Summation with Auren Hoffman

Helion CEO David Kirtley on why fusion finally works

David Kirtley is the co-founder and CEO of Helion Energy, the fusion company. Helion has raised more than $1.5 billion at a $15.5 billion valuation, and Sam Altman is its

Alex Rampell on why the best companies have hostages, not customers

Alex Rampell is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $2.7 billion Apps practice and has driven much of the firm's fintech investing, i

Life360 founder Chris Hulls on existential amusement and why public markets kill bold bets

Chris Hulls is the co-founder and executive chairman of Life360 ($LIF), the family safety and location-sharing app now worth over $5 billion. He was CEO for 17 years befo

Felicis founder Aydin Senkut: why moats are dead and alive

Aydin Senkut is the founder and managing partner of Felicis, the venture firm he started in 2006, with over $4B under management and early bets on Shopify, Notion, Canva,

Nir Eyal on belief, motivation, and the end of suffering

Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked, which became Silicon Valley's playbook for building habit-forming products, Indistractable, on taking your attention back, and the

SecureAuth CEO Geoff Mattson on the coming fraudpocalypse and the death of the password

Geoff Mattson is the CEO of SecureAuth, an identity security company that has raised over $200M and protects more than 50 million identities for enterprises. Before Secur

Fmr. Senator Cory Gardner: why the AI race is won on boring infrastructure and how China wins by making America hate AI

Cory Gardner is a former U.S. Senator and Congressman from Colorado and was one of the Senate's leading Taiwan and China experts, chairing the Foreign Relations subc

CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill on software's new bottleneck and zero to $50m ARR in 2 years

Harjot Gill is the co-founder and CEO of CodeRabbit, the AI code review company that became the most installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab. Over about two years, CodeRabb

Moritz Baier-Lentz on why the future of AI runs on video games

Moritz Baier-Lentz is one of the foremost investors in gaming, AI, and frontier technologies—including companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir, Etched, Decart, and Recurs

OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji: measuring the greatest technology of our time

Ronnie Chatterji is the Chief Economist at OpenAI, where he leads research on how AI reshapes growth, jobs, and the economy. He is also an economics professor at Duke. He

Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg: why AI wins a Nobel before a Pulitzer

Felix Rieseberg leads engineering for Claude Cowork and Claude Code Desktop at Anthropic. Before that he led desktop and web infrastructure at Notion and built software a

Fifth Wall CEO Brendan Wallace: the data center land grab and the most stable asset on earth you still can't buy

Brendan Wallace is the Founder, CEO & CIO of Fifth Wall, the largest investment firm focused on technology for the built environment, with ~$3B in capital, the firm is dr

Striveworks CEO Jim Rebesco on drone swarms, AI for warfighters, and the end of air superiority

Jim Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an AI ops company deployed across the US Army, Navy, and combatant commands. In April, Striveworks announced a $70M

Short-seller Carson Block: a fugitive CEO, Libyan spies, and $50B fraud

Carson Block is the founder of Muddy Waters Research, one of the defining activist short-selling firms of the last decade and a half. Since 2010, Muddy Waters has publish

Facet CEO Anders Jones on the biggest heist in finance, how advisors really sell permission, and the great boomer wealth transfer

Anders Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Facet, a fintech company built to bring high-quality, flat-fee financial advice to an underserved market: the mass affluent. Fac

Charles Duhigg on the writing AI can't touch, what GLP-1s really do to your brain, and the serendipity tax

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better, and Supercommunic

SignalFire CEO Chris Farmer on why venture funds now last 20 years and the hiring boom behind the layoffs

Chris Farmer is the founder and CEO of SignalFire, an early stage venture firm managing over $3 billion.  In this episode of Summation, Chris and Auren discuss: why the

GTMnow Podcast | Your First VC Meeting Will Be Agent-to-Agent

This episode is a rebroadcast of Auren's appearance on the GTMnow podcast  --------------------------------------------------- Auren Hoffman (Flex Capital) joins t

Serval CEO Jake Stauch: talent is the only moat left, hiring founders as FDEs, and building a $1B company with your wife and a newborn

Jake Stauch is the co-founder and CEO of Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform. Serval was founded in 2024 and has already raised over $125M across

Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko on why curiosity is AI’s scarcest resource

Dmitry Shevelenko is Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. He previously co-founded Tortoise, a robotics and commerce automation startup and held business development rol