Perplexity Founder & CEO Aravind Srinivas believes the next wave of American economic growth could come from smaller, AI-native businesses, not just the largest technology companies.

Perplexity, valued at ~$20B with more than $2B in reported funding and backing from NVIDIA, SoftBank, IVP, NEA, Accel, Jeff Bezos, and Elad Gil, has evolved from an AI answer engine into a platform for autonomous agents, research, and knowledge work.

I sat down with Aravind at Perplexity's new San Francisco headquarters to discuss the economics of AI, the future of entrepreneurship, and why agents could enable a generation of smaller, more profitable companies.

Aravind reveals that Perplexity's revenue is growing 5x year over year, enterprise adoption is accelerating, and one solopreneur is spending over $1M annually on Perplexity Computer while generating $3M in annual revenue.

We also explore Perplexity's bet on local AI, its work with NVIDIA and Apple, and why the company has no plans to build its own data centers despite the massive infrastructure buildout underway.

Aravind Srinivas: https://x.com/AravSrinivas 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/1C8_n9nnx5Y

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Harvey—The AI platform built for legal work, is helping the best firms and companies close deals faster. More than 200,000 lawyers, 80% of the Am Law 100, and over 20% of the Fortune 500 build with Harvey. Visit: http://harvey.ai/

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure: 

Paid Ad. Agents are an experimental AI tool. Its output may be inaccurate and is not investment advice. Public Holding’s, Inc. makes no guarantees about its accuracy or reliability—verify independently before use. Brokerage accounts and services provided by Open to the Public Investing, Inc.  See additional disclosures at https://public.com/disclosures/agenticdisclosures.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder & CEO of Perplexity

(01:30) Why Perplexity's brand is built on curiosity 

(08:18) How to build a $1T company in America alone

(13:45) Is the American dream still alive?

(16:28) Stop blaming users for bad prompts

(22:55) How Perplexity quietly grew 5x

(28:28) "We don't have competitors, we have contributors"

(29:20) The data center is coming to your laptop 

(34:32) Orchestrating up with NVIDIA, down with Apple

(39:17) Why Perplexity is skipping the data center race 

(41:25) Stop asking AI to write code, ask it to think

(48:27) The Hugging Face incident & multi-agent threats

(53:31) Why Perplexity isn’t chasing a billion users

USV spent 20 years keeping its funds small on purpose. Its new $900M raise is the largest fund cycle in the firm’s history.

I sat down with USV General Partners Fred Wilson, Rebecca Kaden and Michael Mignano at the firm’s New York office to unpack why one of venture capital’s most disciplined early-stage firms is getting bigger now, and what they think the next era of AI will look like. Together with General Partner Nick Grossman, they’re leading USV into its next chapter.

USV was early to Twitter, Coinbase, Stripe, MongoDB, Twilio, Etsy, Duolingo and Abridge. More than 20 years after Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham laid out the firm’s original internet thesis, Fred believes AI today looks a lot like the internet in 2003. The infrastructure is here, but many of the defining applications have yet to be built.

We get into why AI is making products cheaper to build but breakout companies potentially more expensive to create, why ARR can hide weak retention, the growing importance of founder storytelling, personal AI agents, the “Rebel Alliance” around open AI infrastructure, and why energy may be one of the cleanest bets on AI.

At the center of USV’s new thesis is “obliterate, don’t automate.” Instead of making existing industries incrementally more efficient, AI could completely restructure them. Fred’s version is simple. Don’t hire a lawyer, use an AI lawyer. Don’t hire an accountant, use an AI accountant. Don’t hire a doctor, use an AI doctor.

Fred Wilson: https://x.com/fredwilson

Rebecca Kaden: https://x.com/rebeccakaden

Michael Mignano: https://x.com/mignano

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/sYH4fKKtSPw

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

John Collison, Co-Founder of Stripe, on how AI agents are changing commerce, payments and the internet itself.

I sat down with John at Browserbase Navigate to talk agentic commerce, computer use, cybersecurity and why Stripe considers 2026 the beginning of the “singularity epoch.” We get into why computer use could be the next major leap in AI, how agents will reshape product discovery and transactions, and why Stripe is rebuilding parts of its infrastructure for AI instead of humans.

We also cover Stripe’s acquisitions of Bridge, Privy, Metronome and OpenRouter, usage-based billing, multi-model routing and how AI is already transforming workflows inside Stripe.

Browserbase builds infrastructure for AI agents that use the web, providing cloud browsers and tooling that let agents navigate websites and take actions across existing web interfaces.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Stripe’s $1.9T & Rebuilding for AI
(00:31) Why Agents Will Replace Web Forms
(02:20) How AI Rewires Commerce & Product Discovery
(04:40) Why AI Could Mean More Cyberattacks
(06:49) Why Stripe Says the Singularity Started in 2026
(09:29) Stripe Is Rebuilding Its APIs for AI Agents
(11:38) Why Stripe Bought Bridge, Privy, Metronome & OpenRouter
(15:12) When Stripe Builds vs. Buys
(16:55) How AI Is Changing Stripe Internally
(20:39) How John Keeps Up With AI
(23:28) The Coming Good Bot vs. Bad Bot Problem
(24:53) 17 Years of Lessons Building Stripe

Jonathan Siddharth, Co-Founder & CEO of Turing, joins Sourcery to break down how AI training & deployment are changing in 2026.

We cover the shift from training models to pass benchmarks to training agents for real work through RL environments, and why AI agents that can operate for days today could eventually work autonomously for weeks, months and years.

Jonathan explains why open-weight models are now roughly 3–6 months behind the frontier, why enterprises are building their own AI systems, and how companies should think about frontier vs. sovereign AI, model routing, distillation and owning their proprietary learning loops.

“There's absolutely a place in the world for Ferraris & Koenigseggs. But there's also a place in the world for Model Ys.”

We also get into reward hacking, emergent behavior, AI safety, recursive self-improvement, super intelligence (SI) and why Jonathan believes AI will see a slower takeoff over the next decade rather than an overnight transition.

Jonathan Siddharth: https://x.com/jonsid

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/nI1owceD-xg

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Jonathan Siddharth, Co-Founder & CEO at Turing

(01:03) The biggest shift in AI data this year

(04:10) Why AI won't replace jobs, but uplevel them

(08:31) The arms race inside cybersecurity

(11:22) Why train AI on what it shouldn't do?

(15:45) The Hugging Face hacking incident

(22:33) How AI models cheat to win

(27:40) The AI playbook

(32:20) Open models are only 3–6 months behind

(41:30) Why chips, energy and data always win

(47:27) Is superintelligence by 2030 the goal?

(53:32) Jonathan's hottest take on AI

(55:00) The next 10 years of superintelligence

Annie Lamont is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Oak HC/FT, the healthcare and fintech investment firm she built with Andrew Adams. Across 40+ years she has managed $14B, backed 70+ successful exits and 15 IPOs, and been named the top healthcare investor on the Forbes Midas List multiple times. Her portfolio includes athenahealth, Devoted Health, One Medical, CareBridge, VillageMD, Main Street Health, Komodo Health, and Chai Discovery.

Recorded at the New York Stock Exchange, the conversation covers China taking 50% of pharma's outside research dollars, clinical trial reform at the FDA, and Chai Discovery's roadmap from antibodies to peptides to small molecules. Lamont also explains how AI can cut the 25% to 30% of healthcare costs that are administrative.

On the investing side, she walks through backing repeat founders Todd Park and Brad Smith, CareBridge's acquisition by Elevance, Oak's $1M to $100M check sizes across a $2B fund, and newer portfolio companies Halluminate and Auger. The episode closes with the Brex Performance segment on mentors.

"I just think you've got 10% of the world that's worth it & 90% that's not."

We cover:

› Why AI drug discovery changed in the last 2 years

› China's rise in life sciences

› Devoted Health tripling in size and halving its operating ratio

› Why only 10% of AI companies justify their valuations

› Auger and Dave Clark's $100M AI supply chain build

Annie Lamont: https://x.com/annielamont 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/sjd_G6-k930

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Annie Lamont, Co-Founder & MP at Oak HC/FT

(00:56) How AI reshaped the line between Healthcare and Fintech

(08:35) The China threat to American drug development

(17:03) Are Hospitals actually at risk from AI?

(23:26) How AI will transform your healthcare experience

(32:58) How M&A is changing in Healthcare

(58:49) What's kept Annie Lamont going for four decades

AI's next bottleneck? It might not be GPUs. Memory prices have risen 700% this year, while power, cooling and data transfer are all becoming major constraints on the AI infrastructure buildout. At the same time, the semiconductor industry is approaching the physical limits of simply making transistors smaller.

I sat down with Steven Latré, VP of AI at imec and Thema Board Member, and Adam Chambers of Strike Capital, to talk about what comes after the GPU and where the next wave of value in AI infrastructure could be created.

We get into

› Why memory is already one of AI's biggest bottlenecks

› The power, cooling and data transfer constraints behind inference

› Why photonics could become a critical technology for the next generation of chips

› What happens as Moore's Law approaches the limits of physics

› Why Steven thinks we'll laugh at today's AI in 5–10 years

Steven describes imec as the “hidden gem” of semiconductors. The organization works years ahead of the commercial market, with the world's biggest chip companies coming through its facilities to develop technologies that may not reach the market for another 7–10 years.

His hottest take is that today's LLMs will eventually look like dial-up internet.

“I think we're gonna laugh 5-10 years from now at how old-fashioned AI was today.”

Recorded at the Strike x Sourcery Summit in the South of France.

Steven Latre: https://x.com/slatre

Adam Chambers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-chambers-0b2009274

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/6-q_8T_m5GM

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Europe is preparing to mobilize up to €800B in additional defense spending. But money alone doesn't solve one of its biggest problems.

After decades of underinvestment, Europe's defense industry needs to dramatically increase its ability to manufacture at scale. Component lead times can stretch into years, certain contracts can take 4–5 years to deliver and modern warfare increasingly requires systems produced in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions. As Aistis Šimaitis puts it, “Volume wins.”

I sat down in Monaco with Aistis, Co-Founder & CEO of Onodrim and former head of Palantir's commercial business in Europe, George Hadjiminas, Chief Strategy Officer at Theon International & EFA Group, and Bruno Wejchert, Partner at Strike Capital.

We get into

› How Ukraine exposed the gaps in Europe's defense industrial base

› Why manufacturing and volume matter as much as new technology

› Why autonomous warfare requires dramatically cheaper components at massive scale

› Why George believes “prototypes don't fight wars”

› Bruno's prediction that Europe could produce a $500B defense company within the next decade

The conversation covers everything from autonomous systems and defense procurement to the lessons Aistis took from Palantir and why George believes “prototypes don't fight wars.” As billions flow into European defense, the question is increasingly not just who can build the best technology, but who can actually manufacture and deliver it at scale.

Recorded at the Strike x Sourcery Summit in the South of France.

Aistis Šimaitis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aistissimaitis

George Hadjiminas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgioshadjiminas

Bruno Wejchert : https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruno-jan-wejchert-00b46a1a6

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/X_1wGD6nxbo

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

AI's next infrastructure bottleneck? It's everything connecting them.

As AI models grow, they increasingly need to run across massive clusters of GPUs. Traditional copper interconnects are running out of steam, pushing the industry toward optical interconnects and silicon photonics.

I sat down with Thema's Herwig Van Hove and Yannick De Koninck in Monaco to go deep on the photonics supply chain powering the next generation of AI infrastructure.

