We’re busy thinking up our next event, after having hosting our second INSIDER evening of the year on May 16th at the beautiful 46th floor of Salesforce Tower, thanks to the generosity of CBRE, the commercial real estate services and investment firm.
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The evening featured special guest Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — whose goal is to prevent artificial intelligence from doing harm — and the former president of Y Combinator, which he famously steered for five years, stepping down in February. We talked about why he made the move, and what his priorities are going forward. You can read coverage of the talk here and watch the interview here.
We also sat down with Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of Boom, whose electrifying — and also completely audacious — ambition it is to build a supersonic passenger plane that flies at twice the speed of sound — and charges business class fares. Investors have already given the young company $141 million to get cracking. During this sit-down, we got answers about its technology, its timeline, its potential impact on the environment and much, much more. You can read coverage of the conversation here and watch the sit-down here.
Last but not least, we were thrilled to welcome one of the world’s most famous AI researchers, Daphne Koller, a longtime Stanford professor who cofounded the online education company Coursera; logged time as the chief computing officer of Calico, Google’s life-extension spinoff; and in early May, took the wraps off her newest startup, Insitro, a drug development company that has quietly raised $100 million in Series A funding, including from Andreessen Horowitz and Jeff Bezos. Why is the healthcare world buzzing about it? Our friend Sarah McBride of Bloomberg joined us to pose this very question. You can read about what happened here, or watch it for yourself.
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Giant thanks to our partners in the evening: JetBlue Ventures, the Silicon Valley-based venture outfit that invests in and partners with early-stage startups at the intersection of technology and travel
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Affinity, the relationship intelligence platform that helps teams manage and grow their networks by unlocking introductions to decision makers and auto-populating pipelines to increase deal flow.
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Stay tuned for our next get-together, taking place this fall.
For those who haven’t experienced our events yet, we think of them like cocktail parties with great content. Past entrepreneurs who have appeared include Juul founders Adam Bowen and James Monsees, Vlad Tenev (Robinhood), Emily Weiss (Glossier), Patrick Brown (Impossible Foods), Julie Wainwright (The RealReal), Peter Szulczeski (Wish), Marten Mickos (HackerOne), Tina Sharkey (Brandless), Chris Urmson (Aurora), Howie Liu (Airtable), Marco Zappacosta (Thumbtack), Amy Chang (Accompany), Matt Mullenweg (Automattic), Kim Scott (Radical Candor), David Rogier (MasterClass), Mark Gainey (Strava), Ryan Williams (Cadre), Carl Bass (Autodesk), Zander Lurie (SurveyMonkey), and Vivek Ramaswamy (Riovant Sciences), among others.
We’ve also featured lots of intriguing VCs, including Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), Chamath Palihapitiya (Social Capital), Ravi Mhatre (Lightspeed Venture Partners), Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Steve Jurvetson (Future Ventures), Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Bill Maris (formerly of Google Ventures), Craig Hanson (NextWorld Capital), Megan Quinn (Spark Capital), Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures), Jessica Verrilli (GV), Hunter Walk (Homebrew), Heidi Roizen (DFJ), Bradley Tusk (Tusk Ventures), Naval Ravikant (AngelList), Hans Tung (GGV Capital), Tony Conrad (True Ventures), Greg Gretsch (Jackson Square Ventures), Caterina Fake (Yes VC), Dan Morehead (Pantera Capital), Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures), Bryan Schreier (Sequoia Capital), Semil Shah (Haystack) and Jeffrey Housenbold and Anna Lo of the SoftBank Vision Fund.
We appreciate each of them for making time for us.