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Sourcery with Molly O'Shea

Sourcery

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Interviews with the top Investors, CEOs, & Founders

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Mercor Raises $750M at $20B Valuation | CEO Brendan Foody

54 min

Mercor has raised $750 million in a Series D at a $20 billion valuation, with participation from Nvidia, Benchmark, General Catalyst, Funds managed by affiliates of Apollo, XTX Ventures, Salesforce, and others. Co-Founder & CEO Brendan Foody joins Sourcery to discuss how Mercor has grown more than 5X on a mid-nine-figure base, built a network of over 5 million experts, and scaled to more than $5 million in daily payouts to people helping train frontier AI models. Founded in 2023 by college dropouts, Mercor has evolved beyond AI-powered recruiting into building the data, evaluations, and reinforcement learning environments used to train AI systems on real professional work. Brendan explains why he believes every Fortune 500 company will eventually build its own AI intelligence, why human expertise becomes more valuable as AI improves, & how Mercor plans to expand from frontier labs into the broader enterprise economy. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Brendan Foody, Co-Founder & CEO Mercor (01:00) Mercor’s Path to a $1T Company (02:22) Mercor’s 3 Products (04:05) $5M a Day in Expert Payouts on Stripe Connect (05:40) Why Mercor Is Not a Marketplace (08:51) Is Human Data a Durable Category (12:20) How Mercor Finds and Evaluates Experts (15:45) Holding Category Leadership With a Founding Team in Their Early 20s (18:00) Chips on the Shoulder and Avoiding Mimetic Competition (28:25) Why Mercor Acquired Deeptune (31:22) Turning Down Acquisition Offers (34:40) Harvey, LAB and Why the Model Is the Product (41:30) Why Data Is Mispriced in the AI Stack (43:40) Every Fortune 500 Becomes a Neolab (49:55) IPO Timeline and the Next 12 Months Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOSheaBrendan on X: https://x.com/BrendanFoody𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • 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 f...

Planet Labs Factory Tour

39 min

Planet builds a satellite in about 8 hours. At NASA, the same work took 8 years. Will Marshall is Co-Founder and CEO of Planet Labs (NYSE: PL), which has built about 700 satellites in 15 years, more than any company except SpaceX, and runs the only fleet that images Earth’s entire landmass every day. Marshall walks through Planet’s SF factory, from the garage whiteboard and the phone the founders launched on a suborbital rocket, to the clean room where Pelican-10 is being integrated, the shock, vibration, and thermal test stations, and the RF chamber. The tour ends with a live demo of Planet’s AI interface querying 10 years of daily imagery, and a first look at the new Dove production floor. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Will Marshall, Co-Founder & CEO at Planet Labs (00:48) 700 satellites for less than one NASA mission (02:44) Why Planet Labs is really a data business  (03:45) How a satellite sees trees from 500 km away  (06:22) 4 million images of Earth, every day  (07:44) What a satellite goes through to reach orbit  (09:03) The $500 phone vs. the $1B satellite  (12:05) 1,000x more data than the first satellites (14:47) Planet Labs' 48 ground stations that bring Earth’s data home  (16:44) Why every Planet Labs satellite is named after a bird (18:19) A look inside Planet Labs’ sharpest satellite (20:17) Why Planet Labs doesn’t make its own chips  (21:14) Building a satellite in 8 hours, not 8 years (22:47) Why fleet size isn't what matters (24:30) The engine that’s 10x more efficient in space  (25:29) Why the 100 million pieces of space junk is the real collision risk  (26:56) Spotting gas leaks from space (27:40) Testing satellites to the breaking point  (32:19) What changed at Area 51 in five years?  (37:31) The room where satellite radios are tested Will Marshall: https://x.com/Will4Planet  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 integr...

