will the AI Energy Crisis Create the Next Monster Venture Outcomes?

36:00 Can Startups Survive Microsoft, OpenAI, and the Brutal Power of Bundling?

45:00 Should VCs Ignore Price When Backing Generational Companies?

55:30 Is Traditional Media Dead — and Who Becomes the New Tech Kingmaker?

Clay Bavor is the Co-Founder of Sierra, one of the world's fastest-growing enterprise AI companies. Sierra is valued at approximately $15.8 billion, has raised more than $1.5BN from leading investors including Sequoia, Benchmark, Greenoaks, GV and Tiger Global, and today serves more than 40% of the Fortune 50. The company recently surpassed $150 ARR, making it one of the fastest-growing enterprise software businesses in history.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Why Frontier AI Demand Will Be Unlimited

08:00 – Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins?

17:00 – China's AI Advantage & The Distillation Debate

20:30 – Inside Sierra: The AI Agents Running the Entire Company

24:00 – The $100,000 Token Budget Every Engineer Will Soon Need

29:00 – Building AI for 40% of the Fortune 50

37:00 – Why Forward-Deployed Engineers Are the Future of Enterprise AI

43:00 – Sierra's Unusual Board Meetings & Billion-Dollar Company Playbook

48:00 – The Four Values Behind a $16B Startup: Craftsmanship, Intensity & Family

56:00 – Clay Bavor's Hiring Philosophy, AI-First Teams & What's Coming Next