ACCESS

Sam Stevenson, co-founder of Granola and maker of AI meeting and note-taking tools. He talks about building meeting intelligence, product design decisions, recording and privacy tradeoffs, automation for follow-ups and agents, scaling summarization and speaker ID, and expanding from London to San Francisco while fundraising and hiring.

Immad Akhund, CEO of Mercury — building banking for startups and small businesses — chats about banking products, trust, and AI-enabled financial features. They explore NVIDIA’s GTC spectacle and poker’s role in tech culture. Conversations cover Mercury Insights, bank charters, fintech complexity, AI integrations, and how simple product design builds trust.

Daniel Kuntz, creator of Starboy and founder of Creature, is a designer who builds character-driven hardware. He explains why he made a charming, phone-free wearable companion with Disney-trained animation and fashion-forward collector vibes. Short takes cover design choices, privacy-first local models, rarity-driven personalization, and why toys can be hardware-as-art.

Liz Reid, VP and Head of Search at Google with two decades at the company, oversees Google Search and its AI transition. She talks about AI overviews reshaping how people find information. Conversations cover the difference between Search and the Gemini app, agents acting on the web, fighting low-quality AI content, and how personal, opt-in intelligence and subscriptions could change access to creators’ work.

Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit, steers the company through product, moderation, and AI strategy. Conversation hits fighting AI-generated spam and bot verification. They examine Reddit’s anti-self-promotion culture, prediction-market vibes, onboarding new users via local communities, and the company’s AI licensing and legal battles.

Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion, leads the company through an AI- and agent-first product shift. He discusses Notion’s custom agents, how they automate triage and status updates, and why work tools must be agent-friendly. He also covers hiring young talent, shifting from seat-based pricing to usage/outcome models, and building agent-ready integrations like email and calendar.

Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI and former leader at Facebook and Instacart, discusses ChatGPT's next chapter. She explains why ads are being introduced and how they will be kept separate from model outputs. The conversation covers the move from reactive chatbot to proactive assistant, concerns about emotional attachment to AI, and new products like Sora and ChatGPT Health.

Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia, builds generative AI video for enterprise training and comms. He talks fundraising and turning deepfakes into a scalable business. Short takes cover video replacing longform text, avatars for corporate continuity, interactive training role-plays, translation/editability advantages, and provenance, verification, and safety trade-offs.

Sari Azout, founder of Sublime and builder of a curated discovery product, shares stories from her crypto-era beginnings and Miami founder life. She explores taste as a competitive edge in AI age. Conversations cover community-driven product design, alternative revenue like merch and zines, and designing discovery without feeds or likes.

Tony Zhao, founder of Sunday Robotics and creator of the household robot Memo, joins the conversation about the future of home robotics. He discusses the critical role of real-world data in robotics development, showcasing his innovative Memory Glove for training robots. Zhao emphasizes the importance of making robots feel like helpful companions rather than threats. He predicts that consumer-ready home robots will emerge in the next five years, highlighting their potential to save time on chores and enhance daily life.