Planet Labs CEO: Why AI Data Centers Will Move to Space

40 min

I visited Planet Labs (NYSE: PL) in San Francisco to tour its satellite manufacturing facility and sit down with Co-Founder & CEO Will Marshall. Planet has built more than 700 satellites, second only to SpaceX, and operates the only constellation capable of imaging Earth's entire landmass daily, generating roughly 4 million images per day for defense, government, and commercial customers. Will explains Planet's work with Google on Project Suncatcher and NVIDIA-powered compute in orbit, why AI data centers in space could eventually be cheaper than on Earth, and how its satellite intelligence supports Ukraine, the US Navy, and governments building sovereign space capabilities. We also discuss Planet's growing defense business, AI-powered Earth monitoring, its manufacturing expansion in San Francisco and Berlin, the search for extraterrestrial life, and lessons from 15 years of building Planet. Will Marshall: https://x.com/Will4Planet  Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/llGHpPbCtHo 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    • Mercor—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Frontier labs and leading enterprises use Mercor to turn the knowledge of 5M+ experts into the data, evals and benchmarks that make AI better at real work. Visit: http://mercor.com/sourcery  • VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing...

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The newest 50 of 220 episodes

Mercor Raises $750M at $20B Valuation | CEO Brendan Foody

54 min

Mercor has raised $750 million in a Series D at a $20 billion valuation, with participation from Nvidia, Benchmark, General Catalyst, Funds managed by affiliates of Apollo, XTX Ventures, Salesforce, and others. Co-Founder & CEO Brendan Foody joins Sourcery to discuss how Mercor has grown more than 5X on a mid-nine-figure base, built a network of over 5 million experts, and scaled to more than $5 million in daily payouts to people helping train frontier AI models. Founded in 2023 by college dropouts, Mercor has evolved beyond AI-powered recruiting into building the data, evaluations, and reinforcement learning environments used to train AI systems on real professional work. Brendan explains why he believes every Fortune 500 company will eventually build its own AI intelligence, why human expertise becomes more valuable as AI improves, & how Mercor plans to expand from frontier labs into the broader enterprise economy. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Brendan Foody, Co-Founder & CEO Mercor (01:00) Mercor’s Path to a $1T Company (02:22) Mercor’s 3 Products (04:05) $5M a Day in Expert Payouts on Stripe Connect (05:40) Why Mercor Is Not a Marketplace (08:51) Is Human Data a Durable Category (12:20) How Mercor Finds and Evaluates Experts (15:45) Holding Category Leadership With a Founding Team in Their Early 20s (18:00) Chips on the Shoulder and Avoiding Mimetic Competition (28:25) Why Mercor Acquired Deeptune (31:22) Turning Down Acquisition Offers (34:40) Harvey, LAB and Why the Model Is the Product (41:30) Why Data Is Mispriced in the AI Stack (43:40) Every Fortune 500 Becomes a Neolab (49:55) IPO Timeline and the Next 12 Months Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOSheaBrendan on X: https://x.com/BrendanFoody𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • 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 f...

Planet Labs Factory Tour

39 min

Planet builds a satellite in about 8 hours. At NASA, the same work took 8 years. Will Marshall is Co-Founder and CEO of Planet Labs (NYSE: PL), which has built about 700 satellites in 15 years, more than any company except SpaceX, and runs the only fleet that images Earth’s entire landmass every day. Marshall walks through Planet’s SF factory, from the garage whiteboard and the phone the founders launched on a suborbital rocket, to the clean room where Pelican-10 is being integrated, the shock, vibration, and thermal test stations, and the RF chamber. The tour ends with a live demo of Planet’s AI interface querying 10 years of daily imagery, and a first look at the new Dove production floor. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Will Marshall, Co-Founder & CEO at Planet Labs (00:48) 700 satellites for less than one NASA mission (02:44) Why Planet Labs is really a data business  (03:45) How a satellite sees trees from 500 km away  (06:22) 4 million images of Earth, every day  (07:44) What a satellite goes through to reach orbit  (09:03) The $500 phone vs. the $1B satellite  (12:05) 1,000x more data than the first satellites (14:47) Planet Labs' 48 ground stations that bring Earth’s data home  (16:44) Why every Planet Labs satellite is named after a bird (18:19) A look inside Planet Labs’ sharpest satellite (20:17) Why Planet Labs doesn’t make its own chips  (21:14) Building a satellite in 8 hours, not 8 years (22:47) Why fleet size isn't what matters (24:30) The engine that’s 10x more efficient in space  (25:29) Why the 100 million pieces of space junk is the real collision risk  (26:56) Spotting gas leaks from space (27:40) Testing satellites to the breaking point  (32:19) What changed at Area 51 in five years?  (37:31) The room where satellite radios are tested Will Marshall: https://x.com/Will4Planet  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 integr...

