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Sep 28, 2026 · 13:42
Every AI model. One key. Zero markup. That’s the starting point. The bigger ambition: help companies turn their AI traffic into better models they own Silen Naihin helped grow…
Sep 23, 2026 · 17:03
“I don't believe Claude Code will exist in its current form in six months” Ben Swerdlow, founder of Freestyle, thinks coding agents are moving from local machines to the cloud,…
Sep 22, 2026 · 12:23
For years designers made pictures of a product and engineers turned them into code AI changed that. Designers can now build with code themselves But their work is scattered. One…
Sep 21, 2026 · 12:50
There are over a billion cameras in the world. They can all see. Almost none of them can tell you what they saw. Andrey Gizdov has been in computer vision since 2016, when CNNs…
Sep 18, 2026 · 12:45
Quippy lets you rehearse the conversation before you have it. Pushing back on a boss. A first date. Short practice scenarios, line-by-line feedback on what landed and what…
Sep 16, 2026 · 15:45
A CFO at a publicly traded company on variable AI pricing: "This is introducing my worst nightmare, which is a blank check" Claude, Codex, Cursor, Devin, Gemini... Every workflow…
Sep 4, 2026 · 6:25
Somewhere, someone already has the thing you're looking for. A dataset, a patent, a capability, a customer, an answer. Most of the time neither of you ever finds out. That's the…
Sep 3, 2026 · 9:24
Spend enough at a luxury house and someone actually calls to ask how the bag is working out. Ilya Valmianski brought that up on the show as the piece of retail everyone else…
Sep 2, 2026 · 14:17
Voice AI can pass a Turing test. For about a minute. That's a generated clip, though. Have a human actually talk back and the number collapses to six or seven seconds, roughly…
Aug 25, 2026 · 7:17
It started with a dream. “Guys, let’s make it to the GRAMMYs.” 18 months later, he did it. Zach Nieman’s GRAMMY-Nominated production “Cali Coast (Psionics Remix)” by Soul Pacific…
Aug 21, 2026 · 8:47
Fine-tune a frontier LLM on addition and it handles one through five digits without breaking a sweat. Six digits, a friend of Varun's found performance collapsing to zero. The…
Aug 20, 2026 · 5:36
Hollywood-grade storytelling, startup-speed execution. Most AI ads feel disposable. Rubbrband is betting the future looks cinematic instead. Jeremy Lee, Abhinav Gopal, and Darren…
Aug 18, 2026 · 9:31
You can't do a joke about the Jira board at a normal comedy club. The audience won't know what the Jira board is, and explaining it kills the laugh before you get to it. Neal…
Aug 14, 2026 · 10:08
Creating video is getting easier. Finishing it isn't. AI writes code and you still review it before it ships. AI makes clips now, and someone still has to assemble them into…
Aug 11, 2026 · 5:00
30 petabytes of collider data. That was Jayram Palamadai's job at CERN, where he worked as a distributed computing engineer getting collider data out to physicists. At that scale…
Aug 10, 2026 · 11:00
Pioneer Fund met Gaurav Maken at Y Combinator Demo Day, and today he works there as Community Partner. What stayed with him was the way the meeting ran. The people across the…
Aug 7, 2026 · 10:43
Every startup can build a demo. Then comes everything else: authentication, databases, hosting, monitoring, email, analytics, real-time infrastructure. None of it makes the demo,…
Aug 6, 2026 · 13:04
99% of U.S. banks aren't JPMorgan. All of them are regulated like it. The bottleneck isn't serving customers. It's everything that happens after. Loans. Compliance. Fraud…
Aug 3, 2026 · 10:07
Scientific discovery shouldn't slow down because of software. But every instrument in the lab ships its own, and someone has to learn all of them. Researchers don't want to…
Jul 31, 2026 · 12:00
You can track a burrito from the restaurant to your door in real time You donate to a family in a crisis zone. Usually you get a thank-you email. That's where it ends. Nasrat…
Jul 28, 2026 · 20:45
AI changed how software gets built. The tools we use after we ship haven't caught up. Code is getting cheaper. Production is getting harder. That's the gap Sherwood Callaway saw…
Jul 24, 2026 · 14:38
Your product didn't fail. No one saw it. The best product often loses Not because it's worse Because no one saw it Teams ship daily Marketing got faster too It just never stopped…
Jul 23, 2026 · 6:54
A phone call used to mean trust. Now it could be AI. DetectifAI is building the next layer of cybersecurity for the AI era Not another chatbot Not another AI wrapper Foundational…
Jul 21, 2026 · 10:12
100,000 users sounds like a dream Until you're personally answering 50+ support tickets a day... That was Dawson Chen. He'd scaled Martin, an AI personal assistant, to more than…
Jul 17, 2026 · 25:00
As a founder, Emma Lawler felt like SOC 2 was a major distraction from building. But when she started selling to enterprise logos, it became something that was impossible to…