Yannick spent five years at NVIDIA, where he helped build its silicon photonics technology from scratch to product-ready maturity. He left what he calls the “golden palace” to join Thema and help build large-scale photonics manufacturing in Europe.

Herwig comes from deep tech investing and saw a different problem. The innovation was ready, but the industrial supply chain wasn't prepared for the speed or scale of AI demand.

We get into

› Why copper is running out of steam inside AI infrastructure

› How photonics could reduce the networking and energy bottlenecks facing AI factories

› Why the photonics supply chain wasn't prepared for the AI boom

› What Yannick learned building silicon photonics at NVIDIA

› Thema's plan to begin production in 2027 and build a major photonics manufacturing platform in Europe

Thema believes the opportunity extends far beyond a single component.

“If you look at an AI factory today, half of that is GPUs, but the other half is the technology to interconnect these GPUs.”

Herwig believes Europe has a rare opportunity to turn decades of photonics research into industrial scale, pointing to ASML as proof that Europe has done it before.

Recorded at the Strike x Sourcery Summit in the South of France

Herwig Van Hove: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herwigvanhove

Yannick De Koninck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannick-de-koninck-63304314

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/HfSIbxNv-To

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Stord is on track to cross $1 billion in annual revenue this year after 10Xing the business over the last four years.

The goal: level the playing field with Amazon Prime for the other two-thirds of commerce on the internet.

I sat down with Stord Founder & CEO Sean Henry in Cap Ferrat to talk about the company's $250M Series F, its massive bet on robotics and AI, and why he believes the biggest value from this technology may ultimately accrue to physical businesses, not the AI and robotics companies themselves.

Stord now processes roughly 100 million packages a year reaching about one-third of U.S. households, representing nearly $20 billion in GMV and generating around 8 billion operational data points annually.

We get into:

› Why Stord is going hard on agentic robotics and AI

› The data advantage behind 100M packages a year

› Why humanoids may be the wrong form factor for warehouses

› How acquisitions and vertical integration are accelerating Stord's scale

› Going from Thiel Fellow at 19 to building a $1B+ revenue business

Sean also explains the flywheel behind Stord: more volume creates greater density, lower costs and faster delivery, which in turn makes the company more competitive as it scales.

His hottest take is that today's AI and robotics companies may eventually become commoditized as the technology becomes cheaper and easier to replicate internally.

Instead, he thinks the value accrues to the application layer and real-world businesses putting that technology to work.

Recorded at the Strike x Sourcery Summit in the South of France

Sean Henry: https://x.com/seanhenry

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/oMKuy_-vXa4

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Deel went from $1M to $100M in ARR in under 20 months, then from $100M to $1B in just 3 years.

Today, the company has surpassed $1.5B in revenue and is valued at $17.3B.

I sat down with Shuo Wang, Co-Founder & CRO of Deel, to break down the sales and operating machine behind one of the fastest-growing companies in tech.

Shuo co-founded Deel alongside Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO, in 2019. They built Deel as a global company from day one. Today, the company helps businesses hire, manage and pay teams around the world.

We get into:

› How Deel scaled from $100M to $1B in three years

› Why Shuo thinks founders simply aren't selling enough

› Building and incentivizing a remote sales organization across 120 countries

› How an MIT-trained robotics engineer became CRO and applies systems thinking to sales

› Shuo and Alex's founder dynamic, going global from day one and what she's learned from James Dyson and Jeff Bezos

Recorded at the Strike x Sourcery Summit in the South of France

Shuo Wang: https://x.com/shuooo

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/9_hERpzF_E0

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Shuo Wang, Co-Founder & CRO at Deel

(00:41) How Deel went from $100M to $1B ARR in 3 years

(02:43) Why Deel went global from day one

(03:36) Who uses Deel? From ElevenLabs to Chanel

(04:16) Hot take: People need to sell more

(05:15) Why sales is really about systems

(06:18) How to build a winning remote sales team

(07:48) Going global with Snoop Dogg

(08:34) How Shou and Alex divide the roles

(09:23) The founder who inspired Shuo

(10:24) The Bezos mindset

(11:36) Hot take: Why founders need to sell more

Jen Prosek has spent more than two decades helping build and protect the reputations of some of the biggest names in finance.

She is the Founder & Managing Partner of Prosek Partners, which works across private markets, asset management, venture capital, banking and technology — representing clients with roughly $70 trillion in combined AUM.

We sat down at the New York Stock Exchange to unpack how the most powerful firms and financiers build their brands, what destroys a reputation, how to recover when things go wrong, and why reputation has become even more important in the age of AI.

Jen breaks down the brand strategies behind Apollo, Citadel, Blackstone, Bridgewater and Meta; why Jensen Huang has become an ambassador for AI; how financial firms went from staying “under the radar” to spending millions on brand; and why VC firms are increasingly thinking like media companies.

We also get into crisis communications, when leaders should fight back versus stay quiet, why employees are one of the biggest reputation risks inside a company, the rise of podcasts and owned media, why LLMs are a comms strategy, and how founders should think about journalists.

Jennifer Prosek: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-prosek/ 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/lJDb3bYkLfI

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Jennifer Prosek, Founder & MP at Prosek Partners

(01:10) What makes a great financial brand?

(06:47) How much firms spend on marketing

(07:45) How brand drives talent, deals, and capital

(09:00) How to build a brand

(13:31) How podcasts drive contracts and deal flow

(15:34) When to play offense with your brand

(19:55) The Coldplay concert incident

(23:05) Why relationships with journalists matter

(26:22) The problem with AI’s public narrative

(30:58) The role of a "chief EQ officer"

(34:25) How Meta rebuilt its brand

(39:08) How to win without traditional media

(42:30) How Apollo rebuilt its reputation

The All-In Summit returned to Los Angeles this year with one of its biggest lineups yet: Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Gwynne Shotwell, Jared Isaacman, Brad Gerstner, Bill Gurley, Dina Powell McCormick, Jake Paul, Nick Shirley, Blake Scholl, Martin Shkreli and more — alongside hosts Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg.

Over three days, some of the biggest names across technology, AI, investing, energy, space, media and politics came together for conversations about where the world is heading.Sourcery was on the ground asking founders, CEOs, investors & creators one question: What’s your hottest take right now?

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 — Brad Gerstner, Altimeter — AI Safety

02:28 — Naveen Rao, CEO of Unconventional AI — AI Doom, Energy Efficiency & the SaaSpocalypse

09:00 — Jonathan Neman, CEO of Sweetgreen — AI vs. Processed Food

13:14 — Toby Rice, CEO of EQT — AI, Natural Gas & America’s Energy Demand

20:49 — Wen Sang, COO of Genspark — Why AI Should Speed Up, Not Slow Down

25:10 — Geoff Woo, Anti Fund — Free Will, Consciousness & the Singularity

33:24 — Nick Shirley — California High-Speed Rail & Government Spending

36:35 — Jake Paul, Anti Fund — Updating the Constitution

38:47 — Kent Draper, CCO of IREN — AI Infrastructure & Compute Demand

42:37 — Michael Brandt, CEO of Ketone-IQ — The Human Body as the Next Technology Platform

Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOSheaBrought to you by:Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, and travel. As a Sourcery subscriber you get: 75,000 points after spending $3,000 on Brex card(s). Plus, white-glove onboarding, $5,000 in AWS credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits, and access to $180k+ in SaaS discounts. On top of $500 toward Brex travel, $300 in cashback, plus exclusive perks (like billboards..) visit → brex.com/sourceryFollow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/#podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley

Gagan Biyani, Founder & CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy (fmr Co-Founder of Udemy and Maven), joins Sourcery from a16z’s San Francisco office to unveil a new kind of school built for the AI era.

Backed with $42M from a16z and investors including Adam D’Angelo, Tobi Lütke, Tony Xu, Fidji Simo and Shyam Sankar, Horowitz Andreessen Academy is an AI-native, unaccredited residential program designed for some of the world’s most ambitious young builders.

Its Founding Class will bring roughly 50 students to San Francisco in Fall 2027 for a one-year, tuition-free fellowship. Instead of optimizing for grades, tests and credits, the Academy plans to optimize for proof of work, high agency and building real projects.

Students will learn alongside a network that includes founding partners Anthropic, Anduril, Coinbase, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe, with 75–80% of their time intended for projects and building.

Gagan and I discuss why AI is forcing education to change, why he believes traditional college still makes sense for most students, the rise of the “super IC,” why young founders shouldn’t rush to raise venture capital, what it means to become an AI-native builder, the importance of failure, and why Silicon Valley itself is central to the Academy’s model.

Gagan Biyani: https://x.com/gaganbiyani 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/5JEjv-JlYo8

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Gagan Biyani, Founder & CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy

(01:01) Why this Academy is different from college

(04:44) Started his first company at age 13

(11:55) Raising $40M for a School

(19:08) Should young builders really start companies?

(31:33) Why schools need to embrace AI

(48:51) Why high-agency students struggle in college

(1:02:19) Why you should apply even if you don't get in

(1:08:54) What the Academy program looks like

(1:14:41) Favorite book on AI and climate change

Eclipse spent 8 years investing in manufacturing, space, semiconductors, defense & mining while the rest of Silicon Valley funded SaaS. Lior Susan says the math was never close.

Lior Susan is the Founder & CEO of Eclipse, the Palo Alto firm he started in 2015 with a $125M debut fund alongside Pierre Lamond, who was 85 at the time & had already spent a career at Fairchild Semiconductor under Gordon Moore, co-founded National Semiconductor, & put in 27 years as a GP at Sequoia Capital. Lamond is 96 now and still mentors the team. 

"We never thought ourselves as venture capital. We call it operators with capital because we are operators with capital."

Eclipse manages approximately $12.5B and closed $1.3B in April 2026 across Eclipse Fund VI and Early Growth III, its largest raise to date. The firm's 2016 Series A into Cerebras returned roughly $2.5B at the $185 IPO price in May 2026 on a total of about $147M invested. 

Eclipse portfolio companies have raised $15.9B in 2026 alone, including $1.2B for Wayve, $650M for True Anomaly, $270M for Bedrock Robotics, $220M for VulcanForms and $200M for Oxide. In September 2026, Eclipse incubation Noetive came out of stealth with a $41M seed led by the firm. Susan was named to the 2026 Forbes Midas List.

Lior Susan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liorsusan/

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/fj9pHUbJhp4

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Lior Susan, Founder & CEO at Eclipse

(01:02) The story behind Eclipse

(02:35) How Lior met Pierre

(07:33) Why physical companies need operators

(12:35) How Mind Robotics was spun out of Rivian

(15:41) Why Lior started Eclipse

(18:21) Why building physical companies is so hard

(24:33) Inside Eclipse’s physical industry bet

(36:01) Building the "Eclipse Economy"

(40:08) Why physical infrastructure creates jobs

(41:19) From banana farmer to VC

(43:37) What it really means to support a portfolio company  

(46:00) Who inspires Lior?

Brad Gerstner, Founder of Invest America, on scaling Trump Accounts with Michael Dell:

“We forecast that within the next 10 years, we will have $4 trillion in Trump Accounts.”

“This is $4 trillion of wealth transfer to kids who would've otherwise had zero, who feel like they're totally out of the game.”