Planet Labs CEO: Why AI Data Centers Will Move to Space

40 min

I visited Planet Labs (NYSE: PL) in San Francisco to tour its satellite manufacturing facility and sit down with Co-Founder & CEO Will Marshall. Planet has built more than 700 satellites, second only to SpaceX, and operates the only constellation capable of imaging Earth's entire landmass daily, generating roughly 4 million images per day for defense, government, and commercial customers. Will explains Planet's work with Google on Project Suncatcher and NVIDIA-powered compute in orbit, why AI data centers in space could eventually be cheaper than on Earth, and how its satellite intelligence supports Ukraine, the US Navy, and governments building sovereign space capabilities. We also discuss Planet's growing defense business, AI-powered Earth monitoring, its manufacturing expansion in San Francisco and Berlin, the search for extraterrestrial life, and lessons from 15 years of building Planet. Will Marshall: https://x.com/Will4Planet  Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/llGHpPbCtHo 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    • Mercor—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Frontier labs and leading enterprises use Mercor to turn the knowledge of 5M+ experts into the data, evals and benchmarks that make AI better at real work. Visit: http://mercor.com/sourcery  • VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing...

Inside fal’s $1.65B Series E & F Led by Sequoia & Bessemer

1 hr 3 min

fal has raised $1.65B in a combined Series E and Series F, with Sequoia Capital leading the E and Bessemer Venture Partners leading the F. Its founders see generative media as 1 of only 3 product market fits in AI, alongside search and coding agents. Burkay Gür (Co-Founder and CEO) and Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-Founder and CTO) started fal in 2021 after building machine learning infrastructure at Coinbase and Amazon. fal runs the infrastructure behind image, video, audio, and 3D models, serving developers, studios, and the model labs themselves. Recorded at Dalida in San Francisco, Burkay and Gorkem explain how fal moved from Python data infrastructure into generative media, why video and image now split its revenue 50/50, and how demand kept rising as video prices jumped more than 10X. They also cover fal’s 150+ person org with only 2 reporting levels, the compute shortage shaping model launches, and why they believe the margin in AI sits with compute providers over applications. “AI really has 3 product market fits. One of them is search. The other really clear one that’s growing really fast now is coding agents. And the third one is, we believe, generative media.” We cover: › The $1.65B Series E and F › Why individuals spend $10K to $20K a month on generative media › Veo 2 pricing and the shift to professional ads and film work › Super ICs and hiring for agency, hunger, and humility › World models, open source, and Hollywood adoption Burkay Gur: https://x.com/burkaygur Gorkem Yurtseven: https://x.com/gorkem Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/pPzJ1wE8Lnw 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 La...