Jul 15, 2026 · 5:39
96% of users aren't saying no to your product. They're saying no to your paywall. And the only tool most teams have for that is manual A/B tests. Thousands of dollars per…
Jul 14, 2026 · 16:33
Right now most AI agents interact with software the way humans do They open a browser, look at a screenshot, and try to figure out what to click That's like ripping the LIDAR off…
Jul 13, 2026 · 10:54
Before AI, marketing teams built five creatives for every campaign. Now they can generate fifty. But more content didn't solve marketing. It exposed a new bottleneck. Most of it…
Jul 10, 2026 · 9:52
1.2 billion people struggle with addiction. There will never be enough clinicians to treat them. Koby Conrad believes AI changes that equation. His own story starts much smaller.…
Jul 8, 2026 · 9:38
Bao's job was automating other people's jobs. So he automated his own. His team used to forward deploy the old way — go into customers' offices, sit next to their teams, watch…
Jul 7, 2026 · 16:42
Most founders don't need another lawyer. They need a better system. Jessica Hubley spent years in Big Law, served as General Counsel at a venture-backed startup, and built her…
Jul 6, 2026 · 14:02
10 coding agents running in parallel. Zero idea which one finished. That was the problem. Around November, Austin Wang and his co-founder Lawrence Chen stopped opening their IDE.…
Jul 2, 2026 · 15:53
Most companies don't need smarter AI. They need AI they can actually deploy OpenClaw is brilliant but can be brutal to set up. Days of configs. Agents messaging random contacts…
Jul 1, 2026 · 11:02
Most companies think they have a documentation problem. They don't. They have a context problem. Every company runs on things that were never written down - they just live in…
Jun 29, 2026 · 9:13
Every company runs on a hidden workforce. The people who reset the passwords. Clear the MFA requests. Provision the access. Push the tickets through the systems so the rest of…
Jun 24, 2026 · 19:19
The biggest hedge funds have entire teams building AI. Most asset managers are on their own. But closing that gap isn't about buying more AI. It's about a problem most people get…
Jun 23, 2026 · 8:18
Shipping isn't the bottleneck anymore. Attention is. Maanav Agrawal kept seeing the same pattern. Some of the coolest products weren't getting the attention they deserved…
Jun 22, 2026 · 16:35
In 2022, San Francisco leased five million square feet of office space The entire year In Q1 2026 alone: more than four million At the time of this recording (Apr 2026) tenant…
Jun 20, 2026 · 9:27
A single glass of water holds about 20 hours of breathing Leo Kankkunen is building the gear that pulls it out Tankless diving technology that generates breathable oxygen…
Jun 18, 2026 · 11:30
Startups spend more time wiring their outbound tools together than actually talking to potential customers Verbiflow was built to change that It's Outbound Infrastructure for…
Jun 16, 2026 · 15:36
Most brands don't know if their marketing is working. They launch campaigns. Spend real money. Watch the dashboards. Then hope. Months later, a report arrives explaining what…
Jun 12, 2026 · 12:13
The internet got flooded with AI content. Everything started sounding the same. Same hooks. Same cadence. Same “we’re not doing X — we’re doing Y.” Jameson Zaballos thinks that’s…
Jun 12, 2026 · 14:05
Global markets were built for everyone. Access wasn't. Millions of traders outside the US watch Tesla move. Watch Nvidia earnings. Watch SpaceX rumors explode timelines. But when…
Jun 10, 2026 · 17:06
The best AI companies aren't replacing bad software. They're giving it a login. Every software company for years has made the same pitch to manufacturers: clean APIs, migrate…
Jun 8, 2026 · 11:12
Relationships drive revenue. That's why more companies are investing in dinners, customer events, founder meetups, and community gatherings. But here's what happens after the…
Jun 5, 2026 · 15:03
Chris Bakke never pitched Elon. He just posted good ideas in public for nine months straight. Laskie was sourcing engineers on Twitter while everyone else lived on LinkedIn.…
Jun 4, 2026 · 9:31
Teddy li's first version of Prepse did something reasonable It connected to your call recordings, pulled out the data, and filled in your CRM. customers told him it was a nice…
Jun 3, 2026 · 11:35
AI shouldn't replace therapists. It should help them spend more time being therapists. Not because AI won't get smarter Because good therapy isn't just information It's trust…
Jun 3, 2026 · 21:37
Most companies don't realize they have a documentation problem until everyone already depends on it. Customers use it. New hires use it. Engineers use it. And when documentation…
Jun 2, 2026 · 11:11
A production issue shouldn't require a detective Yet that's how most observability works today Most observability tools just dump alerts. Duplicates, no context, and you still…
Jun 1, 2026 · 12:35