Stats:

› 70M U.S. kids under 18 is the goal

› $6.25B committed by Michael & Susan Dell to fund $250 investment account deposits for 25 million U.S. children aged 10 & under

› Up to $100M personally pledged by Brad for children in Indiana

› $4T in Trump Accounts within 10 years, Brad forecasts

› $1,000 federal seed for eligible newborns

Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOSheaBrad Gerstner on X: https://x.com/altcapBrought to you by:Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, and travel. As a Sourcery subscriber you get: 75,000 points after spending $3,000 on Brex card(s). Plus, white-glove onboarding, $5,000 in AWS credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits, and access to $180k+ in SaaS discounts. On top of $500 toward Brex travel, $300 in cashback, plus exclusive perks (like billboards..) visit → brex.com/sourceryFollow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/TIMESTAMPS:(00:00) Putting $150 Into a Trump Account

(02:53) How Trump Accounts Work

(03:08) Building Invest America

(03:25) Scaling From 9M to 70M Accounts

(03:43) Brad Gerstner & Michael Dell’s Contributions

(04:01) Forecasting $4T in Trump Accounts

(05:06) From Idea to Federal Law

(05:25) The “IPO” & Scaling to 70M Accounts

(06:31) Teaching 750K Kids Financial Literacy

(07:12) The Power of Compounding

(07:51) The Pushback on Trump Accounts

(08:07) Bipartisan Support

(08:47) Taking the Idea to President Trump

(09:21) “The Giving Pledge 2.0”

(10:22) Brad’s AI Safety Take

(10:40) Elon, Dario & Jensen on AI Risk

(11:14) A New Consensus on AI Safety

(11:31) China & AI Peer Review

(11:48) Finding the “Commonsensical Middle Way”

Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder & CEO of Bending Spoons, sits down with Molly O’Shea at the company’s Milan headquarters for Part II of our Bending Spoons series, going deeper into the technology, culture and operating philosophy behind the company.

Luca takes us inside Bending Spoons’ centralized technology platform, including 50+ proprietary tools, 95% of code being written by AI, its internal Alt Spooner agents, and why he estimates the company is now 2–3X more productive. We also discuss the company’s extreme approach to talent, with 800,000 job applications in 2025 and fewer than 300 hires, alongside a culture built around extreme ownership, experimentation and truth-seeking.

We get into why Luca believes most people don't actually seek the truth, why Bending Spoons ran more than 3,000 experiments last year, the misconceptions around its business model, AI hype and valuations, the risks of underestimating increasingly capable AI systems, and how Luca thinks about building Bending Spoons for the decades ahead.

Luca Ferrari: https://x.com/luke10ferrari 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/mCN1e_03I-c

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder & CEO at Bending Spoons

(00:45) The deal that broke the Internet

(03:41) Why Silicon Valley overspends on Hype

(07:35) Half a billion monthly active users

(16:17) What makes a company worth buying

(20:07) Inside the platform powering every product

(32:16) Debunking the Private Equity comparison

(38:23) $4 Million in revenue, per employee

(43:44) The secret to zero churn

(47:40) The one value that defines Bending Spoons

(51:52) The AI tool every Spooner uses

(57:58) Going Independent from the AI labs

(59:02) Have we actually reached AGI?

(1:08:05) The AI question nobody's asking

(1:12:54) Luca's next big bet 

Brad Gerstner & Jason Chang are trying to turn the $100 CAC heart scan into the “mammogram for the heart.”At the All-In Summit, Brad and Jason brought his mobile coronary artery calcium CT scanner to screen attendees & make the case for preventing heart attacks at scale.Heart disease kills ~800,000 Americans annually. Brad and Jason believe scaling CAC scans to 40M people a year could save 50,000 lives and $20B in government healthcare costs annually.Rob Goldberg joined us to explain why the mission is deeply personal.His brother Dave Goldberg, married to Sheryl Sandberg, died suddenly at 47 from undiagnosed heart disease, leaving behind their two young children. Just five months earlier, he had passed a running EKG.“My brother had passed a running EKG five months before he dropped dead from heart disease, from undiagnosed heart disease.”Dave’s death became the foundation for Sandberg’s book Option B, co-written with Adam Grant, about grief, resilience and rebuilding life after devastating loss.Now Rob Goldberg, Brad Gerstner, Jason Chang, & the rest of the besties, & the team behind the Center for Heart Attack Prevention want to prevent more families from experiencing the same thing, pushing for earlier detection, broader access to CAC scans & changes to the standard of care.We go inside the mobile scanner and discuss:› Why Brad calls CAC scanning the “mammogram for the heart”› The Goldberg family’s experience with undiagnosed heart disease› Why cholesterol & traditional testing can miss cardiovascular risk› What CAC scores actually tell you› Difference between a calcium CT scan & an angiogram› Why Brad bought his own mobile scanner› The “buy one, give one” model for expanding access› Brad’s push to bring CAC screening to 40 million Americans a year› How a roughly $100 scan could potentially prevent thousands of premature deaths› Why Brad believes health data gives people the power to take actionMolly on X: https://x.com/MollySOSheaBrad Gerstner on X: https://x.com/altcapJason Chang on X: https://x.com/yoweichangBrought to you by:Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, and travel. As a Sourcery subscriber you get: 75,000 points after spending $3,000 on Brex card(s). Plus, white-glove onboarding, $5,000 in AWS credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits, and access to $180k+ in SaaS discounts. On top of $500 toward Brex travel, $300 in cashback, plus exclusive perks (like billboards..) visit → brex.com/sourceryFollow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

00:00 Brad Gerstner & Rob Goldberg

00:10 CAC Scanner Moonshot

01:53 Rob’s Family Tragedy

04:39 Center Missions and Prevention

05:37 Why Cholesterol Became Standard

10:07 Overcoming Fear and Insurance

12:29 CAC vs Angiogram Guidance

14:43 Where the Trailer Goes Next

16:40 Inside the Scanner Demo

20:48 Why Labs Miss Risk

23:27 Final Call to Action

Bending Spoons buys companies and never sells them. Since listing in July it has spent roughly $2.6B, and the pipeline has never been fuller.

Bending Spoons (NASDAQ BSP) is a Milan-based technology company that acquires digital businesses, rebuilds them on its own platform, and holds them permanently. It owns AOL, Airtable, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove, Tractive, Remini, komoot, Harvest, StreamYard and Meetup, with more than 500 million monthly active users and over 9 million paying customers. It listed on the Nasdaq on July 1, 2026 at $29 a share.

Sourcery visited the Milan headquarters for a walkthrough with: 

› Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder & CEO

Followed by sit-downs with:

› Francesco Patarnello, Co-Founder & Head of M&A

› Matteo Danieli, Co-Founder & VP of Product

› Valentina Jerusalmi, General Manager of AOL

We cover deal selection across 1,000 targets, how the debt and equity stack was built from a $2M bank loan to US term loans, the Grindr process that collapsed in 2020, the decision to drop vesting entirely, why Danieli stepped down as CPO, and the AOL carve-out from Yahoo.

This is Part I of a II-Part Series, Full Sit-down Interview with CEO Luca Ferrari next..

Luca Ferrari: https://x.com/luke10ferrari

Francesco Patarnello: https://x.com/frapatarnello

Matteo Danieli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matteodanieli

Valentina Jerusalmi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentina-jerusalmi

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/3IUnY8btQQo

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Dino Mavrookas, Rob Lehman, Doug Lambert, and Vibhav Altekar are the 4 Co-Founders of Saronic, the autonomous maritime company that has gone from founding in 2022 to raising ~$2.6B at a $9.25B valuation in just 4 years.

The founding team brings together deep experience across defense, maritime autonomy, engineering, and investing: Dino spent 11 years as a Navy SEAL before joining Vista Equity Partners; Doug has built maritime autonomy systems since 2012; Rob spent 21 years in the Marine Corps before working across major defense contractors and startups; and Vib was one of Anduril’s earliest engineers.

In Part III of our Saronic series, we sit down with all 4 founders to go deeper into the business and technology behind its rapid rise and the demand driving it.

We cover America’s growing shipbuilding gap with China, why Saronic is investing $3B+ into Port Alpha, scaling autonomous ship production, rebuilding the U.S. maritime supply chain, defense acquisition reform, hardware-software co-design, AI at sea, and what happens when autonomous fleets scale from a handful of vessels to hundreds.

Dino Mavrookas: https://x.com/mavrookasd 

Doug Lambert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-lambert-00463a1b

Rob Lehman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-lehman-8387634

Vibhav Altekar: https://x.com/vbob202

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/2LQH5d93WzQ

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Applied Aerospace—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit: http://applied-ad.com  

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Dino Mavrookas, Co-Founder & CEO of Saronic, is building one of the fastest-growing defense companies in America.

Saronic is now valued at over $9B, has raised $2.6B, and is making a multi-billion-dollar bet on rebuilding America’s maritime industrial base.

In Part II of our three-part series inside Saronic, Dino and I sit down to go deeper into the business, the market, and why America’s shipbuilding gap has become a national security problem.

China now outbuilds the U.S. 230 to 1. The U.S. Navy has roughly 290 ships despite Congress setting a 355-ship minimum in 2018, while the Navy now estimates it needs 381 manned ships alone.

Dino explains why Saronic believes autonomy, private capital, commercial shipbuilding, and a new generation of defense primes can change that equation.

Dino Mavrookas: https://x.com/mavrookasd

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/7bDA_oKBGbk

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Applied Aerospace—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit: http://applied-ad.com   

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com   

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Dino Mavrookas, Co-Founder & CEO at Saronic Technologies 

(01:10) America's shipbuilding crisis

(03:33) Why Defense contracts move so slow

(06:43) Scaling one win at a time

(08:24) Why Defense needs the Private sector now

(09:38) The next wave of defense giants

(10:50) Building for both Military and Commercial

(14:28) Serving the Navy, Army, and beyond

(16:12) How China wins on price, not quality

(18:15) The Hypersonic missile deal

(20:58) From Private equity to founding Saronic

(25:02) The real story behind the name "Saronic"

(26:49) The next decade of American shipbuilding

(27:58) Where is the Maritime Industry headed?

(28:30) It's the people, not the capital

Saronic Co-Founder & CEO Dino Mavrookas takes us on a tour of the company’s 420,000 sqft autonomous boat factory in Austin, Texas.

This is Part I of a 3-Part Saronic dive. Sit-downs with all 4 co-founders to follow.

Founded in 2022, Saronic has raised $2.6B at a last valuation of $9.25B. We walk the Corsair production line, which has capacity for 2,000 autonomous boats per year, and climb aboard Mirage, its new 52-foot vessel with 2,500+ nautical miles of range and 3,500 lbs of payload capacity.

Dino breaks down Saronic’s vertically integrated hardware + software strategy, its 180-foot Marauder autonomous ship, and Port Alpha, the massive new shipyard it’s building in Brownsville, Texas.

Plus: why China outbuilds the U.S. 230:1, lessons from SpaceX manufacturing, the future of autonomous warfare, and how Saronic went from testing its technology on an $800 Amazon raft to building autonomous vessels at scale.

