NVIDIA

Fireworks CEO: AI Startups Are Scaling Into Bankruptcy (And How to Fix It)

Sep 27, 2026 · 57:46

Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, argues AI companies are scaling into bankruptcy because product-market fit no longer means a durable business, and that specialized intelligence built on private data cuts costs five to ten times. She explains product is no longer a moat now coding agents make it easy to copy, making accumulated customer data the real moat. Lin shares her framework for owning intelligence: invest 10-20% of AI spend in training to cut total cost of ownership four to eight times. She traces Fireworks' growth from Cursor at $2M ARR to 40 trillion tokens a day, while doubling from 150 to 300 people each quarter with seven co-founders. She also recounts lessons from Jensen Huang, joining Meta in 2015 to learn, and Fireworks' zero data retention policy.

Lambda Co-Founder: How to Pivot and Scale to $3 Million in 1 Year

Aug 26, 2026 · 50:50

Lambda co-founder and CTO Stephen Balaban explains how a $40,000-a-month AWS bill forced a pivot into GPU infrastructure that produced $3 million in revenue in 2017. He details Lambda's six pivots from facial recognition to workstations and says V100 GPUs from 2017 still earn money in its cloud, rebutting short sellers' 'three-year usable life' claim. He stepped down as CEO after 14 years because he disliked the fundraising treadmill and wanted to focus on technology, handing the role to a telecom-industry outsider. He explains why Lambda avoided traditional VCs, argues GPUs are becoming an asset class like toll roads, credits NVIDIA and Jensen Huang for the partnership, and predicts multiple AI models will survive because the market lacks network effects.

Superhuman CEO: The Strategy to Turn Standalone Apps Into a $13 Billion Suite

Aug 20, 2026 · 1:07:27

Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman—now bundling Superhuman Mail, Grammarly, Coda (as Superhuman Docs), and Superhuman Go—explains how he built a $13 billion suite by overturning conventional wisdom on bundling. He describes meeting Rahul Vora at a Hawaii conference, rebranding 16-year-old Grammarly under the Superhuman name, and lessons from Reid Hoffman about people-first, long-term building. On the 'SaaS apocalypse,' he argues AI agents are new teammates that increase the need for coordination tools like CRMs, while pricing shifts from per-seat to usage because virtual employees don't fill out W-2s. He details his inbox-zero system using Superhuman Mail's 'splits,' and advises founders to build boards as 'weird teams' with soft connection and non-jeopardy feedback.

Inside Mercury's Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund

Jun 9, 2026 · 50:11

Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, explains how the startup bank captured one in three U.S. startups by launching with product-market fit from day one—a million-dollar deposit arrived within four days from a stranger—and why legacy banks never stood a chance due to their focus on loans, expensive branch structures, and IT rather than engineering teams. Mercury raised $200M at a $5.2B valuation without needing the money, driven by 2.5x growth in Q1 2024 from AI-fueled entrepreneurship. Akhund details building trust as a moat, using small teams and Amazon's working-backwards process to launch AI features like Mercury Insights and Mercury Command, which let users run banking tasks inside AI tools. He dropped all one-on-ones after learning from Jensen Huang's 60 direct reports, favors optimistic curiosity, and angel-invests 250K checks in contrarian areas like space and deep tech.