Erik Brynjolfsson runs Stanford's Digital Economy Lab. He's also the guy whose own graduating class asked him, point-blank, if their generation was doomed. He didn't talk her out of the question. He answered it with data. There's …
Andrej Karpathy co-founded OpenAI, ran Tesla's AI team, and coined "vibe coding" about a year ago. At Sequoia's AI Ascent 2026, Stephanie Zhan asked him directly whether the last year felt exhilarating or unsettling. His answer:…
AI was supposed to take the tedious stuff off my plate. Instead I got a second job: checking whether the first job's output can be trusted. Nobody renamed my title for it. Nobody budgeted for it. Teachers doing this for cheating detection. …
Paul Bakaus created jQuery UI — code that's reportedly still running on about 6% of the internet. He sold a game-engine startup to Zynga, spent close to a decade at Google, and is now a solo founder backed by a16z building Impeccable, an op…
Adam Mosseri runs Instagram — 3B+ users, plus Threads. In a recent sit-down with Lenny Rachitsky, he said something that's quietly reshaping who gets hired. Engineering used to mean 40–60% of your time writing code. Not anymore. Mosseri'…
Sam Altman closed out Startup School 2026 with a real answer to the PhD question — not "get the credential," but a structural claim about why startups cluster and win when they do. His argument: tech velocity, falling costs, and shrin…
For a year, Nick Saraev's AI automation agency never cleared $40K a month. Not from lack of clients — from the opposite problem. Every client wanted something custom, so nothing he built ever got reused. A year of hours, and he was no more ef…
Ken Venner spent 11 years scaling Broadcom from $400M to $8.6B, then became CIO of SpaceX, then joined a startup called Senra Systems as CTPO. At SpaceX, his core platform team was 175 people. At Senra, the equivalent job takes 6. His explana…
Avichal Garg has co-founded and backed 10 unicorns through Electric Capital. In a recent interview he laid out, unprompted, the three categories of value AI structurally can't absorb. First: physical-world work — anything requiring atoms, n…
Travis Kalanick (Uber co-founder, now running an industrial-AI company called Atoms) got asked a pretty direct question on a recent podcast: how would you pitch a Stanford CS new grad who's worried software engineering isn't the safe, eas…