Dino Mavrookas: https://x.com/mavrookasd

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z-hJOibGUo0

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Applied Aerospace—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit: applied-ad.com/

• Zone—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: zonefrontier.com

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Dino Mavrookas, Co-Founder & CEO at Saronic Technologies

(00:55) Saronic's $2.6B raise

(03:14) 7 Buildings, One mission

(06:43) Watching Corsairs get built

(09:04) How Saronic finds and trains talent

(10:48) Why Saronic's boats are different

(14:55) From factory floor to customer

(15:48) Using autonomy in real missions

(17:39) Building ships with zero room for failure

(19:06) The Biggest bottleneck in autonomy testing

(19:57) Saronic's newest boat

(22:57) The $800 raft that started it all

(26:08) From boats to building actual ships

(31:48) The culture behind long hours

Tony Kim is Managing Director and Head of the Global Technology Team within Fundamental Equities at BlackRock. Recorded at the RAISE Summit in Paris, where Tony spoke on 4 panels, next-gen accelerators with d-Matrix, quantum computing with PsiQuantum, optics in data center design with Lumentum, and XPU and AI chip co-design with Broadcom.

Tony breaks down the shift from a software-centric world to a compute-centric one, and why roughly $1 trillion of CapEx this year, and $10 trillion over the next 5 years, is being spent to move data centimeters and millimeters. He maps the market cap transformation, roughly $10 trillion in software, services, and internet, $20 trillion in Mag 7, and $30 trillion in non-Mag 7 chips and hardware.

We cover the RAMpocalypse and why memory intensity is skyrocketing as AI models start to mirror the human brain, the 3 to 4 year duration mismatch between fab buildouts and today's demand, and the move from copper to light inside the data center.

Tony also lays out his capital allocation framework, 90% in the 3-year AI vortex and the rest on frontier bets like quantum, orbital data centers, SMRs, and 800-volt power architectures, all converging on 2030. Plus, the coming wave of 30 to 40 Chinese robotics IPOs, mixing Chinese robot bodies with Western brains, his contrarian case for social robots addressing loneliness and aging populations, token flow as the new enterprise framework, and the mentors who shaped his career.

We cover:

› Why AI is forcing a complete rebuild of data centers

› The shift from software to compute

› Why memory becomes the next critical bottleneck

› The future of AI chip co-design

› How investors should think about AI infrastructure

› Quantum, orbital data centers and the road to 2030

› Why robotics could become AI's next trillion-dollar market

› China's robotics advantage

› The enterprise AI stack and "token flow"

› How BlackRock evaluates long-term technology investments

Tony Kim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-kim-3150053/

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube : https://youtu.be/zXB-LI7skL8

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Tony Kim, Head of BlackRock Fundamental Equities Global Technology

(01:10) Secret Location, Croissants, and the RAISE Summit

(03:52) Why Compute now rules everything

(05:17) Why old data centers can't survive AI

(07:43) Why data centers are ditching Copper for Light

(10:44) The shortage nobody saw coming: RAM

(15:20) Only three companies control memory 

(16:03) Tony's Playbook for Investing in the AI Era

(18:16) The 20-year lie: "Compute is just a Commodity"

(22:38) How Hardware quietly became bigger than Software

(27:49) The Investing Rule: Will you still be cool in 5 years?

(38:16) Chips were never a Commodity

(43:30) Inside the architecture of a Robot's mind

(45:03) Why China Is winning the Robotics race

(53:07) "Token Flow": Tony's Framework for the Future Enterprise

(1:03:51) The mentors who shaped Tony Kim's worldview

Bridgit Mendler, Co-founder & CEO of Northwood Space, gives Sourcery a first look inside the company’s new 185,000 sqft headquarters and factory in Torrance, California.

Northwood has raised over $136M since 2022, including a $100M Series B in January 2026 led by Washington Harbour Partners and co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Alpine Space Ventures, Balerion and Fulcrum participating. The company also signed a $49.8M contract with the US Space Force to support the Satellite Control Network.

The new facility will more than 5x Northwood’s manufacturing footprint, support production of hundreds of antennas per year, and add 400 jobs over the next three years as the company works to solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in the space economy: getting data between satellites and Earth.

We tour the future manufacturing floor, antenna production lines, machining and PCB assembly areas, anechoic testing chambers, and a former movie theater that Northwood plans to turn into mission operations. The new facility will include dedicated production for Northwood’s Portal phased-array and Prism parabolic systems, while bringing more critical manufacturing and testing in-house.

Bridgit also breaks down why ground infrastructure has fallen behind the explosion in satellites, Northwood’s Space Force contract, the economics of satellite connectivity, building a global ground network, supply-chain strategy, national security, and her approach to leadership and scaling Northwood.

“If you can improve the networking for the space economy, that is how you translate bits into dollars.”

Bridgit Mendler: https://x.com/bridgitmendler

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/8SGgaMiGv6g

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Applied Aerospace—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit: https://applied-ad.com

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Tour 02: We’re back inside Rocket Lab with Founder & CEO Sir Peter Beck, this time for a behind-the-scenes tour of the company’s Engine Development Center and the technology powering Electron and its next-generation Neutron rocket.

Peter walks us through Rocket Lab’s additive manufacturing operation, where the vast majority of its engines by mass are 3D printed, and breaks down the engineering behind Rutherford and the much larger Archimedes engine being built for Neutron.

We see Archimedes thrust chambers, turbopumps, 12-laser metal 3D printers, the Rutherford engines powering Electron, and an Archimedes production line capable of producing an engine every eight days.

Peter explains why Rocket Lab chose methane for Neutron, how designing for reusability changes almost every engineering decision, why an Archimedes engine must survive 40 starts and one hour of qualification burn time, and Rocket Lab’s goal of building a rocket that can come off the barge, go straight back onto the pad, and launch again.

We also get into how Rocket Lab acquired more than $100 million of Virgin Orbit assets for $16 million, why Peter thinks some “zombie” space companies refuse to die, the difficulty investors have diligencing rocket companies, and why Rocket Lab believes vertical integration has been critical to its success.

And Peter leaves us with his view on where the space industry goes from here: “I think the biggest thing to be done in space hasn't even been thought about, let alone talked about.”

This is Tour 02, the second and final part of our Rocket Lab factory tour.

Catch up on the full series:

Part I: Our full sit-down interview with Sir Peter Beck

Part II / Tour 01: Inside Rocket Lab HQ, Mission Control & Satellite Manufacturing

Part III / Tour 02: Inside Rocket Lab’s Engine Development Center, Rutherford & Archimedes

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/g83mTdM5tQA

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Applied Aerospace—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit: https://applied-ad.com

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Factory Tour 1 of 2: We went inside Rocket Lab with Founder & CEO Sir Peter Beck for a behind-the-scenes look at how one of the world’s leading space companies actually builds.

In the first part of our Rocket Lab factory tour, Peter takes us through the company’s Long Beach headquarters, mission control, satellite manufacturing, spacecraft testing, electric propulsion, and NASA’s LOxSAT program.

Along the way, we trace Rocket Lab’s evolution from a tiny New Zealand startup with less than $100,000 NZD in capitalization to a global, publicly traded space company spanning launch, satellites, spacecraft components, propulsion, defense, and interplanetary missions.

Peter breaks down Rocket Lab’s capital-efficient culture, why he took the company public, its acquisition strategy, the hidden moat in spacecraft components, and his goal of building a multi-generational space company that continues long after he’s gone.

We also get into Rocket Lab’s earliest rockets, Khosla and Bessemer’s first investments, NASA’s CAPSTONE mission to the Moon, the search for life on Venus, and what Peter believes most new space companies underestimate.

This is Factory Tour 1 of 2. 

In Tour 2, we head inside Rocket Lab’s propulsion & engine facilities.

Peter Beck: https://x.com/Peter_J_Beck

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/RTcF6jqrTYs

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Applied Aerospace—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit: applied-ad.com/

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Touring inside Rocket Lab's HQ

(01:44) The origin story

(07:14) Too much Capital can kill a startup

(09:03) Why Rocket Lab decided to go public

(10:45) From Rockets to an entire Space Ecosystem

(15:11) Where Escapade and CAPSTONE were flown

(18:08) Inside the Electric Propulsion Lab

(19:58) Inside the Thermal and Shock Testing Facility

(21:45) Inside the NASA LOxSAT project

(24:00) Up Next: Inside the Engine Lab

Sir Peter Beck founded Rocket Lab 20 years ago. Today, the company is scaling far beyond launching rockets.

Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) just posted a record Q2 2026:

• $234M revenue, +62% YoY

• $2.36B record backlog, +137% YoY

• $437M+ in new launch contracts

• $581M+ in new Space Systems contracts

• 90+ launches in backlog

• Q3 revenue guidance of 250M–265M

We sat down with Founder & CEO Sir Peter Beck after touring Rocket Lab’s Long Beach facility to break down what comes next.

Peter explains Rocket Lab’s transformation from a launch company into an end-to-end space company spanning rockets, satellites, components, defense, and communications.

We get into Neutron and why Peter believes investors should be asking about the 10th launch, not just the first, the strategy behind the Iridium acquisition, Rocket Lab’s growing national security business, Flatellite, its acquisition playbook, and why going public gave the company the firepower to pursue opportunities it never could have as a private company.

We also discuss Neutron’s delays, Archimedes, reusability, Rocket Lab’s vertically integrated manufacturing strategy, building an entire space industry from scratch in New Zealand, and Peter’s long-term ambition to build a multi-generational company.

Plus: aliens, getting knighted, why Archimedes engines are painted black, and Peter’s surprisingly simple philosophy on business.

Peter Beck: https://x.com/Peter_J_Beck

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠⁠https://youtu.be/mpOy_UarJKg⁠⁠

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Sir Peter Beck, Founder & CEO at Rocket Lab

(00:59) Rocket Lab's biggest quarter

(02:53) The competitive edge in Space

(04:10) Rocket Lab's Acquisition Strategy

(05:04) Reason behind the Iridium Deal

(06:13) Competing with Blue Origin & SpaceX

(11:19) Building a Launch Monopoly in New Zealand

(12:33) Is this why Peter got Knighted?

(16:42) Beating SpaceX to the Public Markets

(20:05) Why Neutron is still facing delays

(27:38) Rocket Lab's latest contract wins

(29:04) How defense became a prime mover for Rocket Lab

(30:39) Ghost: Rocket Lab's portable launch pad

(31:30) Has he seen Aliens?

Ben Lamm is the Co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences + their AI spinout, Astromech. Colossal is the $12 billion de-extinction company using genome engineering, AI and reproductive technologies to bring extinct species back to life, while Astromech is its AI biology spinout, now valued at $3.8 billion.

We went inside Colossal’s lab to see its Gen 2 woolly mice and sat down with Ben to discuss the technology behind the dire wolf, the race to bring back the woolly mammoth, and the much bigger business being built underneath de-extinction.

Colossal has raised $635 million, including a recent $400 million round that was originally targeted at $200 million. Ben explains why he still believes Colossal is “one of the most undervalued companies in the world,” and how technologies developed inside the company are creating entirely new businesses.

Astromech, the AI biology spinout Co-founded by Lamm and George Church, just raised $20 million at a $3.8 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $60 million. Astromech is using evolutionary and multispecies genomic data to build AI models designed to predict biological change, with potential applications across cancer, disease and drug discovery.

We cover Colossal’s rise, woolly mice, dire wolves, mammoths, artificial wombs, genome editing, AI and biology, Astromech, and what happens when humans learn to program life.

Ben Lamm: https://x.com/BenLamm 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/zCQuSExl0gI

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Ben Lamm, Co-Founder & CEO at Colossal Biosciences 

(01:07) Inside Colossal's De-Extinction Lab

(06:02) The AI idea that could save the planet

(08:28) Revealing Colossal's woolly mice

(10:49) Wild requests they get every day

(13:35) Colossal's business model

(15:07) How Colossal raised $635 million

(20:17) How AI is converging with Biotech

(22:44) How ancient DNA actually gets to the lab

(26:24) The real stats behind Mass Extinction

(32:07) Will their animals ever live in the wild?

