Podcast
No Priors
Sarah Guo and Elad Gil interview AI founders, researchers, and operators about the future of artificial intelligence.
Original source
Chasing Trillion-Dollar Companies, Founder Ambition, Token Budgets, and Regulatory Capture with Sarah & Elad
Sarah Guo and Elad Gil debate how quickly AI can create trillion-dollar companies, arguing that market size alone is not enough and that the real constraint is speed to massive revenue. They also discuss compute scarcity, recursive self-improvement timelines, founder exit decisions, and why heavy-handed regulation could slow beneficial AI deployment.
Building an Autonomous Enterprise for Real-World Services with Netic Founder Melisa Tokmak
Melisa Tokmak explains how Netic is building an autonomous operating layer for essential services businesses, using AI agents to handle intake, scheduling, routing, and labor deployment. She argues the near-term opportunity is not robotics or frontier labs, but productized orchestration that delivers measurable ROI in slow, operationally complex industries.
Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang
DoorDash’s founders frame the company as both an agentic-commerce platform and a long-term robotics company, with Ask DoorDash changing discovery and basket size while Dot pushes autonomous delivery in Phoenix. The episode focuses on the hard parts of scaling physical-world autonomy: purpose-built hardware, operations, first/last-100-feet logistics, and a multimodal future with robots, drones, and more Dashers.
Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel
Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel argues that travel has no lasting moat, so the winner is the company that keeps innovating on product, service, and operations. He discusses Priceline’s agentic AI assistant Penny, Booking’s AI/customer-service gains, heavy reinvestment, large-scale buybacks, and the labor risks and retraining challenges posed by AI.
How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor
Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor says the company is proving nuclear by physically building and running reactors, not by paper design, and claims its first advanced startup-built reactor has already made power. He argues nuclear’s bottleneck is execution and scale, then makes the case that cheap atomic energy will unlock AI, manufacturing, and eventually broad energy abundance.
Really Big Test-Time Compute in AI Changes Benchmarks, Safety and Research with OpenAI Research Scientist Noam Brown
Noam Brown argues that modern AI capability is increasingly determined by test-time compute, so static benchmark grids badly understate what models can do. He discusses cost-aware evaluation, safety-policy gaps, poker and math case studies, and why long-horizon reasoning matters more than one-shot scores.
Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan lays out a turnaround centered on culture, faster decisions, and balance-sheet repair, while arguing that AI is making CPUs, advanced packaging, and full-stack systems more important. He also frames semiconductor investing as bottleneck hunting and says the industry’s capital intensity increasingly requires government, sovereign, and hyperscale backing.
Biohub: The Future of Biology is Open-Source with Co-Founders Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Head of Science Alex Rives
Biohub’s founders and science lead argue that the future of biology will be driven by open-source tools, frontier AI, and large-scale biological data generation. The episode centers on ESMFold2, Biohub’s protein world model, and its longer-term push toward virtual cells, personalized medicine, and hierarchical biological simulations.
We Need An Ecosystem in AI, And Every Company Can Win A Place In It
Satya Nadella argues Microsoft’s AI strategy is an ecosystem play built around models, tools, data, and eval loops rather than a single model. He also explains how agents, private evals, and new pricing and infrastructure patterns will reshape SaaS, engineering roles, and the social license for AI.