Inside $17B Index Ventures: Anthropic, Wiz, Datadog & the Future of AI

44 min

Shardul Shah, Partner at $17B Index Ventures, joins Sourcery from the firm's NYC office to discuss its investments in Anthropic, Wiz, Datadog, Simile, Parallel, and the next generation of AI companies. Shardul joined Index in 2008 and has backed some of the most important companies in cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity, including Wiz, acquired by Google for $32B. We discuss why startup valuations will keep rising, how Index invests in founders before they even have a business plan, the firm's approach to conviction and concentration, the future of cybersecurity in an agent-to-agent world, and the evolving IPO and M&A markets. Shardul also shares how Index invested over $250M in Wiz, why the firm has historically underestimated its biggest winners, and how it identifies the next generation of category-defining founders. Shardul Shah: https://x.com/shardul_shah  Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/9Vq63dnCfMU 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    • Mercor—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Frontier labs and leading enterprises use Mercor to turn the knowledge of 5M+ experts into the data, evals and benchmarks that make AI better at real work. Visit: http://mercor.com/sourcery  • VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfoli...

Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory

1 hr 9 min

I went inside Starcloud’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, right outside of Seattle, to tour the $2.3B company building AI data centers in space. Philip Johnston, CEO & Co-Founder led the tour, alongside technical features with Co-Founder & CTO Ezra Feilden, Co-Founder & Chief Engineer Adi Oltean, as well as Bailey Montaño, Miguel Rivera and Camilo Lopez from the engineering team. Starcloud has raised $450M to put Nvidia GPUs, AI inference and eventually gigawatts of computing infrastructure into orbit. Its latest round was $250M, led by Manhattan West, with Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Benchmark and EQT. The team went from founding to orbit in 21 months. Starcloud 1 launched with the first Nvidia H100 in space. Starcloud 2 launches in January with 100x the power, and Starcloud 3 is designed to deploy up to 50 satellites per SpaceX Starship launch. We cover the economics of orbital vs terrestrial data centers, the $500/kg launch cost threshold, SpaceX rideshare and Nvidia chips in space. We also get into liquid cooling and radiators, radiation and chip burn-in, edge inference for government customers and plans for an 88,000-satellite constellation. We also go behind the scenes of spacecraft testing, including a rebuilt secondhand vibe table, plus laser fabrication and welding. We close with Philip’s take on SpaceX passing $100T and his mission to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. Philip Johnston: https://x.com/PhilipJohnston  Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/mdq6urSx-f8 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.a...

I Got Interviewed! The Story Behind Sourcery, Alex Karp, Sam Altman Clip..

1 hr 6 min

I got interviewed! Paige Finn Doherty of Behind Genius sat down with me in the yard to look back on Sourcery's insane growth for her 100th episode. Copy below is from her post, check out her podcast Seed to Harvest. (https://open.spotify.com/show/1TcSnOcmeCG82HnXwNZwM0?si=452aee7408c1489c) In just one year of full-time building Sourcery, Molly O’Shea has interviewed over 200+ founders, CEOs, execs & investors across public co's, startups, VC, growth equity, PE, hedge funds on her show, Sourcery - including Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir ($PLTR), Palmer Luckey, CEO of Anduril, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. In today’s episode, we talk about how an art degree led her into venture, how an internal deal newsletter became Sourcery, and why she went all-in on X when Elon bought it.She also shares her contrarian take on funding-announcement exclusives and how a Top 100 dream-guest list landed her the Alex Karp interview that went viral. And yes, we talk about the Alex Karp sword swinging moment. My mission is to educate and inspire the next generation of CEOs and builders, and the reason why I wanted to share a conversation with Molly is she’s one of my favorite creators in the technology space!00:25 Intro01:26 Lemonade stands in Connecticut and growing up with two entrepreneur parents03:59 Drawing houses in Moleskines and teaching herself dimensions06:14 Using art to stand out08:32 Why the USC Architecture program failed her ROI test11:17 Discovering VC at Google’s 30 Weeks incubator15:12 Breaking into VC18:44 How Sourcery started as an internal deal newsletter22:53 Why she went all-in on X when Elon took over27:41 Breaking news vs. timeless content, and a funding-announcement playbook31:34 What frustrates her: companies that don’t amplify their own interviews34:21 Her Top 100 dream-guest list38:06 How the list landed Alex Karp40:55 Alex Karp: The first walking interview and the sword46:17 Jack Altman: “It’s my brother”48:28 Dry humor, Will Ferrell, and learning to sm...

