Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Noah Shinn, CEO of Instinct, discusses building a personal AI agent that acts autonomously on behalf of users through natural communication channels like text, email, and voice calls. The company is growing at 10% daily with over $1 billion in transaction volume, and Shinn explores how personal agents will fundamentally transform digital commerce, business operations, and user interaction with technology.

Gabe Stengel, founder of Rogo, discusses building AI-powered investment intelligence tools for financial professionals. He explains how rapidly improving AI models are enabling automation of complex financial workflows, the challenges of enterprise sales in finance, and his vision for transforming capital markets through AI infrastructure.

Michael Moritz reflects on 40 years of investing and writing, exploring how family history shaped his character, the importance of identifying exceptional founders through their early life experiences, and lessons learned from building Sequoia Capital into an enduring institution.

Walter Russell Mead discusses America's historical dominance through maritime commercial strategy, the current crisis in post-WWII institutional order despite strong American technological power, and how personal politics, technological disruption, and great power competition are reshaping global affairs in ways that require a new American social consensus.

Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction venture capital, discusses her investment strategy focused on the 250 frontier researchers and entrepreneurs shaping AI, her approach to identifying extraordinary people and teams, and her concerns about compute infrastructure, regulatory hurdles, and maintaining Western technological independence in an increasingly competitive global AI landscape.

Neil Movva, founder of SAIL Research, discusses building a 'token factory' designed for long-running AI agents by optimizing across the full stack—software, hardware, and power—to achieve unbeatable cost per token. He argues the future of AI inference will shift from low-latency chatbots to background agents running for hours or days, fundamentally changing GPU optimization priorities from speed to throughput.

In this discussion, Ben Thompson shares insights on the AI race between the U.S. and China, the evolving semiconductor industry, and the implications of AI on businesses and economy. He explores how major tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA are navigating these challenges while impacting their respective fields.

Eric Vishria discusses the evolving landscape of investing in software and hardware, emphasizing the importance of scalable infrastructure in AI and the nuanced role of traditional companies in rapidly changing markets. He shares insights on the complexities of hardware investing, the potential of AI, and the necessary traits for successful partnerships in venture capital.

Gavin Baker discusses the recent market volatility in AI stocks despite improving fundamental metrics, arguing that hyperscalers are under-earning and that operating cash flows will accelerate as GPU contracts reprice higher. He emphasizes that negative sentiment is disconnected from quantitative data showing accelerating demand, token growth, and infrastructure metrics across AI labs and open source models.

Sam Altman discusses OpenAI's refocus on core AI development after overextending in 2024, explains the company's early conviction to secure massive compute resources, and outlines his vision for abundant, democratized AI that maintains human agency while addressing critical security concerns like the Hugging Face incident.

Matthew Smith argues that the U.S. faces an impending natural gas crisis by 2028-2030 driven by AI data center demand and LNG exports, which will exhaust working gas storage and cause electricity prices to spike dramatically. The problem stems from infrastructure constraints in production, processing, and pipeline capacity rather than resource scarcity, requiring urgent investment in nuclear energy and pipeline infrastructure to prevent economic disruption.

John Kim, a prolific fundraiser and author of 'The Dow of Fundraising,' explains that successful fundraising is fundamentally about understanding human psychology—specifically the equation 'persuasion equals desire minus fear.' He shares three laws of fundraising (differentiation, trade-offs, and pipeline) and emphasizes that trust, not logic, drives capital allocation decisions.

Jeremy Giffen discusses his observations from hundreds of conversations with founders and investors over 18 months, exploring how narrative and storytelling drive capital allocation, the dominance of timeline-native culture in shaping markets and politics, and the emerging 'poster class' as a new priestly class replacing billionaires as arbiters of meaning in society.

Etched founders Gavin Uberti and Rob Lockett discuss building the first AI inference chip by a post-ChatGPT startup, their architectural innovations in low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory, and their philosophy of velocity, vertical integration, and aggressive risk-taking to capture what they believe will become the largest market in the world.

Vlad Barbalat, CIO of Liberty Mutual Investments' $120 billion platform, discusses how the mutual insurance structure enables unique long-term capital deployment, the importance of entrepreneurial culture in investing, and his journey from Soviet Moldova to building one of finance's most distinctive investment platforms.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviews Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay, a $4B software company. They discuss Clay's origin and growth, but spend most of the conversation exploring Amin's personal philosophy around courage, truth, justice, wholeness, risk, and what it means to build a company with integrity and self-awareness.

Darren Farber, managing partner of Albion River defense investment firm, discusses the Iran contingency, defining 'winning' in modern warfare, the state of the US military and industrial base, China's strategic weaknesses, and the rise of neoprime defense companies. He analyzes martyrdom cultures, magazine depth, procurement reform needs, and how AI disinformation could corrupt military decision-making systems.

In this episode, Gavin Baker discusses the significant impacts of AI on the economy, emphasizing the importance of energy (watts) and semiconductor capacity (wafers) in shaping the future of AI technology. He shares unique insights on the valuations of AI companies, the dynamics of competition, and geopolitical implications.

Krishna Rao, CFO of Anthropic, discusses the company's compute strategy, explosive revenue growth from $9B to $30B ARR in a single quarter, and the thesis that returns to frontier AI intelligence are exceptionally high in enterprise. He explains how Anthropic uses three chip platforms fungibly, navigates a 'cone of uncertainty' in forecasting, and why the company's culture of intellectual humility and collaboration has been a key competitive advantage.