(41:44) Choosing their earliest backers

(52:51) Why they refuse to work on Humans

(58:07) Are they secretly working on Aliens?

Nikesh Arora is the Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, the cybersecurity giant that has grown from roughly $18 billion in market cap when he joined to around $300 billion today.

We sat down at Palo Alto Networks to discuss why Nikesh believes the AI cybersecurity boom is only beginning, how companies will defend themselves against increasingly powerful AI attacks and rogue agents, and why the time between discovering a vulnerability and exploiting it is collapsing.

Nikesh also explains why he signed Jensen Huang’s recent open-source AI letter, what the rise of autonomous agents means for enterprise security, and why he believes the entire software industry will be rewritten over the next decade.

We also go inside the operating playbook behind Palo Alto Networks’ rise, including 40+ acquisitions in eight years, the $28 billion CyberArk deal, Nikesh’s “paranoia” about disruption, hiring AI-native talent through hackathons, and the lessons he took from Larry Page at Google and Masayoshi Son at SoftBank.

Nikesh Arora: https://x.com/nikesharora

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/_v_ryYwmfM0⁠

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Nikesh Arora, Chairman & CEO at Palo Alto Networks

(00:51) The AI attack era has already started

(03:30) What happens when agents go rogue

(04:39) Why AI Labs are slowing down

(06:31) The Mythos Fallout

(17:25) Cybersecurity's secret weapon

(19:43) Buying a company is the easy part

(20:48) Where most acquisitions go wrong

(24:58) Predicting the SaaS Crash?

(28:03) The question nobody in Tech is asking

(30:54) There's never enough Compute

(33:12) Palo Alto's bar for AI fluency

(35:37) The controversial hire

(37:12) Using LinkedIn to spot opportunities

(39:19) What a CEO's day actually looks like

(43:47) The leadership traits that matter

(47:02) Google vs. SoftBank: What was different?

(51:02) Why planning horizons are shrinking

(52:55) Lessons From Elon & Masa

(56:44) What's next for Nikesh?

Adam Foroughi, Co-Founder & CEO of AppLovin, and Giovanni Ge, CTO of AppLovin, join Sourcery from AppLovin’s Palo Alto headquarters for a deep dive into the technology and strategy behind its advertising business.

Gio joined AppLovin in late 2022, when the company was worth roughly $5.5 billion, and helped architect Axon 2, the recommendation engine that became central to AppLovin’s transformation. The new architecture improved predictions and advertiser returns, helping drive the company’s expansion beyond mobile gaming into e-commerce ads and its recovery from a 92% post-IPO decline to a $100B+ company.

Adam and Gio break down how Axon works, how AppLovin scales with a remarkably lean engineering team, how AI is changing the way they build, why knowing what not to build matters, and what it would take for AppLovin to eventually become a trillion-dollar company.

We also cover AppLovin’s expansion into e-commerce, the future of advertising across LLMs and connected TV, engineering culture, and how they think about building for the next five to ten years.

Adam Foroughi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamforoughi/

Giovanni Ge: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiaochuan-giovanni-ge/

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/IZHwulZQixQ

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Adam Foroughi, Co-Founder & CEO and Giovanni Ge, CTO at AppLovin

(00:52) Gio's first impression of AppLovin

(03:38) Joining AppLovin after a 30% stock drop

(09:59) How Axon 2 actually got built

(20:23) Why AppLovin never needed a sales team

(21:59) From gaming ads to e-commerce

(24:47) From a napkin drawing to a real product

(30:54) The onboarding mistake most companies make

(34:37) What "AI-Native" actually means

(36:37) Should new engineers still learn to code?

(41:41) UGC vs. traditional ads: what's winning?

(47:56) Adapting to AI without rebuilding from scratch

(54:50) Gio's daily tech stack

(1:02:17) AppLovin's path to a trillion-dollar valuation

(1:06:19) Recovering from a 90% stock drop

(1:09:47) What's next for AppLovin?

(1:13:44) What happens when AI takes over?

(1:15:48) Adam and Gio's hottest takes

(1:19:50) How to actually stay locked in

Sourcery goes inside Neros Technologies’ new 250,000-square-foot Millennium One facility with Co-Founder & CEO Soren Monroe-Anderson.

Neros designed the factory with enough space to eventually produce one million drones per year. Today, the company says it is already manufacturing more than 250 drones per day, with engineering, testing, supply chain and production operating under one roof.

Soren takes us through Neros’ engineering labs, flight-test operation, drone and ground-station assembly lines, manufacturing software and 100% end-of-line flight testing. We also get a look at the latest Bandit interceptor prototype, which can reach roughly 300 km/h, with Neros targeting closer to 400 km/h for intercepting faster jet-powered Shahed variants.

We also visit the new-product introduction line where Neros is preparing Archer AI for mass production, and the massive open portion of the factory reserved for bringing more component manufacturing in-house. Soren explains why mass-producing drones requires designing the product around manufacturing, why 3D printing does not solve the underlying supply-chain problem, and how Neros plans to vertically integrate its way toward million-unit scale.

Soren Monroe-Anderson: https://x.com/soren_ma

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/1qysc9sNACg

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Inside Neros' 250,000 sq. ft. Millennium One Factory

(01:21) How Neros pushes its drones to the limit

(02:35) Why 3D printing can't solve the drone supply chain problem

(03:40) How their drones are built different

(06:20) The new 300 km/h Bandit interceptor

(09:09) Inside the drone assembly line: producing 250+ drones a day

(11:17) South Bay's biggest American flag

(11:42) How Neros stress-tests its drones

(15:26) Inside the new product introduction line

(17:01) What roles is Neros hiring for

(19:00) Soren's hot take on defense tech

Soren Monroe-Anderson, Co-Founder & CEO of Neros Technologies, joins Sourcery from the company’s new 250,000-square-foot factory in Torrance following its $250 million Series C at a $2.5 billion post-money valuation.

The round, led by Sequoia and American Strategic Technology Fund, comes as Neros expands from its core Archer FPV platform into multiple product lines, including Archer AI and Bandit, its counter-UAS interceptor. Neros is also fresh off a $500 million Army IDIQ and is building toward the capacity to manufacture one million drones annually.

Soren explains why modern warfare is increasingly being shaped by low-cost drones, why America fell so far behind China in drone and electronics manufacturing, and what it actually takes to “de-China-fy” a defense supply chain. Neros has pushed critical components including boards, chips, motors and magnets outside China, but Soren argues complete independence is far harder when Chinese suppliers still dominate some raw materials and precursor chemicals.

We also discuss Neros’ transition from a single-product company to a multi-product defense manufacturer, the rise of interceptor drones, autonomous capabilities that can operate through communications loss, sovereign manufacturing for U.S. allies, and why Soren wants Neros to become the “Toyota of defense manufacturing.”

Soren Monroe-Anderson: https://x.com/soren_ma

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/a8sFzL-E948

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Soren Monroe-Anderson, Co-Founder & CEO at Neros Technologies

(01:02) Neros just raised $250M at a $2.5B valuation

(04:25) Inside the Army's $500M drone contract

(08:05) The Interceptor drones taking over the battlefield

(12:55) Is it even possible to build a drone without China?

(19:55) The biggest BS claims in defense tech right now

(22:58) Neros’s growth to over 250 employees

(25:29) The Talent bottleneck slowing down American manufacturing

(29:43) The biggest myth about re-industrializing America

(35:52) What actually happens on a modern battlefield?

(37:41) How Starlink is changing drone warfare

(40:41) Soren’s learnings from Kelly Johnson

Justin Lopas, Co-Founder and COO of Base Power, joins Sourcery at Factory 1 in Austin for the launch of Base Core and the company's $1 billion Series D.

The round values Base at $13 billion post-money and is led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group. Existing investors Thrive Capital, a16z, Lightspeed, Trust Ventures, and CapitalG re-invested, bringing total capital raised past $2.5 billion.

Base Core is the largest standalone home battery on the market at 40 / 80 kWh. Justin walked me through the factory floor, the install demo, and why Base builds the hardware itself.

"It is so critical to bring manufacturing back to the US, especially for critical infrastructure."

We cover:

› The $1B Series D at a $13B post-money valuation

› Base Core, 40 kWh of storage and 20 kW on the inverter

› Whole home backup versus circuit-level backup

› Retail choice markets versus utility partnership markets

› Installing batteries around data centers to offset interconnection load

› 4,000 units per week by the end of the year

› Over 100 installs a day

› 100% US and Mexico supply chain

› Factory 1 built in under 6 months

Justin Lopas: https://x.com/JLopas

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/zfFGgfI2Xog

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Justin Lopas, Co-Founder & COO at Base Power Company

(01:06) Base Power raises a $1B Series D

(02:26) Meet Base Core

(05:42) Demo: Whole-home backup in action

(07:06) How Base Power's business model works

(08:55) Inside Base Power's Factory

(11:28) Why Base Core is 3x larger than other home batteries

(12:05) Inside the manufacturing line

(13:23) Can humanoid robots build batteries?

(14:13) Why Base Power manufactures its own batteries

(15:47) Inside the robotic assembly line

(18:09) How lithium-ion batteries work

(21:40) Scaling production to 4,000 units a week

(22:33) Installing 100+ systems a day

(23:03) COO or Electrician?

(23:53) From oil rigs to Base Power

Dylan Fox is the founder and CEO of AssemblyAI, the voice AI infrastructure platform behind AI notetakers, medical scribes, drive through ordering, contact centers and humanoid robots. AssemblyAI went through Y Combinator's first AI batch in 2017 and now serves over 1 million developers with roughly 100 million API calls a day.

We get into the volume numbers, why weekly conversations are up over 800% in three years, the three macro trends pulling voice into everything, why coding agents turned small businesses into API customers, how data mixture drives 75% of model quality, the humanoid robot speaker problem, on device models, and the disclosure question the entire voice agent industry is avoiding.

"It's very easy to optimize for a public open source benchmark. It's very hard to optimize across all these real world applications."

We cover

› 120 million weekly conversations and 4x YouTube's daily voice volume

› Coding agents expanding the TAM by 100x

› Context aware voice models and the McDonald's ordering problem

› Why humanoid robots can't disambiguate speakers

› Whether voice agents should disclose they are AI

Dylan Fox: https://x.com/YouveGotFox

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/xAF7HkX2DXI

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Dylan Fox, Founder & CEO at Assembly AI

(01:06) AssemblyAI's voice traffic just beat YouTube by 4x

(03:33) $100K in GPU credits that started it all

(06:39) Why Voice AI is inflecting right now

(10:11) AssemblyAI's infrastructure-first strategy

(12:41) Handling 120 million weekly calls

(14:49) How AI agents are rewriting Internal Ops at AssemblyAI

(17:05) The Sovereign AI problem nobody's solved for voice

(18:26) Is the Keyboard and Mouse finally dying?

(22:33) The problem Humanoid Robotics hasn't solved yet

(25:14) The real problem behind translating languages

(29:27) Can AI actually talk to animals?

(31:24) The real reason Open-Source benchmarks lie to you

(34:20) Building websites in chat rooms as a kid

(36:48) On-Device AI models are about to change everything

(43:03) The people who shaped Dylan's career

Everyone talks about Nvidia GPUs. Few people talk about the lasers connecting them.

