Benny Chen is the cofounder of Fireworks AI, an AI infrastructure platform. They have raised $327M in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lightspeed, Index, and others. Benny's favorite book: Principles (Author: Ray Dalio) (00:01) Intro and why AI infrastructure is having a moment (00:06) Training vs inference: what’s working and where the real bottlenecks are (01:25) Why inference is the hard problem in production (03:30) What breaks at scale when AI systems hit real users (05:29) GPUs,...

Surojit Chatterjee is CEO of Ema, an agent platform build AI employees. They have raised $61M in funding from Accel, Section 32, and others. Before Ema, he was the chief product officer at Coinbase. And before that, a VP at Google. Surojit's favorite book: Man's Search for Meaning (Author: Viktor Frankl) (00:01) Welcome (00:07) Defining the “AI Employee” (02:23) Lessons from Google: Building for Scale (06:59) Coinbase CPO: Hypergrowth & Product Leadership (09:24) Market Framing: W...

Rishi Bhargava is CEO of Descope, an identity management platform for customers and AI agents. They've raised $88M in funding from investors such as Notable Capital, Lightspeed, Unusual Ventures. The two previous he founded were acquired by Palo Alto Networks and McAfee. (00:01) Introduction (00:08) Origin story: why identity and passwords needed a rethink (02:59) Passwords vs passkeys explained in plain English (05:06) Why logging in is still painful (and why passwords persist) (09:06...

Gou Rao is CEO of NeuBird, an agentic AI Site Reliability Engineer for IT teams. They've raised $44.5 Million from Mayfield and M12. He was previously the CTO of Citrix and Portworx. (00:01) Introduction (01:07) What Does an SRE Do? (02:19) Inside a Typical Incident Flow (04:16) What Can Be Automated? (05:52) Deploying Hawkeye: Day 1 to Day 100 (11:59) Earning Trust for Autonomous Agents (14:57) Versioning Agent Behavior & Chain of Thought (17:02) Building Agentic Infra Products (18:38) ...

Brian Moore is CEO of Voxel51, a data infra platform for visual AI. They most recently raised a $30M Series B led by Bessemer. Brian's favorite books: Trillion Dollar Coach (Author: Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle) (00:01) Introduction and setup (00:22) Defining visual AI — beyond traditional computer vision (02:14) Why visual data is so hard to manage (04:17) Common “gotchas” in image and video datasets (06:43) Is it a data problem or a model problem? (09:41) The im...

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

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

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

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

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