AI agents can write code, analyze data, and pass the bar exam They can't order you a pizza because they don't have a phone number Think about how much of the real world still…
May 28, 2026 · 8:54
Flowscope’s agents can map an entire department in two weeks. Then they automate it. It’s an AI-native consulting firm where agents learn how a business actually runs - process…
May 27, 2026 · 10:57
99% of session replays are your app working exactly as expected (hopefully) The other 1% is where the friction hides The bugs. The failed onboarding flows. The conversion leaks.…
May 26, 2026 · 17:55
Most cancer drugs target proteins FinalDose thinks the real opportunity is one layer deeper: DNA Jeff Liu and his team are building a programmable drug platform that uses genetic…
May 23, 2026 · 11:47
The next big space race won’t be about going up. It’ll be about bringing things back down. After four years building satellites at Astranis, Payton Case realized something: as…
May 21, 2026 · 3:50
Ansel Dias is using his robot factory to build more robot factories AutoFAB is a robotic desktop factory that prints, assembles, quality-checks, and packages hardware…
May 20, 2026 · 9:38
The most valuable thing in AI won't be generating answers. It'll be knowing which ones are right. Right now AI writes code, solves problems, produces proofs. But there's no way…
May 19, 2026 · 15:10
A bug shows up in your product Lucent spots it Drops an alert in Slack Someone tags a coding agent in the thread It ships a PR Fixed before anyone knew it was broken This is the…
May 18, 2026 · 16:20
The entire vibe coding wave got one thing backwards Everyone optimized for speed Prompt in, app out, as fast as possible But the bottleneck isn't just speed It's context Give…
May 15, 2026 · 18:58
Your AI agent makes a mistake. Who pays for it? Not your E&O policy That assumes a human made the error Not your cyber policy That assumes an attacker breached the system…
May 14, 2026 · 9:14
AI coding tools are making developers faster than ever QA still hasn't caught up Aakash saw it firsthand at Windsurf during the AI coding explosion Then realized: QA is probably…
May 13, 2026 · 21:12
The “buy a list and blast emails” era is ending Not because outbound stopped working Because the data got smarter than the emails Kathryn Wu and her co-founder built Openmart as…
May 12, 2026 · 14:13
A drug was approved in China Then it failed clinical trials in the US No one could figure out why The answer was hiding in the gut microbiome Anto Bio’s model helped identify it…
May 11, 2026 · 18:08
Most people think they need more motivation to work out They need less friction But training plans assume your life stays static You travel It rains You have 20 mins between…
May 8, 2026 · 16:46
Every voice AI has the same problem The moment you stop talking, it starts talking But humans don’t work that way In real conversations, pauses don’t always mean interruption.…
May 7, 2026 · 58:43
Speed to lead sounds like a sales tactic It's actually the whole game Ruben Harris knows this better than anyone He built a 300-person call center across 3countries to reach 1M…
May 6, 2026 · 10:23
The way to make software faster was always: make the code happen faster AI solved that Cursor, Claude Code, Replit... Building is nearly instant now So what's slow? Knowing if it…
Apr 30, 2026 · 12:19
Google used to surface the PDF of a law if you searched its exact name. Now it surfaces consultancies advising on it. And LLMs have gotten worse at this too. As they’ve tried to…
Apr 16, 2026 · 24:31
Tech is the biggest story in the world and its media is somehow the least fun to watch Adil Mania moved from Paris to SF to change that Now he's building a full media company…
Mar 31, 2026 · 12:05
Liam Karlsson had no clue why his SEO clients were losing traffic while rankings held Then his 57-year-old mom asked ChatGPT for new running shoes Nike answer. Bought the shoe.…
Mar 27, 2026 · 7:41
Amazon sellers do not have a data problem. They have a decision problem. They already have the clicks The conversions The impressions The keyword history What they do not have is…
Mar 27, 2026 · 6:52
Construction doesn't fail on the jobsite. It fails in the drawings. The jobsite just reveals it Project managers spend half their time scanning plans page by page for conflicts…
Mar 27, 2026 · 20:15
Agents don’t need bigger models. They need better tools. Morph trains coding subagents. Not for humans. For frontier models. Fast Apply edits at 10,000 tokens/sec . WarpGrep…
Mar 25, 2026 · 15:02
Pamir Ehsas spent years as outside counsel serving startups. He saw the same problem on repeat Simple legal work took weeks. Pricing was opaque. Lawyers kept starting from…
Mar 25, 2026 · 16:56
An employee used his corporate Gemini account to generate fake receipts for reimbursements Not because he was lying. He just didn't have the real ones That's when the CISO…
Mar 24, 2026 · 43:03