Michael Hurlston is the CEO of Lumentum (NASDAQ: LITE), one of the world's leading suppliers of optical networking and laser technologies powering AI data centers. Before joining Lumentum in 2025, he served as CEO of Synaptics and previously led Finisar, making him one of the few executives to lead three public technology companies.

In this conversation from the RAISE Summit in Paris, Michael explains why AI is forcing a once-in-a-generation shift from copper wiring to fiber optics, why hyperscalers are demanding millions of optical components, and why manufacturing these systems has become one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI infrastructure. He also discusses optical networking inside GPU clusters, the future of "optical scale-up," and how the same laser technology could eventually power internet connectivity in space.

"What you get with fiber optics is the ability to move data faster over longer distances with less heat & less power than you get with electricity."

We cover:

› Why AI data centers are replacing copper with fiber optics

› The manufacturing bottlenecks facing optical infrastructure

› Why hyperscalers need millions of optical components

› The coming transition to "optical scale-up"

› Space lasers and the future of internet connectivity

› AI infrastructure, geopolitics, and U.S. manufacturing

› Michael's journey leading Finisar, Synaptics, and now Lumentum

Michael Hurlston: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-hurlston-1b2274/

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒

YouTube: https://youtu.be/TCoJtpFd4yM

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Michael Hurlston, CEO at Lumentum Holdings

(00:58) Backstage with Tony Kim at RAISE Summit

(01:53) What optical connectivity actually means

(03:31) The $10 trillion irony of the data center build-out

(05:37) Scaling up inside a data center

(08:38) Tripling revenue in 5 quarters

(10:13) From Finisar to Synaptics to Lumentum

(11:51) Why Lumentum went all-in on data centers

(13:10) Why space is the next big market for optical lasers

(14:06) Debunking laser myths

(16:40) Why copper is about to disappear from the server rack

(19:00) The geopolitics of the optical supply chain

(20:16) The advice that shaped Michael's path

Scott Wu, CEO & Co-Founder of Cognition, joins Sourcery in Paris amid the RAISE AI Summit. Cognition is the applied AI lab behind Devin, the autonomous AI software engineer, and Devin Desktop, formerly Windsurf. The company has raised more than $2.5 billion, including a $1 billion round in May 2026 at a $26 billion valuation, while growing annualized revenue from roughly $37 million to $492 million in a year. Devin now writes roughly 95% of Cognition's own code, total code shipped has grown 7x in six months, and customer usage has increased 11x to 12x.

We cover Cognition's acquisition of Windsurf, negotiated over a single weekend after Google's $2.4 billion talent deal, why Scott is keeping Cognition independent, why enterprises won't buy coding agents directly from the model labs, AI's impact on software engineering, the six-month singularity debate, and the origin story of Devin, from fixing a MongoDB error in 2023 to deployments at Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, Santander, NASA, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army.

Recorded July 7, 2026, ahead of Cognition shipping SWE-1.7 on July 8 and acquiring The Interaction Company (maker of Poke) on July 23.

Scott Wu: https://x.com/ScottWu46

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/y1XxtvYll4s

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Scott Wu, Co-Founder & CEO at Cognition

(01:00) The Identity crisis of building Devin

(01:42) How Cognition 7X-ed its output in 6 months

(02:55) The Metric every AI company gets wrong

(04:18) Cognition's 12x growth curve

(07:46) The Windsurf acquisition

(13:26) Scaling overnight: Cognition's hardest week

(15:11) The strategy behind the integration of Cognition products

(17:23) Cognition's merger playbook

(20:01) Why the DMV is Cognition's next big target

(22:59) Why Cognition bet against AI centralization

(25:09) Why enterprises refuse to bet on a single AI lab

(28:32) Scott's honest take on Superintelligence

(32:36) Is Silicon Valley losing its mind over the AI gold rush?

(33:26) Devin's origin story

(37:17) The question Scott thinks nobody's asking yet

(39:59) The poker match that almost closed a deal

(41:24) Scott's vision for the next year

Tony Kim is Managing Director and Head of the Global Technology Team within Fundamental Equities at BlackRock. Recorded at the RAISE Summit in Paris, where Tony spoke on 4 panels, next-gen accelerators with d-Matrix, quantum computing with PsiQuantum, optics in data center design with Lumentum, and XPU and AI chip co-design with Broadcom.

Tony breaks down the shift from a software-centric world to a compute-centric one, and why roughly $1 trillion of CapEx this year, and $10 trillion over the next 5 years, is being spent to move data centimeters and millimeters. He maps the market cap transformation, roughly $10 trillion in software, services, and internet, $20 trillion in Mag 7, and $30 trillion in non-Mag 7 chips and hardware.

We cover the RAMpocalypse and why memory intensity is skyrocketing as AI models start to mirror the human brain, the 3 to 4 year duration mismatch between fab buildouts and today's demand, and the move from copper to light inside the data center.

Tony also lays out his capital allocation framework, 90% in the 3-year AI vortex and the rest on frontier bets like quantum, orbital data centers, SMRs, and 800-volt power architectures, all converging on 2030. Plus, the coming wave of 30 to 40 Chinese robotics IPOs, mixing Chinese robot bodies with Western brains, his contrarian case for social robots addressing loneliness and aging populations, token flow as the new enterprise framework, and the mentors who shaped his career.

We cover:

› Why AI is forcing a complete rebuild of data centers

› The shift from software to compute

› Why memory becomes the next critical bottleneck

› The future of AI chip co-design

› How investors should think about AI infrastructure

› Quantum, orbital data centers and the road to 2030

› Why robotics could become AI's next trillion-dollar market

› China's robotics advantage

› The enterprise AI stack and "token flow"

› How BlackRock evaluates long-term technology investments

Tony Kim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-kim-3150053/

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/zXB-LI7skL8

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Tony Kim, Head of BlackRock Fundamental Equities Global Technology

(01:10) Secret Location, Croissants, and the RAISE Summit

(03:52) Why Compute now rules everything

(05:17) Why old data centers can't survive AI

(07:43) Why data centers are ditching Copper for Light

(10:44) The shortage nobody saw coming: RAM

(15:20) Only three companies control memory

(16:03) Tony's Playbook for Investing in the AI Era

(18:16) The 20-year lie: "Compute is just a Commodity"

(22:38) How Hardware quietly became bigger than Software

(27:49) The Investing Rule: Will you still be cool in 5 years?

(32:41) 2030: the year every frontier technology bet converges

(38:16) Chips were never a Commodity

(41:30) Rack design, materials science, and the physical-world renaissance

(43:30) Inside the architecture of a Robot's mind

David Friedberg takes America's 250th anniversary as a starting point to ask where does the country actually stand? And how do the bottom 50% get left behind?

He argues the wealth gap is widely misunderstood, pointing to roughly $183 trillion in total US household net worth, compared to about $8 trillion held by billionaires and $4 trillion by the bottom half of Americans. His view is that the rich didn't take everything. Instead, the bottom 50% never got to own the productive assets that created the last 50 years of wealth, and.. as Friedberg puts it: "The truth is that the bottom 50% were left behind because of bad tax policy."

From there, Friedberg breaks down the policy decisions he believes created today's affordability crisis, including a tax code that taxes capital below labor, a Social Security system invested in Treasury bonds instead of equities since 1982, the shift away from pensions after ERISA, and government policies that drove housing, healthcare, and education costs higher. He argues those failures have created the conditions driving the rise of socialism in America.

"Americans should feel good about America. We just have to fix the policies."

David Friedberg: https://x.com/friedberg

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/LGkRR4ZNsEA

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) David Friedberg, CEO at Ohalo Genetics & Co-Host at All-In

(01:11) Is California functionally bankrupt?

(02:28) The real reason Americans can't afford anything anymore

(12:13) Why a wealth tax is really government theft

(21:22) Why blaming billionaires is a political strategy, not a solution

(25:33) How Socialism grows like a virus

(30:40) Inside Trump Accounts: a 401(k) for every American

(34:22) Why rational arguments can't compete with viral outrage

(40:56) Jeff Bezos's radical fix for the wealth gap

(45:47) 5 years till Social Security is bankrupt

(46:35) Is AI actually coming for your job?

(50:29) The K-shaped economy

(55:39) Five things America needs to fix to survive

(59:21) David's research process

(1:02:54) "It's about making Americans feel good again"

CJ Desai, CEO of MongoDB, joins Sourcery at the RAISE Summit in Paris. We cover why data is the downstream winner of the AI cycle, how hyperscaler capacity limits are pushing workloads back on-prem, the return of data sovereignty, & what a bank's real agentic architecture actually looks like.

"Data is the unsung hero and data is back. You cannot create an AI application without a great data layer, and your AI application is as good as your data."

"You see these hyperscalers, some of them are running out of capacity. And the hyperscaler said, 'Sorry, we don't have a capacity.' And they are one of the top 50 customers for that hyperscaler."

CJ took over MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB) in November 2025 after Dev Ittycheria's 11-year run, with a mandate to reposition the company as the default modern database for AI applications. MongoDB carries a market cap of roughly ~$25 billion. CJ runs on a cadence of speaking to 10 to 12 customers a week, and in this conversation he brings that view straight from frontier labs, AI-native startups, and Global 2000 enterprises.

Plus prediction markets under World Cup load, the open vs closed source model debate, data centers in space, and the mentors who shaped him.

We cover:

› The 3 classes of AI customers MongoDB serves

› Why hyperscalers are telling top-50 accounts "no capacity"

› On-prem, sovereign AI, and the data-center comeback

› ElevenLabs running 50M+ agents on MongoDB

› MongoDB (OLTP) vs Snowflake and Databricks (OLAP)

› Why there is no standardization in enterprise AI models

› Auto-scaling and the death of the expensive DBA

CJ Desai: https://x.com/cj_mongodb

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/Ts-f5ZBwDFw

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) CJ Desai, CEO at MongoDB

(01:12) Top CEOs at the Raise AI Summit

(03:24) The 3 types of companies powering the AI boom

(07:25) Why on-prem is making a shocking comeback

(09:01) Hyperscalers are quietly running out of capacity

(11:06) What actually separates MongoDB from Snowflake and Databricks

(13:18) Why Frontier Labs treat MongoDB as their memory layer

(15:23) The truth about data labeling companies

(16:22) From Oracle intern to first-time CEO

(19:19) Becoming CEO during the AI chaos

(23:53) The World Cup crisis that tested MongoDB's scale

(28:19) The real complexity behind simple AI agents

(31:22) Open source vs. closed models: what customers actually pick

(34:36) CJ's honest take on data centers in space

(36:50) The mentors who shaped a first-time CEO

(40:32) MongoDB's next big bets

(41:36) Data is back?