Franklin Templeton CEO on SpaceX, Anthropic, Circular Deals & the State of the Market

42 min

Is AI in a bubble? What happens to circular AI financing deals, and why is one of the world's largest asset managers investing in SpaceX and Anthropic? I sat down with Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton ($1.8T AUM), at the firm's NYC headquarters to discuss today's market conditions, AI valuations, private markets, and the future of investing. We cover: AI Bubble & Circular Deals: AI infrastructure spending, revenue recognition, chip depreciation, and risks in long-term data center financing. SpaceX & Anthropic: Franklin Templeton's late-stage venture investments, the SpaceX IPO, and Elon Musk's ambitions. Market Conditions: Inflation, interest rates, geopolitical risks, and where Jenny sees opportunities. Building a $1.8T Asset Manager: 17 acquisitions in six years, the $4.5B Legg Mason deal, and Franklin's expansion into private markets. AI & Tokenization: 1,000+ AI agents, an 11% sales uplift, and why blockchain could transform financial infrastructure. Jenny also shares how she went from Franklin Templeton's mailroom to CEO, and why she believes Elon Musk is the modern-day Benjamin Franklin. Jenny Johnson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyjohnsonfranklintempleton  Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/VmCKksLNmsM 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    • Mercor—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Fron...

The $2B AI Startup Simulating Human Behavior with 85% Accuracy

56 min

What if AI could predict human behavior before it happens? I sat down with Joon Sung Park, Co-Founder & CEO of Simile, the $2B AI startup building foundation models of human behavior, backed by Greenoaks, Index Ventures, + investors including Fei-Fei Li & Andrej Karpathy. Simile is building digital twins of real people to simulate how individuals, consumers, and entire populations make decisions. Its foundational Stanford research demonstrated 85%+ accuracy in predicting human behavior, and today the company has partnerships providing access to over 40 million real people globally. Companies including CVS, Wealthfront, Deloitte, and Banco Itaú are already working with Simile to understand their customers, test products, optimize messaging, and simulate decisions before deploying them in the real world. Recorded at Index Ventures in San Francisco, we discuss how Joon's original Stanford research, Smallville, evolved from 25 autonomous AI agents into a $2B company, why human behavior is more predictable than we think, and how simulations could transform traditional market research, corporate strategy, and decision-making. We also put Simile to the test. Before our interview, Joon simulated our conversation using AI, and the model correctly anticipated one of my opening questions. Joon Sung Park: https://x.com/joon_s_pk  Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/-6Kg5N7JL7I⁠ 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 techn...

Ex-Twitter CEO Says We’re Underestimating AI Agents by 10,000x

59 min

Former Twitter CEO & CTO Parag Agrawal predicts AI agents could drive another 5,000–10,000x increase in web usage, fundamentally transforming how the internet operates and makes money. Now Founder & CEO of $2 Billion Parallel Web Systems, Parag is building the search infrastructure for an internet where AI agents, not humans, become the primary users. With a reported $230M raised, customers including Harvey and Notion, and a team that has grown 4x this year, Parallel is positioning itself at the center of the AI infrastructure boom. Recorded at Index Ventures in San Francisco, we discuss the massive GPU demand behind AI search, why traditional advertising and subscription models could break, and how Parallel is developing a new way to compensate content owners as agents replace human browsing. Parag also explains why the web will shift from reactive to proactive, how he's scaled Parallel from 30 to 120 employees this year, and lessons from his 11 years at Twitter as engineer, CTO, and CEO. Parallel Web Systems was funded by Index Ventures. Parag Agrawal: https://x.com/paraga  Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/iRI6gTe1wGM⁠ 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    • Mercor—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Frontier labs and leading enterprises use Mercor to turn the knowledge of 5M+ experts into the data,...

