Carina Hong is CEO of Axiom Math, where they're building a self-improving superintelligent reasoner, starting with an AI mathematician. She's a Rhodes Scholar, first-gen college grad and mathematics prodigy who earned dual degrees in mathematics and physics from MIT in 3 years. And a joint JD/PhD at Stanford. They just raised a $64M seed round from B Capital, Greycroft, Madrona, and Menlo Ventures. Carina's favorite books: Proofs from THE BOOK (Author: Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler)...

Mukund Jha is CEO of Emergent, an agentic vibe-coding platform. They've raised $23M from Lightspeed, Y Combinator, Together Fund, and Prosus. He was previously the cofounder and CTO of Dunzo, a hugely popular ecommerce company in India. Mukund's favorite books: The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Author: Ben Horowitz) (00:01) Intro (00:07) State of vibe-coding and where we are today (01:42) Emergent in plain English: what the product delivers (03:07) From prototype to traction: the first 90 d...

Stefano Ermon is the cofounder of Inception Labs and an associate professor at Stanford. Inception is developing a new type of AI models called Diffusion LLMs. Stefano's favorite book: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Author: Italo Calvino) (00:01) Introduction (00:38) What are autoregressive LLMs and how do they work (02:28) How diffusion LLMs rethink generation (04:02) The ceiling of autoregressive LLMs: cost, latency, reliability (06:19) Why diffusion LLMs are commercially viable now (...

Idan Plotnik is the CEO of Apiiro, an application security platform built for the AI era. They've raised $135M in funding from investors like Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, and General Catalyst. Idan's favorite books: Zero to IPO (Author: Frederic Kerrest) (00:01) Introduction (00:07) How LLMs Generate Code (02:11) Rise of Vibe Coding: Opportunities and Risks (05:24) Debugging and Security in Vibe Coding (09:13) Vulnerabilities Introduced by AI Code Assistants (12:20) Security Basics for ...

Astasia Myers is a GP at Felicis, an iconic VC firm with investments in companies like Shopify, Canva, Adyen, Notion, Mercor, Plaid, Supabase, Flexport, and more. Astasia's favorite books: God's Bankers (Author: Gerald Posner) (00:01) Introduction (00:26) Astasia’s Infra Thesis (03:59) Golden Age of Infra & Innovators Network (06:22) RL Environments & AI Agents (08:57) Disruption Opportunities: Data & Observability (11:31) Where to Find Infra Founders (16:31) Early Signals...

Spiros Xanthos is the CEO of Resolve AI, a platform to put AI on-call for humans. He previously started Log Insight that was acquired by VMware. And started Omnition that was acquired by Splunk. He also helped start OpenTelemetry. They've raised $35M from amazing investors such as Greylock. Spiros's favorite books: - Zero to One (Author: Peter Thiel) - Build (Author: Tony Fadell) (00:01) Introduction & Setting the Stage (00:42) AI’s Impact on Software Engineering (02:55) What Reli...

Nick Schrock is the founder of Dagster Labs, a data platform that helps you build, schedule, and monitor reliable data pipelines. They've raised $49M in funding from investors such as Sequoia, Index, Amplify, Slow, and 8VC. He is also the cocreator of the popular query language GraphQL. Nick's favorite books: The Great CEO Within (Author: Matt Mochary) (00:01) Introduction and Welcome (00:39) The Origins of GraphQL at Facebook (05:24) Explaining Data Orchestration in Plain English (09...

Rehan Jalil is the CEO of Securiti, a platform that enables the safe use of data and generative AI. They've raised $156M in funding from investors such as General Catalyst, Mayfield, and others. He was previously the CEO of Elastica, which was acquired for $280M by Bluecoat. Before that, he was the CEO of WiChorus, which was acquired by Tellabs for $180M. Rehan's favorite books: Good to Great (Author: Jim Collins) (00:00) Introduction (02:14) Founding Securiti and the Evolution of Dat...

Alberto Rizzoli is the CEO of V7 Labs, an AI agent platform to automate knowledge work. They've raised a total of $43M in funding from Radical Ventures, Temasek, Air Street Capital, and others. Alberto's favorite books: Sapiens (Author: Yuval Noah Harari) (00:01) Introduction and What V7 Labs Does (01:23) The Founding Insight and Early MVP (04:54) Getting the First Five Customers (07:01) Darwin vs. Go: Product Differentiation (10:16) Infrastructure and Chaining Models at V7 (12:34) Pr...

Dave Selinger is the CEO of Deep Sentinel, an AI-powered video surveillance system. They have raised $38M in funding from Intel Capital, Shasta Ventures, and others. Prior to this, he was the cofounder and CTO of Redfin. And he was also the cofounder of RichRelevance. Dave's favorite books: - The Speed of Trust (Author: Stephen Covey) - Snow Crash (Author: Neal Stephenson) (00:01) – Origin Story: A Near-Miss and the Broken Security Market (04:22) – What Deep Sentinel Does and Wh...

