No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Elad and Sarah discuss the difficulty of building trillion-dollar companies in the AI era, the acceleration of startup timelines, founder exit strategies, AI researcher burnout from RSI beliefs, compute as a scarce resource, regulatory capture risks, and the importance of balancing safety with progress.

Melisa Tokmak, founder of Netic, discusses building AI agents to autonomously run operations for essential service businesses like HVAC, plumbing, and roofing. She explains why she chose to build a platform company rather than pursue private equity roll-ups, and emphasizes the importance of hiring for agency and long-term commitment while solving real-world problems.

Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, discusses his 27-year journey from a struggling Priceline during the dot-com crash to a $130+ billion company, while reflecting on AI's transformative potential in travel, competitive moats, job displacement concerns, and the importance of meaningful work.

Isaiah Taylor, CEO of Valor Atomics, discusses how his company achieved the first nuclear power generation by a private startup through hardware iteration, simplicity-focused design, and organizational speed obsession. He argues nuclear energy's future depends on manufacturing-based scaling rather than design perfection, enabled by a regulatory environment that now allows experimentation through the Department of Energy pathway.

Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan discusses his strategy to transform Intel through cultural change, product simplification, foundry investment, and AI-driven demand. He shares his views on the semiconductor supply chain, government partnerships, and his venture capital philosophy built over decades of semiconductor investing.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discusses the company's AI ecosystem strategy at Build 2025, emphasizing that the goal is enabling every company to operate at the intelligence frontier with their own private models and evals. He covers topics ranging from MAI model training, agentic workflows, SaaS disruption, data center buildout, and societal impact of AI. Nadella argues that delivering tangible, broad economic benefits is essential for AI companies to maintain public trust and permission to operate.

Maxim Bar Kogan, CEO of Onyx Security, discusses building AI agents to oversee other AI agents in enterprise environments. He explains how existing security tools are insufficient for governing autonomous agents, why Onyx trains specialized small models for this purpose, and why independent third-party oversight of AI is structurally necessary rather than something foundation model labs can solve themselves.

Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras, discusses his company's journey from building wafer-scale AI chips in the mid-2010s to achieving a $63 billion market cap post-IPO. He covers the technical and market challenges of being ahead of demand, the pivotal OpenAI and AWS partnerships, and his views on how speed in AI inference will unlock entirely new business models rather than merely improving existing ones.

US Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg discusses Pax Silica, a 14-nation economic security coalition aimed at securing the AI supply chain for the US and its allies. The strategy centers on leveraging private sector companies rather than government-operated supply chains, contrasting sharply with China's Belt and Road Initiative. A key initiative includes a forward-deployed industrial base in the Philippines spanning 4,000 acres.

Alex Taubman, CEO of Long Lake Management, discusses their $6.3 billion bid to acquire American Express Global Business Travel in what is described as the world's first AI take private. Long Lake's strategy involves acquiring service businesses and transforming them using their proprietary AI platform called Nexus, with a focus on employee productivity and revenue growth rather than cost-cutting. The company has completed around 30 acquisitions across sectors including HOA management, architecture, HR services, and specialty tax.