Apollo’s Yahoo Playbook, 5 Years After the $5B Deal

56 min

Apollo bought Yahoo and AOL from Verizon in 2021 for about $5B. 5 years later, Yahoo has returned Apollo’s capital in one of the fastest returning deals in the firm’s history. Jim Lanzone has been CEO of Yahoo since September 2021. Yahoo ranks among the top 5 internet companies in the US, reaching roughly 90% of the American online population and 700M users globally each month across Finance, Sports, Mail, News, and Search. Jim previously served as CEO of Tinder, CBS Interactive, where he launched CBS All Access (now Paramount+), and Ask Jeeves, and co-founded eTour. He sits on the board of Snap. We go inside the Apollo acquisition, a structure of roughly $4.25B in cash, $750M in preferred interests, and a 10% stake retained by Verizon, and how Jim works with Reed Rayman, now Head of the AI Sector at Apollo and still Yahoo’s board chair. Jim walks through reorganizing Yahoo into GM-led brands, shutting down and selling a money-losing ad tech stack, and divesting EdgeCast, TechCrunch, and AOL, which went to Bending Spoons for a reported $1.4B to $1.5B. We also cover Yahoo Scout, the company’s first in-house search engine in 17 years, and why startups with less than one-tenth of 1% of Yahoo’s users carry higher valuations. “It’s one of the fastest returning deals in the history of Apollo. We are playing with house money now for what the upside could be here.” We cover: › Inside Apollo’s ~$5B acquisition and the deal structure › Working with Apollo’s Reed Rayman on a growth-led turnaround › Divesting AOL, EdgeCast, TechCrunch, and the ad tech stack › Yahoo Scout, AI search, and 30 years of search data › 700M monthly users and Yahoo’s valuation vs AI startups Jim Lanzone: https://x.com/jlanzone  Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/31JELwiXgMo 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, &...

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on Building the Internet for Agents

1 hr 29 min

Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO of Vercel, joins Sourcery from the company's San Francisco headquarters to discuss how AI agents are transforming software development, infrastructure, and the economics of SaaS. Vercel has reportedly reached $600M in annualized revenue, growing 148% YoY, with more than 485,000 paying teams and a $9.3B valuation. Its infrastructure powers applications for OpenAI, Meta, Stripe, Shopify, DoorDash, and more. AI agents now account for 60% of Vercel deployments, up from just 3% at the beginning of 2026. Guillermo explains why coding is becoming dramatically cheaper, why companies may eventually generate software instead of buying it, and how the internet is shifting from human interfaces to agent-native infrastructure. We cover open vs. closed AI models, autonomous agents, cybersecurity, the future of SaaS, exploding compute demand, and how the role of software engineers is changing. Guillermo Rauch: https://x.com/rauchg Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/WuorvLfAFmA 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    • Mercor—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Frontier labs and leading enterprises use Mercor to turn the knowledge of 5M+ experts into the data, evals and benchmarks that make AI better at real work. Visit: http://mercor.com/sourcery  • VCX—VCX is the public ticker for private...

Thrive Capital's Bet on Neuralink, OpenAI & the Future of Medicine

1 hr 10 min

Dr. Nworah Ayogu, MD, MBA, Partner at Thrive Capital, joins Sourcery to discuss how AI is transforming drug discovery, medicine, and the economics of healthcare. A Harvard-trained physician, founding team member of Cityblock Health, former General Manager of Amazon Clinic and first Chief Medical Officer of Amazon Pharmacy, Nworah is now a partner at Thrive Capital. The investment firm has grown to over $65bn in AUM and its healthcare portfolio includes Neuralink, Nudge, Isomorphic Labs, OpenEvidence, OpenAI, Oscar Health, and Cadence. We cover AI's potential to accelerate drug development, Isomorphic Labs and Demis Hassabis, Neuralink's brain-computer interfaces, OpenEvidence's rapid adoption among physicians, personalized medicine, and the emergence of 10X doctors and nurses. We also explore some of Thrive’s breakout healthcare incubations, the next generation of trillion-dollar healthcare companies, and why AI's most important breakthroughs may happen in medicine rather than software. Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are the speaker's own as of the recording date and are subject to change. Thrive funds and their affiliates have investments in certain companies discussed in this episode. References to those companies are illustrative, do not represent all investments made by Thrive, and should not be viewed as recommendations or indications of future investment performance. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Dr. Nworah Ayogu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nworah Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/gYA2yyV6U5E 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,...