Day 2 of RAISE Summit in Paris, the biggest AI summit in Europe. 12 founders, operators, and investors give us their hottest takes on the debates splitting the room right now: is token maxing genius or a waste, is open source dying or about to take over, and are we in a bubble.The disagreements were the best part. Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) loves token maxing and says open source is dying quickly, while others call token maxing the wrong approach entirely. Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition) on the opulence phase of the cycle and the pullback he sees coming. Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter) on the four seasons of AI and planning for the climate, not the weather. Plus enterprise ROI, physical AI, petabyte-scale search, and why data is back."Open is dying quickly." - Dylan Patel, SemiAnalysis. "There are four seasons in AI. They're called OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google." - Apoorv Agrawal, Altimeter.Guest lineup:Dylan Patel, CEO, SemiAnalysisQasar Younis, CEO, Applied IntuitionApoorv Agrawal, Partner, Altimeter CapitalArvind Jain, CEO, GleanAriel Cohen, CEO, NavanCJ Desai, CEO, MongoDBGil Feig, CTO, MergeNikhil Benesch, CTO, TurboPufferBarak Kaufman, Chief Strategy Officer, WonderfulMax Junestrand, CEO, LegoraMarc Boroditsky, CRO, NebiusLaura Diorio, Social Media, NYSEThis episode is brought to you by Brex, MongoDB, and Assembly AI.Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio. Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒00:00 RAISE Summit Day 200:12 Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition)03:46 AI Trends at RAISE05:29 Applied Intuition Updates09:46 Bubble Risks and Books15:37 Self-Driving Future17:29 Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis)22:05 Tokenmaxxing Debate24:31 Marc Boroditsky (Nebius)28:37 Arvind Jain (Glean)32:02 Laura Diorio (NYSE)35:03 Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter): Four Seasons of AI38:23 Nikhil Benesch (TurboPuffer)42:18 CJ Desai (MongoDB): Agent Data Layer43:00 Barak Kaufman (Wonderful)45:34 Max Junestrand (Legora)49:35 Gil Feig (Merge)51:58 Ariel Cohen (Navan): Bullish on Humans54:54 CJ Desai (MongoDB): Data Is Back#podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley

Day 1 of RAISE Summit in Paris, the most high-profile AI summit in Europe. We pulled 10 of the sharpest founders, operators, and investors aside for their hottest takes on the debates defining AI right now.Open source vs closed models dominated the room, alongside agents rewriting how work gets done, the death of the keyboard and mouse, the economics of inference, and physical AI moving from data centers into cars, devices, and even orbit. Real numbers, real disagreements, and a few pieces of breaking news, straight from the people building it."The keyboard and mouse are slowly dying." - Max Cook, Coatue. "In the next 12 months, 90% of tokens will be going to open models." - Matan Grinberg, Factory."Most of AI is just glorified data science." - Pim de Witte, General Intuition"The SpaceX IPO is going to be viewed historically as the most undervalued IPO of all time." - Philip Johnston, Starcloud"People don't even understand how transformational agentic AI is." - Mark Papermaster, AMDGuest lineup:Max Cook, Sector Head, CoatueMatan Grinberg, CEO, FactoryRodrigo Liang, CEO, SambaNovaPhilip Johnston, CEO, StarcloudMark Papermaster, CTO, AMDPim de Witte, CEO, General IntuitionRamin Hasani, CEO, Liquid AIRobin Rombach, CEO, Black Forest LabsChris Madden, CEO, Good Future MediaHenri Delahaye, CEO, RAISE SummitThis episode is brought to you by Brex, MongoDB, and Assembly AI.Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio. Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒00:00 RAISE in Paris00:16 Max Cook (Coatue)01:01 Keyboard and Mouse Dying03:42 Future Interaction Models06:32 Open Source vs Closed12:20 Henri Delahaye Hosts the Night13:21 Pim de Witte (General Intuition)14:46 Mark Papermaster (AMD) on Agentic Workflows16:38 Robin Rombach (Black Forest Labs)20:31 Matan Grinberg (Factory): Droids in Europe21:03 Open Models Token Shift23:17 Philip Johnston (StarCloud): Space Bets24:01 SpaceX IPO Bull Case25:13 Chips for Space Compute26:58 Chris Madden (Good Future Media): Clipping28:23 Viral Clip Hook Secrets32:03 Ramin Hasani (Liquid AI): Physical Models34:50 Three-Axis Foundation Models38:43 Rodrigo Liang (SambaNova): $1B Raise#podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley #ai #elonmusk #spacex

Rodrigo Liang is the CEO and Co-Founder of SambaNova. The company just announced a first close on a $1B round at an $11B valuation, led by General Atlantic with T. Rowe Price and Capital Group participating.

Rodrigo has spent 32 years building chips. We covered the 101 of semiconductors and data centers: what inference is, why it is a different problem than training, and why inference will require orders of magnitude more chips than training.

He walks through SambaNova's chip lineup from SN10 to the new SN50, why a 10 kilowatt air-cooled rack changes where AI can be deployed, and why running a trillion parameter model in a single rack matters for agents, latency, and edge.

We also covered the era of premium inference, how providers measure revenue per rack, coopetition and traffic routing across Nvidia and AMD, sovereign models, the move back to on-prem, and why tokenmaxxing is the wrong goal.

Special thank you to Brex, MongoDB, & AssemblyAI for helping make this RAISE AI Summit mini-series in Paris, France happen.

Sourcery covers the people building the future across AI, hardware, and the private and public markets, subscribe for more.

Rodrigo Liang: https://x.com/rodrigoliang?s=21 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/etod19D9IEg⁠

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Rodrigo Liang , Co-Founder & CEO at SambaNova Systems

(00:59) SambaNova’s Series F : $1B raise at an $11 billion valuation

(03:00) The Inference problem nobody saw coming

(04:52) SambaNova's chip evolution

(07:19) Running a trillion-parameter model on a single rack

(11:00) Do $100 billion data centers actually make sense?

(14:14) What "premium inference" really means

(18:28) Speed is about to become AI's biggest price tag

(20:43) Starlink, edge computing, and AI reaching every corner of the planet

(24:27) Working alongside NVIDIA and rival chipmakers

(27:49) How customers actually measure inference performance

(32:07) The biggest bottlenecks in AI's global land grab

(35:12) Justifying the billion-dollar AI valuations

(37:53) Why SambaNova refuses to build its own cloud

(41:03) The "AI sovereignty" debate

(43:48) Data privacy fears are driving the return to on-prem AI

(47:55) How to actually get ROI out of AI spend

(51:16) The one question every business should be asking about AI

(56:09) The mentors and lessons behind a 32-year career in chips 

(58:02) Unveiling SambaNova's newest chip, the SN50

"Elon Musk was really good about keeping the mission as a forefront focus for what we were doing, & just energized everyone to get it done."

Now Chief Tech & Product Officer, Senra Systems Ken Venner spent 11 years at Broadcom, joining at 1,000 people and $400 million in revenue and leaving at 10,000 employees and $8.6 billion, across 52 acquisitions. Then he became CIO of SpaceX, where Elon hired him to build the digital nervous system for a 21st century rocket company. The result was Warp Drive, the custom operating system that helped scale SpaceX from about 1 booster a year and 1,000 employees to 40 boosters and 9,000 employees.

He recently joined Senra Systems as Chief Technology and Product Officer, this is a sit-down on how he scales companies.. wish we had more time."

Scaling up & scaling out are my core skills."

We cover the Broadcom years & why process kills growth if you add it too early, the tour of the Hawthorne factory that got him to leave, working for Elon & Gwynne, why he spent two years thinking Warp Drive was a terrible idea.. & what changed in year three.

Ken also breaks down Elon's playbook: first principles thinking, "remove before automate," and the responsible engineer model where one person owns a part from requirements through post-flight with no handoffs.

Plus: why he had 175 engineers building core platforms at SpaceX and only needs 6 at Senra, the law of threes for scaling factories, why he still works after one of the largest wealth creation events ever, and his winery in Sonoma.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

00:00 Meet Ken Venner

00:17 Why Join Senra

01:26 Scaling Playbook

02:08 Broadcom Growth Lessons

03:48 Broadcom Jump to SpaceX

05:16 Building SpaceX Systems

06:39 Elon Leadership Principles

07:43 Gwynne & SpaceX Culture

09:39 Why Keep Working?

11:14 Law of Threes - Scaling

11:56 AI & Automation Changing the Game

13:35 Senra Name Story

14:07 Winery Side Project (Auteur Wines - Healdsburg, CA)

14:55 Next 12 Months Outlook

Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. #podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley #spacex #elonmusk

Senra Systems has closed a $65 million Series B, bringing total funding to over $112 million. The round was co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Interlagos, with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Dylan Field, CIV, 8VC, The Friedkin Group, Jaws Estates Capital, Sozo Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.

Jordan Black, co-founder and CEO of Senra Systems, and Ken Venner, Senra's new Chief Technology and Product Officer, join Sourcery for a full breakdown plus a walkthrough of the new 80,000 sq ft Cypress factory.

Jordan Black co-founded Senra after managing the R&D team for electronics at SpaceX, where wire harnessing was the bane of everyone's existence and 95% of it was outsourced for Falcon and Dragon. He started the company on his apartment carpet with co-founder Ben Shanahan, who helped write the application software that scaled Starlink production from day one.

Ken Venner joins as CTPO after a legendary career in manufacturing. He scaled Broadcom from 1,000 people and $400M in revenue to 10,000 employees and $8.6B across 52 acquisitions, then served as CIO of SpaceX, where he built Warp Drive, the custom operating system that helped scale production from 1 booster a year to 40.

Wire harnesses are the nervous system behind every advanced platform, from rockets and satellites to cars, missiles, and generators. They can account for 25% of a vehicle's cost, and they are still built almost entirely by hand. Senra is digitizing the process with Amp, its proprietary manufacturing operating system, and training a new workforce in weeks instead of years.

We cover the funding environment, the Redondo vs Cypress factory split, the reindustrialization macro, vertical integration, the Ken Venner hire, and the plan for Factory 3.

Jordan Black: https://x.com/jordan__black

Ken Venner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenvenner/

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/qsd3JNHzAY8

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Andrew Feldman, Co-Founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, joins Molly O'Shea at the RAISE Summit in Paris.

Recorded 2 months after Cerebras went public at a $56B valuation and popped to roughly $95B on its first day, this conversation covers the $20B+ OpenAI deal, why inference is the new battleground, the state of the AI data center build-out, and Feldman's take on the circular deals reshaping the industry.

We also get into what it means to create 1,000 millionaires, how co-design between hardware and software actually works, data centers in space, and why Feldman thinks AI could mean the next generation never knows anyone who dies of cancer.

Cerebras (Nasdaq: CBRS) builds the WSE-3, a single wafer-scale chip with 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 cores, and the CS-3 system it powers.

Special thank you to Brex, MongoDB, & AssemblyAI for helping make this RAISE AI Summit mini-series in Paris, France happen.

Chapters below.

Sourcery covers the people building the future across AI, hardware, and the private and public markets, subscribe for more.

Andre Feldman: https://x.com/andrewdfeldman

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/k9UX2fVGhsI⁠

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Andrew Feldman, Co-Founder & CEO at Cerebras Systems

(00:49) Why hardware suddenly became the coolest industry in tech

(01:51) What changed at Raise AI Summit

(03:01) Inside the $20 billion Cerebras - OpenAI deal

(05:50) What actually changes two months after an IPO

(06:32) Turning 1,000 employees into millionaires

(07:52) Staying sane during an AI gold rush

(10:44) Life after the IPO plateau

(11:45) The truth about the global data center shortage

(12:56) Why data centers are borrowing jet engines for power

(14:44) Are data centers really headed to space?

