Alex Rampell (a16z) and Varun Krishna (Rocket CEO) discuss the housing affordability crisis, driven by asset inflation and supply constraints. They explore how Rocket Mortgage is evolving into a homeownership company by vertically integrating the entire housing funnel through strategic acquisitions like Redfin, aiming to turn a once-in-a-lifetime transaction into an everyday relationship.
Co-founders Albert Gozzi and Santiago Perez De Rosso of Aleph discuss their journey building an AI-native FP&A platform. They share insights on their first-principles approach of meeting finance teams in spreadsheets, achieving rapid time-to-value, and the early challenges of building a horizontal product. The conversation covers their YC experience, scaling to a $29M Series B, and their vision for the future of finance powered by pragmatic, accuracy-focused AI.
Keith Rabois predicts a new American economic boom driven by AI, forecasting 4-6% GDP growth without inflation. He discusses the rise of sovereign AI, OpenAI's dominance as a multi-trillion dollar company, Google's existential threat, and the strategic challenges facing Microsoft, Meta, and Apple in the new AI paradigm.
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.
Co-founder Sam Ross discusses Numeral's journey from a personal e-commerce pain point to a venture-backed global tax platform. He covers the market opportunity created by outdated incumbents, the 'do things that don't scale' approach to finding product-market fit, lessons from fundraising, and how Numeral leverages AI to automate complex compliance workflows, shifting from a tool to a full-service solution.
BlackRock engineers Vaibhav Page and Infant Vasanth introduce a modular, Kubernetes-native AI framework designed to accelerate the development of custom knowledge applications for investment operations, reducing deployment time from months to days.