Brennan Pothetes is the CEO of Infinity Constellation, an AI-native holding company. They've raised $17M from Freestyle Capital, Charlie Songhurst, and others. Brennan's favorite books: Zero to One (Author: Peter Thiel) (00:01) Lightning Bolt Moment – Origin of Infinity Constellation (03:48) Transitioning from Founder to Holdco CEO (07:00) How Infinity Incubates vs Acquires Companies (09:05) Infinity vs Traditional Venture Studios (10:58) Aligning Incentives: Founders, Holdco, and Inv...

Mark Fussell is the CEO of Diagrid, a developer platform that provides tools and services for building cloud native applications. They've raised $24.2M from Amplify and Norwest. He is also the co-creator of Dapr, an open source tool used by 40,000 companies. Mark's favorite books: - Crossing the Chasm (Author: Geoffrey A. Moore) - Good to Great (Author: Jim Collins) - The Dispossessed (Author: Ursula K. Le Guin) (00:01) Opening and Introduction (00:09) The Origins of Dapr:...

Jan Liphardt is the founder of OpenMind, where they're building an operating system for intelligent machines. He is an associate professor at Stanford and was previously an associate professor at UC Berkeley. He got his PhD from University of Cambridge. Jan's favorite books: The Little Prince (Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) 00:01 — Introduction 00:32 — Gap Between Movie Robots and Real-World Robotics 02:35 — Vision for a New Robotics OS 07:14 — Robotics OS Stack Breakdown 11:01 — Biggest...

Anna Patterson is the cofounder of Ceramic, an AI infrastructure platform for large scale model training. They raised their seed round led by NEA along with amazing investors such as Lukas Biewald, Laszlo Bock, Sean Carey, Jeff Hammerbacher, Ankit Jain, Seval Oz, Joanna Rees, Gokul Rajaram, and Ram Sriram. She was previously the founder and managing partner at Gradient Ventures. She was the VP Engineering at Google for 14 years. Anna's favorite book: Books she reads with her daughters ...

Tom Chavez is the cofounder of super{set}, a startup studio that founds, funds, and builds data and AI startups. Prior to this, he was the CEO and co-founder of Krux, a martech platform acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Before Krux, he was the CEO and co-founder of Rapt, a provider of software for media monetization acquired by Microsoft in 2008. He went to Harvard for undergrad and Stanford for his PhD. Tom's favorite book: The Three Musketeers (Author: Alexandre Dumas) (00:01) Origin Story ...

Rowan Stone is the CEO of Sapien, a decentralized data foundry where AI models can access verified human expertise worldwide. They've raised raised a $10.5M round led by Variant. He's also the co-creator of Coinbase's layer 2 network called Base. Rowan's favorite book: Outlive (Author: Peter Attia) (00:01) Introduction (01:09) The Flaws in Centralized Data Models (04:10) Mechanism of Knowledge Transfer and Expert Incentives (07:08) Supply, Demand, and Market Dynamics for Training Data (10:2...

Rish Gupta is the cofounder and CEO of Spot AI, a video AI platform for the physical world. They've raised $93M from amazing investors such as Scale, Bessemer, and Qualcomm Ventures. Rish's favorite book: Atlas Shrugged (Author: Ayn Rand) (00:01) Introduction (00:32) Video-AI basics: ingesting camera feeds across diverse networks ​ (02:42) Edge-vs-cloud trade-offs for compute, storage, and bandwidth ​ (05:40) Mapping the sector: hardware waves to cloud cameras to pure-software layer ​ (07:4...

Alex Levin is the cofounder and CEO of Regal, a platform for AI phone agents. They've raised $82M from amazing investors such as Emergence Capital. Alex's favorite book: The PayPal Wars (Author: Eric M. Jackson) (00:01) Introduction (02:37) Evolution of customer contact tools and legacy players (06:02) Launching Regal: Origin story and early challenges (08:41) MVP strategy and problems worth solving (11:46) Lessons from 0 to 10 customers: Growth mistakes and hiring (16:13) Ideal early-stage...

Colin Zima is the cofounder and CEO of Omni, a data platform that combines the consistency of a shared data model with the speed and freedom of SQL. They recently raised their $69M Series B led by ICONIQ Growth. He was previously the Chief Analytics Officer at Looker. Colin's favorite book: Blink (Author: Malcolm Gladwell) (00:01) Introduction (01:10) What Is a Data Model and Why It Matters (03:27) Gaps in the Modern Data Stack (05:38) The Staying Power of SQL (07:29) Origin Story: Why Omni...

Alvaro Morales is the cofounder and CEO of Orb, a usage-based billing product for modern software companies. They've raised $44M to date from amazing investors such as Mayfield, Menlo Ventures, and Greylock. Alvaro's favorite book: Conversation in the Cathedral (Author: Mario Vargas Llosa) (00:01) Introduction (00:35) What is Usage-Based Billing? (02:27) Challenges in Metering Usage (04:14) Examples of Consumption-Based Products (05:49) Tools for Usage Metering and Billing (09:0...