Attorneys are trained to spot issues. That’s literally what law school teaches. Show them your product, and the first thing they’ll say is: “the margin is off on this.” Every…
Mar 19, 2026 · 10:46
The internet was the training set for intelligence Nobody has built the equivalent for the physical world Previously, Lucas Ngoo co-founded Carousell, scaled it past $1B Now at…
Mar 18, 2026 · 9:14
Some hotel software is still DOS-based. Sometimes pen and paper (that's why guests are waiting 45 mins to get towels) Gavin's dad has worked at Marriott for the last nine years.…
Mar 18, 2026 · 12:02
Direct sales reply rates are going down. AI spam is making it worse Nikhil Reddy saw the shift early: as trust matters more, partnerships become a real revenue channel Problem is…
Mar 17, 2026 · 16:37
Setting up a single trigger in Zendesk takes 30 clicks With Pillar it takes one sentence JJ Maxwell built an open source copilot you build into your app. Users talk to it in…
Dec 20, 2025 · 18:18
The script has been the same for decades: find a co-founder Investors demanded it. Accelerators screened for it. The narrative became so entrenched that founders started pairing…
Dec 19, 2025 · 15:05
Nate Matherson has spent 10+ years as a founder. He's built companies and even exited. After that first exit, he started angel investing in dozens of companies, then launched a…
Dec 18, 2025 · 10:38
Jayden Clark didn’t abandon music. He re-scored it for distribution. After music school, a hedge fund tour, and a B2B SaaS sprint, he launched MOTS—short, sharp episodes designed…
Dec 16, 2025 · 12:44
Sky Yang (CEO) & Neo Lee (CTO) are Co-founders of Imagine AI, an AI-powered content engine that clones B2B founders—replicating their voice, context, and backstory to create…
Dec 11, 2025 · 32:36
Rebecca Medina and Jeff Phillips built an AI-powered talent marketplace that's disrupting recruitment with transparent pricing, direct negotiation, and same-day PM hires for…
Dec 4, 2025 · 42:53
Julian Weisser is the Founder and CEO of Solo Founders , a three-month residency program in San Francisco where founders live and work together while maintaining full authorship…
Dec 2, 2025 · 19:37
Allen Naliath is the Founder and CEO of Friday , a Chrome extension that integrates AI email management directly into Gmail. Two years ago at Stanford, he struggled with the…
Nov 26, 2025 · 39:13
Lindsay Amos is the Founder of Amos Communications , a boutique firm for founder-led marketing and PR. From 2018 to 2024, she ran communications at Y Combinator, where she…
Nov 24, 2025 · 37:51
Joe Holberg is the Founder & former CEO of Spring , a workplace financial wellness platform that began D2C, pivoted to employer-paid, and became a top-rated U.S. offering for…
Nov 19, 2025 · 22:01
Jay Ram is Founder & CEO of Hud , the evaluation and RL platform for AI agents. Hud helps startups build RL environments , run fast reward loops, and plug into any RL backend —so…
Nov 17, 2025 · 38:03
Kevin Xu is Founder & CEO of Alpha AI , your “AI money friend” that plugs into real-time markets and your portfolio to explain what just happened—and what matters next—inside a…
Nov 1, 2025 · 37:52
Daivik Goel is Co-founder & CEO of Shor , a global payroll platform for startups. Traditional EOR providers charge around $7,000 per year to manage an employee earning $20,000…
Oct 24, 2025 · 23:55
Cody Schneider is the Founder & CEO of Graphed , an AI agent for marketing analytics. Graphed plugs into common data sources, manages the data warehouse , and lets marketers chat…
Oct 24, 2025 · 31:04
Craig Lewis is the Founder & CEO Ogentic AI , builder of Zing —an AI-native enterprise browser that turns intent → action in a secure, workflow-native workspace. Before Ogentic,…
Oct 17, 2025 · 27:37
Grace Gong is the Founder & CEO of Smart Venture Media , podcast host, angel investor, and author. She’s interviewed 500+ founders, investors, and operators on her podcasts, then…
Oct 15, 2025 · 44:48
Collin Wallace is a partner at Lobby Capital with 20+ years as an engineer, inventor, operator, and investor. Before Lobby, he was Managing Director of Techstars Silicon Valley,…
Oct 9, 2025 · 33:42
Alessandro Chesser is the founder and CEO of Dynasty , a startup focused on making Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) trust stacking accessible to founders. Before launching…
Oct 3, 2025 · 35:54
Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin is a co-founder of Sky Mavis , the team behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin blockchain. At the forefront of Web3's most groundbreaking experiments, Jeff helped…
Sep 23, 2025 · 31:16
Parthi Loganathan is the founder and CEO of Letterdrop , a Y Combinator-backed startup that helps B2B companies build pipeline by focusing on the warmest leads and people who are…
Sep 16, 2025 · 21:03
In this episode , I sat down with John Paul Mussalli , the co-founder and COO of CareSwift , a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-powered software to streamline…
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