(15:37) The shift to designing chips and software together

(17:39) The biggest misconception about co-designing chips and software

(18:31) Inside SpaceX's multi-billion dollar AI deals

(20:06) NVIDIA's playbook for locking out competitors

(20:54) The hidden cost behind free tokens

(22:52) Andrew's response to Karp's sovereign AI thesis

(24:18) AI's biggest win might be curing cancer

(26:50) Peptides and biohacking

(28:00) How AI could finally fix the broken education problem

(29:46) The mentors who shaped Andrew Feldman's career

Cyan Banister put her entire IronPort exit into SpaceX when the rockets were still blowing up on the launchpad. She never sold. It became the best investment of her life. She is Co-Founder and General Partner at Long Journey Ventures, spent 4 years as a partner at Founders Fund, and with her husband Scott Banister has built one of the most successful angel portfolios in the world across 20+ years of investing together: 

SpaceX. Anduril. Uber. PayPal. Affirm. Flexport. Postmates. Niantic. Opendoor. Carta. Together AI. Diamond Foundry. Crusoe. Flock Safety. Substrate. Brave. Depop. Calm. Fivetran. Zappos.

Cyan joins Sourcery at Long Journey's HQ to break down how she actually sources deals, why she refuses to chase hot rounds, and what she is buying next in nanotech and biotech. She found Niantic in a customer support inbox at Hint Water. She found Uber by asking taxi drivers what their day was actually like. Her point is that the alpha is in paying attention, and that the best investments arrive as a feeling before they arrive as a thesis.

Cyan Banister: https://x.com/cyantist

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/810VlN3lkqQ

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Cyan Banister, Long Journey Ventures

(01:13) Inside Long Journey HQ 

(02:17) The wild story behind the office mural

(05:32) What Cyan's actual house looks like

(08:08) What the Long Journey logo actually means

(10:41) How Cyan became one of Mafia's breakout stars

(15:42) The first time she's ever had to lie to win

(16:30) What really happens off-camera at Mafia

(18:58) The blooper reel nobody's seen yet

(22:33) The one thing Mafia is missing

(23:54) Inside Brian Singerman's $40-a-month boardgame club

(31:36) Cyan's Serendipity

(43:56) The "why" behind her biggest investments

(1:01:57) Full list of Cyan's investments

(1:04:28) All-in on SpaceX

(1:08:57) Why she never sold a single SpaceX share

(1:12:53) Top Bets: Becoming Bio + Substrate

(1:15:52) Why America's reindustrialization moment is now

(1:19:16) The mentors who shaped who she is today

(1:22:54) Manifesting Rick Rubin

(1:24:00) Real take on the Peter Thiel events

Accel Partners Arun Mathew, Miles Clements, & Matt Weigand join Sourcery to go deep into the lore of the quiet, yet legendary, Silicon Valley firm.

We go back through Accel's 40 years of history, starting with the 10% Facebook stake and the secondary they modeled at 5X, which under-shot the outcome by an order of magnitude, and how the firm now runs a global AI portfolio spanning chips, neoclouds, labs, and applications, with exposure across Cursor, Anthropic, and Nebius.

The three have invested together for 15 years, and they break down how a generalist team wins competitive deals against flashier names, why late-stage returns are starting to match early-stage top quartile, and how check sizes moved from a $480M first growth fund to single investments north of $500M and, at times, over $1B.

Topics include Matt's $150M Nebius PIPE, now up 13X, and its $26B Meta deal; the "agentic influence" thesis behind the Lovable investment; Supabase growing 350% on nearly all inbound at 9M developers; Cyera's path from Series A to the highest-valued private security company; token maxing; and three trillion dollar IPOs on the horizon.

We also get into the hot topics moving tech, AI, and investing right now: the agent economy and real enterprise adoption, the inference buildout and whether infrastructure is the rate limiter, AI optimization replacing SEO as the new distribution channel, the concentration of capital into a handful of late-stage rounds, security as an AI tailwind rather than a casualty after Mythos, the race toward $10 trillion companies, and what it means for retail when SpaceX, and others, finally hit the public markets.

Miles Clements: https://x.com/mkclements

Arun Mathew: https://x.com/ammathew

Matt Weigand: https://x.com/Mweigand13

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/mi4Cpes1dV8

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Arun Mathew, Miles Clements, Matt Weigand, Partners at Accel

(00:49) Meet the Accel growth team

(01:48) The Facebook deal almost no one believed in

(06:19) The Thesis behind every Accel bet

(09:06) The silent strategy behind Accel's biggest wins

Figma Co-Founder and CEO Dylan Field joins Sourcery behind-the-scenes at Day 0 of Config 2026, aka the “Coachella for design,” just before 10,000 attendees arrived.

The headline going around is that “design is dead” and AI has turned it into a commodity. Field's argument is that the market has this backwards. Anyone can prompt a model into the average, and in a world flooded with templated software the average does not stand out, so taste and a real point of view are what separate the products people actually use from everything else.

He also points to a shift in who is on the platform. Engineers now come to Figma to take what they built fast with AI and make it beautiful, and designers are giving the kind of feedback that used to come from developers. Design, in his telling, is expanding, not shrinking.

From there we get into vibe mathing and LLM psychosis, why judgment and empathy do not scale with raw IQ the way math does, why he thinks we are still stuck in a prompting age five years after GPT-3, his three losing rounds on Founders Fund's Mafia game, what the Thiel Fellowship actually gave a 20 year old founder, why he is bullish on SpaceX, and whether Elon Musk is right that a truly special product needs no logo.

Dylan Field: https://x.com/zoink 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/3xfMDWEVQWY

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery 

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Dylan Field, Co-Founder & CEO at Figma

(00:57) Day Zero begins: backstage at Config

(01:44) The "Coachella for Design" is real

(02:35) Why Dylan started Config back in 2020

(03:47) Why "design is dead" is completely wrong

(06:11) How Figma turned engineers into designers

(06:54) Inside Config before the crowd arrives

(07:55) The Config speakers Dylan can't wait to watch

(11:34) Inside the exclusive Pantone Lounge

(12:00) The one question every designer gets asked

(13:16) Getting killed in every single game of Mafia

(15:33) How to escape the permanent underclass of zero taste

(19:51) Why execution is cheap but taste is everything

(22:25) What actually builds a trusted brand

(25:51) How AI agents are rewiring company structure

(28:54) The AI safety debate happening right now

Ev Randle, General Partner at Benchmark, joins Sourcery to break down how AI has rewritten the rules of venture and growth investing. Ev explains why the old inverse relationship between scale and risk has collapsed, why the golden rules of SaaS now run in reverse, and how he underwrites AI companies when the spreadsheet no longer does the work.

We cover the new AI taxonomy through a P x Q x M lens, the economics of inference and agents, Claude Code at $36,000 per developer, the AI mom test for frontier versus open source demand, and the trillion-dollar question of whether frontier labs hold pricing power. Ev also walks through the coming liquidity shock from the $380B Anthropic round, why late-stage can now beat a Series C, and how venture firms became alternative asset managers.

Benchmark's AI portfolio spans Mercor, HeyGen, Decart, Manus, Gumloop, Exa, StarCloud, Reducto, Eigen, Cerebras, 11x, Sierra, Fireworks AI, Legora, and LangChain.

Everett Randle: https://x.com/EverettRandle 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery 

• Merge—The leading provider of customer-facing integrations and agentic tools for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. Visit https://merge.dev  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Everett Randle, General Partner at Benchmark

(00:58) Coming off Benchmark's AGM

(04:05) The Golden rules of Investing are all gone

(08:58) Who actually has a handle on AI Economics?

(12:57) Why Benchmark bets on Founders, not Categories

(15:31) Brad Gerstner's "Age of Inference" Thesis

(19:07) The most important shift since the Cloud

(23:55) Inside Gumloop's AI automation canvas

(26:40) The Token Maxing problem nobody's solving

(27:25) Ev's "Mom Test" for frontier AI

(31:33) What happens when frontier models get too cheap

(34:44) Inside the new funding playbook

(40:31) Venture Capital became a product, not a firm 

(42:35) The Biggest IPO wave Wall Street's ever seen

(49:08) The secret behind Benchmark's wildly diverse bets

(52:54) The mentors who shaped him

Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder and CEO of Coinbase, sits down with Sourcery backstage ahead of the Coinbase System Update.

We cover tokenized equities, an SEC-registered AI agent advisor, and the unified global liquidity approvals that bring Coinbase's offshore and US order books together. Brian explains why 4 billion people remain unbrokered, how the Everything Exchange works, and where pre-IPO perps fit as nearly $4 trillion in new IPOs come to market.

On AI: 1,200 full-time agents now work at Coinbase, team sizes are shrinking to as few as 1 person, and intelligent routing to open source models is flattening the company's AI cost curve. Brian also gets into economic freedom, his time in Argentina, accredited investor reform, the New York Times, and the mentors he leans on.

Brian Armstrong: https://x.com/brian_armstrong 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/XLfNlShdATI

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery 

• Merge—The leading provider of customer-facing integrations and agentic tools for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. Visit https://merge.dev  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder & CEO of Coinbase

(00:45) Backstage before the Announcements drop

(01:47) Why Tokenized Stocks never worked before until now

(03:58) Inside Coinbase Advisor: The SEC-Registered AI Investment Agent

(05:36) The real mission behind every Coinbase product

(06:55) Does the average American feel economically free?

(08:42) What Argentina taught Brian about Capitalism

(11:16) Why younger generations are drifting toward Socialism

(13:01) What Roblox reveals about the next generation

(13:57) Why no one in Argentina plans for the future

(18:17) How Crypto is rewriting financial infrastructure

(20:20) The Strategy behind Coinbase's "Everything Exchange"

(21:28) Building the most trusted brand in the Crypto Industry

(23:49) Prediction Markets, Dry Powder & Reading Market Cycles

(26:07) The Pre-IPO loophole Coinbase built for everyone else

(28:18) Why Coinbase wins the super app war

(29:40) The tweet that got 24 million views

(32:22) Will AI actually kill jobs?

(36:03) How Brian stays on top of everything

Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga and author of the newly released Life at the Speed of Play (HarperCollins, foreword by Reid Hoffman), joins Sourcery to break down the framework he’s used over the past three decades to build hit products. Pincus took games like FarmVille and Words With Friends to more than 1 billion users in 4 years and a $12.7B exit, and was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, and Polymarket. This conversation is a tactical playbook for builders and the investors backing them.

Pincus covers separating winning instincts from losing ideas, his Proven Better New framework to increase odds of success, why consumer products win on “day 365 retention” instead of virality, how he represents the ‘dumb fucks’ and uses his iPhone home screen as market research, the tech assistant model and other unscalable hiring tactics he learned from Jeff Bezos, his new enterprise AI company Hivemind, how to spot a fake CEO, the 2006 think weekend he hosted with Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker, and why he is an AI maximalist who still thinks consumer AI is un-investable. Chapters below.

Get the book now on Amazon or at lifeatthespeedofplay.com, and follow Mark on X @markpinc. 

Read more and subscribe to our newsletter at sourcery.vc. for more conversations with the operators and investors building the next cycle.

Mark Pincus: https://x.com/markpinc 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/2z-sSISO9BE

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery 

• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery 

• VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com  

• Deel—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery

• Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery 

• Merge—The leading provider of customer-facing integrations and agentic tools for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. Visit https://merge.dev  

Follow Sourcery for the latest updates!

https://www.sourcery.vc

Disclosure

Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Mark Pincus, Chairman & Founder at Zynga

(01:07) Why it took so long to write the book

(01:52) Why the book starts with Elon

(07:29) How frustration becomes market research

(08:16) The gap between Airbnb and hotels

(09:14) Why people don't want flight attendants on private jets 

(13:13) The goal behind Life at the Speed of Play

(15:07) The instincts vs. ideas framework

(21:01) Do instincts improve with experience?

(22:49) A framework for building winning products