Albert Cheng, who has led growth at Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com, shares his framework for finding and scaling growth opportunities. He discusses the explore-exploit model, the keys to consumer subscription success like retention and resurrected users, and how AI is accelerating the experimentation cycle.
Alex Rampell of a16z explains how software is evolving from digitizing records to performing labor, shifting the industry's focus from the $300 billion SaaS market to the $13 trillion labor market. This transition, accelerated by AI, is forcing a change in business models from seat-based pricing to outcome-based pricing, creating new opportunities and expanding the total addressable market.
Maria Zhang, CEO of Palona AI, and Somya Rai, Principal AI Engineer at EXL, discuss the architecture, scaling, memory management, and cost optimization of multi-agent systems in their respective domains of restaurants and insurance. They explore practical challenges, such as real-world bottlenecks and regulatory compliance, and share their technical stacks, including LangGraph, Ray, and NVIDIA platforms, for building robust and efficient agentic solutions.
Joe Reis and Matt Housley, authors of "Fundamentals of Data Engineering," reflect on the book's principles three years after its publication. They discuss how the rise of AI has created both powerful tools and dangerous "bear traps" for engineers, the critical role of expertise in a world of AI-generated content, and why foundational knowledge is more important than ever.
In a dynamic discussion, experts debate the merits of pricing H-1B visas versus the current lottery system, questioning what the policy should optimize for. They explore the real-world impact of AI on developer productivity, with Box reporting that 30% of its code now comes from AI, and highlight how small, senior teams are achieving superhuman results by shifting from writing code to reviewing it. The conversation also covers why bottom-up, personal AI tools are succeeding where top-down corporate pilots fail, and analyzes the platform shift, arguing that AI-native startups have a unique advantage in a landscape where incumbent scale is being neutralized by AI agents.
A summary of the conversation between YC's Harj Taggar and Base's Jesse Pollak about the 'golden age of crypto,' covering the evolution to Fintech 3.0, the technological and regulatory shifts enabling it, and the key opportunities for founders in stablecoins, tokenization, and the intersection of AI and crypto.