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No Priors
Elad Gil and Sarah Guo speak with leading AI engineers, researchers, and founders about model progress, markets at risk of disruption, and how commerce, culture, and society may change.
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Building a $200M Bootstrapped Chess Empire with Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest
Chess.com is on track for a little over $200 million in revenue this year with 10M DAU, 40–50M MAU and 250M+ registered members, achieved without primary capital after a $56K 2005 domain purchase.Cash-flow-funded product and community compounding lifted the baseline through successive demand waves, while the secondary-only CVC deal and General Atlantic reinvestment improved operational maturity.Gambit and the billion-player ambition extend expansion paths, while cheating enforcement and AI governance remain risks to monitor.
Chasing Trillion-Dollar Companies, Founder Ambition, Token Budgets, & Regulatory Capture
Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX’s leap toward $1 trillion is a five-year anomaly, while reaching that scale likely requires $50 billion-$100 billion of revenue with good margins.AI’s opportunity may be far larger than current per-seat models imply, but compute bottlenecks, founder exit timing, recursive-self-improvement uncertainty, and token allocation by return on invested tokens remain decisive constraints.
Building an Autonomous Enterprise for Real-World Services with Netic Founder Melisa Tokmak
Netic has moved beyond call overflow: over 70% of customers are now “Netic first,” with agents determining service urgency, equipment, customer value, and the right worker across essential-service businesses.A $500,000 contract closed end-to-end in 14 days, and Tokmak estimates over $600 million in customer value from AI-handled interactions; the open question is whether vertical orchestration can compound faster than general-purpose labs or services roll-ups.
Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang
Sarah GuoAndy FangStanley Tang
Ask DoorDash is shifting demand, with 50% of restaurant-order trajectories reaching new-to-customer venues and grocery baskets roughly 40% larger.DoorDash’s 10 billion delivery history supplies pickup and handoff ground truth for routing DOT, drones and Dashers, but scaling now depends on hardware, operations and supply chains rather than autonomy alone.
Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel
Booking’s Penny is emerging as a personalized travel concierge, with adoption reportedly doubling monthly and a stronger long-term opportunity in repairing disrupted itineraries than merely shortening search.The investment test is still unresolved: token costs, routing, conversion, cancellations, loyalty, and lifetime value must justify roughly $700 million of annual multi-initiative spending, while scale remains an advantage rather than a moat.
How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor
Valar Atomics treats nuclear as a manufacturing problem, targeting a simple, intrinsically safe “Toyota Camry” rather than a bespoke paper reactor.DOE testing authority enabled its 100 kW W-250 to reach criticality, while passive heat removal and a seven-month milestone interval provide operating evidence.Equity-funded deployment could precede project finance, with AI as an initial catalyst and cheaper energy as the longer-term demand thesis.
Really Big Test-Time Compute in AI Changes Benchmarks, Safety and Research with OpenAI's Noam Brown
Noam Brown argues that model quality must be measured as a cost, token, or time curve, because fixed benchmark scores hide gains from test-time compute.Models can keep improving beyond 100 million tokens, while safety policies still lack a clear budget for evaluating cyber, bio, and other dangerous capabilities.Routing and orchestration businesses therefore face a demanding test: outperforming a single stronger model allowed to think longer at the same cost, with gains that transfer beyond benchmarks.
Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan
Lip-Bu Tan’s Intel turnaround starts with faster accountability, balance-sheet repair and product simplification, while inference and agentic AI could lift CPU demand from one per eight GPUs toward one per four or one per one.Intel Foundry remains a costly trust and supply-chain bet against TSMC, with IP, yield and cycle time as the proof points; its potential may surface around 2030–2032 as packaging, power and materials become harder bottlenecks.
Biohub: The Future of Biology is Open-Source with Zuckerberg & Chan
Elad GilSarah GuoMark ZuckerbergPriscilla ChanAlex Rives
Biohub’s $500 million, 10- to 15-year commitment targets purpose-built biological data, combining frontier AI with wet labs from proteins to cells and whole systems.ESMfold predicted structures for more than 1.1 billion proteins and produced nanomolar binders from 96 synthesized designs without antibody-specific training, while open release could accelerate research but leaves biosafety and clinical translation unresolved.
We Need An Ecosystem in AI, And Every Company Can Win A Place In It
Sarah GuoElad GilswyxSatya Nadella
Microsoft’s AI strategy centers on an ecosystem where customers create differentiated intelligence through clean-lineage models, traces, private evals, and specialist training.Private evals could become enterprise IP: swapping models while improving on protected outcomes indicates control over the stack, not dependence on one vendor.Agents pressure SaaS to unbundle data and business logic and add consumption pricing, while data-center expansion faces a 12–18-month test of public benefit.









