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.
Ashley Peacock, author of 'Serverless Apps on Cloudflare,' joins Ricky Robinett to provide a deep dive into Cloudflare's evolution from a security provider to a comprehensive developer platform. They explore its unique global architecture, serverless offerings like Workers and Durable Objects, and its growing suite of AI and data tools, contrasting its developer experience with traditional cloud providers.
University of Oxford Professor Carl Benedikt Frey discusses his book "How Progress Ends," exploring the mechanics of innovation in different economic systems, the limitations of generative AI for true discovery, and the profound impact of AI on the future of work, job displacement, and the skills needed to thrive.
Elias Torres, co-founder of Drift and Agency, discusses the prevalent expectation mismatch in AI adoption, where businesses demand AI but reject it due to "imperfection anxiety." Drawing from his experiences scaling HubSpot and Drift, he explains why human-led customer experience is fundamentally unscalable and details how his new venture, Agency, is building autonomous, AI-first solutions to solve deep, back-end customer challenges. His goal is to "deprogram the entire business world" from inefficient, human-dependent processes.
A novel framework called zk-promises is introduced, enabling stateful anonymous credentials with Turing-complete state machines and asynchronous callbacks. This allows for robust moderation, such as banning or reputation updates, for anonymous users without compromising their privacy, using zk-objects and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure state integrity.
Tom Chothia and George Pavlides discuss how proprietary, uncoordinated features built on top of the core EMV specification by companies like Apple, Google, Square, Visa, and Mastercard lead to significant security vulnerabilities. They detail how these "black box" additions create subtle interactions and mismatches, enabling attacks that bypass authentication, allow high-value fraudulent offline transactions, and leave merchants vulnerable to significant financial loss.