Relentless

Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, a leader in cryptocurrency and fintech. He talks about leading as an introvert, making bold regulatory bets like suing agencies, and building trust through compliance and product design. He explains picking strategic battles, launching institutional products fast, fostering internal innovation, and why he prefers wartime urgency to rally teams.

Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab and builder of the Electron launch vehicle, talks scaling rocket production and mission cadence. He covers factory-driven launch rates, solving supplier failures with in-house engineering, balancing Electron scale with Neutron development, and the company culture of relentless execution and pride in beautiful engineering.

Soren Monroe-Anderson, Co-founder and CEO of Neros, a leader in high-performance FPV drones and U.S. drone manufacturing. He discusses scaling a 250k sq ft factory toward one million drones a year. Topics include factory build-out, vertical integration, lessons from Ukraine, jamming-resistant radios, testing and manufacturing playbooks, recruiting talent, and balancing rapid innovation with production.

Scott Nolan, co-founder and CEO of General Matter and former early SpaceX engineer, builds U.S. uranium enrichment to power current and advanced reactors. He explores risks if Russian enriched uranium stops, the 2028 import ban, HALU fuel shortages for advanced designs, history of global enrichment, why the U.S. outsourced capacity, and how to rapidly scale domestic enrichment.

Aaron Slodov, founder of Atomic Industries and former Waymo engineer focused on rebuilding U.S. manufacturing. Sam D'Amico, founder of Impulse Labs and ex-Google Glass/Oculus engineer with China manufacturing experience. They debate China’s deep factory-engineering model, U.S. deindustrialization, reshoring strategies, financing factories, AI/data-center demand as an onshoring lever, and lessons from Tesla, BYD, and Apple.

Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood and founder of Aetherflux, is an entrepreneur building space-based power and orbital data-center tech. He talks about shifting from software to hardware, designing satellites that marry thermal, power and optics, networking small sats with lasers, and why now is the moment to build compute and energy systems in low Earth orbit.

Sacha Schermerhorn, founder and CEO of Babylon Bio building therapies for Alzheimer’s, blends rigorous science with scrappy startup grit. He walks through Alzheimer’s research history, why amyloid approaches fell short, tau’s central role, and using AI to connect scattered biomedical clues. He also covers hiring for mission, funding strategies, repurposing drugs, and keeping focus amid failures.

Ali Ansari, founder and CEO of micro1 who built a recruiter-turned-data company, discusses scaling from recruiter product to data-centric operations. He talks about hiring hundreds of specialists quickly. He describes collecting egocentric robotics data, predicting expert happiness, and surviving a near-fatal revenue loss while pursuing aggressive growth.

Ed Mehr, Co-founder and CEO of Machina, builds robotic systems that form custom sheet-metal parts fast. He discusses the robot-driven design-to-robot pipeline and the scan/adjust feedback loop. He recounts early prototyping struggles and how robotics plus AI unlocked flexible, low-volume manufacturing. He also covers factory scaling, capital strategies, and scrappy startup resourcefulness.

Mehul Nariyawala, co-founder of Matic and former Nest/Google engineer building vision-first home robots. He talks about making simple, lovable hardware, choosing long stealth iteration over fast MVPs, betting on vision-only autonomy, ditching disc designs for friendly forms, and shipping through production hell while keeping simplicity as a company value.