Perplexity CEO: SMBs Could Drive the Next Economic Boom

54 min

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...

USV’s New $900M Fund: Fred Wilson, Rebecca Kaden & Mike Mignano

1 hr 25 min

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 an...

John Collison, Stripe: AI Agents Will Rewire the Internet

28 min

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

Frontier AI Is a Ferrari. Most Companies Need a Model Y | Turing CEO

58 min

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 equ...

Annie Lamont: $14B Managed, 70+ Exits, 15 IPOs, 7x Midas Investor

1 hr 2 min

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...

IMEC Says Today’s AI Will Look Ancient in 10 Years

13 min

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    • Turin...

The $500B Opportunity in Europe’s Defense Buildout

21 min

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 exp...

The $10T AI Buildout Has a Photonics Problem

33 min

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...

The $3B Company Trying to Beat Amazon Prime

14 min

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 companie...

How Deel Scaled From $100M to $1B+ ARR in 3 Years

12 min

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...

How Apollo, Citadel, Blackstone, & Bridgewater Built Their Brands

1 hr 5 min

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...

10 of The Wildest Hot Takes From the All-In Summit 2026

47 min

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...

a16z Just Launched a School

1 hr 18 min

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 p...

Eclipse's Lior Susan on $12.5B AUM and the Bet on Physical Industries

48 min

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...

Brad Gerstner on the Largest Wealth Transfer to America’s Kids

12 min

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...

Bending Spoons is Eating Silicon Valley | CEO Luca Ferrari

1 hr 14 min

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 he...

Brad Gerstner: The $100 Test That Could Save 50,000 Lives a Year

23 min

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...

Inside Bending Spoons: Buying Airtable, AOL, Vimeo & Eventbrite

1 hr 17 min

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 tool...

Saronic's 4 Co-Founders on Building a $9.25B Shipbuilder | Part III

59 min

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...

Dino Mavrookas: America Needs to Build Ships Again

29 min

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 a...

Inside Saronic’s $9.25B Autonomous Boat Factory | CEO Dino Mavrookas

33 min

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 publ...

BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners?

1 hr 8 min

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...

Inside Bridgit Mendler’s New 185,000 sqft Northwood Space Factory

46 min

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...

Inside Rocket Lab: How Sir Peter Beck Is Building Neutron’s Engines | Tour 02

28 min

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 integr...

Rocket Lab HQ Tour with Sir Peter Beck | Factory Tour: Part I

24 min

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 en...

Inside Rocket Lab w/ CEO Sir Peter Beck: Record Earnings, Neutron, Flatelittes

38 min

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...

Ben Lamm CEO of $12B Colossal Biosciences & $3.8B Astromech

59 min

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, allo...

Nikesh Arora, CEO Palo Alto Networks ($PANW)

59 min

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: http...

How AppLovin Built a $100B Ad Machine

1 hr 26 min

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 t...

Inside Neros’ Factory Built to Make 1 Million Drones a Year

20 min

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,...

Neros Raises $250M Series C at $2.5B to Build 1 Million Drones a Year

43 min

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...

Base Power Hits $13B Valuation on $1B Series D

25 min

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, anywh...

AssemblyAI CEO Dylan Fox on 120 Million Voice Conversations a Week

46 min

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 fe...

The Stock That Went Up 1000% | Lumentum CEO

23 min

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...

Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition

43 min

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 po...

BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum

1 hr 8 min

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...

David Friedberg on the Economic Crisis Nobody Wants to Fix

1 hr 4 min

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,...

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