Oct 19, 2026

Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI

Jean-Denis Greze, Town's CEO and former Plaid CTO, explains why he shut down a nearly $1M-revenue AI tax business for SMBs and pivoted to Town, an AI assistant that works from email and calendar. The conversation with a16z's Alex Rampell covers founder decision-making under time pressure, product-market fit, the consumer-grade enterprise thesis, token allocation as a business model, neutrality versus frontier labs, horizontal versus vertical strategy, uneven AI diffusion, and how agents may reshape commerce and advertising.

Oct 13, 2026

Deploying AI Inside a Bank Is Not an Engineering Problem — Paden Gayle, Applied AI Engineers

A bank's AI demo works but cannot ship due to non-engineering problems like security, data ownership, and risk approval. Paden Gayle outlines a method focusing on early stakeholder discovery, iterative workflow scoping, gradual autonomy, and a comprehensive evidence pack to build AI systems with a credible path to production, emphasizing that "discovery is the engineering."

Oct 09, 2026

Beam: The Great American Open Model with ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin

Misha Laskin, co-founder and CEO of Reflection AI, discusses building frontier open-weight models, the launch of the 500B-parameter Beam reasoning model, the economics of renting versus owning intelligence, and why he believes open models will capture most token demand. The conversation covers RL-driven scaling efficiency, Chinese open model ecosystems and their geopolitical implications, and the safety case for openness, including cybersecurity as a lens for defense and offense. He closes with optimism about AI-accelerated science and the evolving research workforce.

Oct 09, 2026

Beam: The Great American Open Model with ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin

Misha Laskin, co-founder and CEO of Reflection AI, discusses the company's 500B open-weight reasoning model Beam, the economics of frontier training, the shift from renting to owning intelligence in enterprise, the role of Chinese open models in the global ecosystem, and the case that openness itself is a safety strategy. He also reflects on how AI is accelerating scientific research and reshaping research team sizes.

Oct 08, 2026

Building the Cloud for AI Agents | AWS CEO Matt Garman

a16z's Raghu Raghuram interviews AWS CEO Matt Garman about how AI is reshaping cloud infrastructure: why startups remain central to AWS, how cloud primitives like databases, permissions, and sandboxes must be rethought for agents, how GPU capacity is allocated amid $220B in capex, and how Graviton and Trainium fit into the AI stack. The discussion also covers enterprise barriers to autonomous agents, data privacy with Bedrock, and AWS's own internal use of agents.

Oct 08, 2026

$450K TO TRAIN A FRONTIER AI MODEL?

Thomson Reuters CTO Joel Hron explains why the company built Thomson, a domain-specific frontier model adapted from open-weight checkpoints like Qwen 3.5, using decades of proprietary legal and tax content and expert judgment. The conversation covers the training lifecycle from realignment and continual pre-training to agentic RL, the economics ($450K final run versus roughly $40M total), team structure, CoCounsel orchestration, verification challenges in legal and tax, and the future balance between open-weight and frontier models.