No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
Conviction
16 episodes
Taking on ServiceNow: Coding Agents the Rest of Us with Serval Co-Founder and CEO Jake Stauch
- Serval CEO Jake Stauch says it competes with ServiceNow by bringing coding agents to IT teams, which he calls the right way to express enterprise automation.
- Stauch says Serval prices on workflows run rather than tokens because customers are pulling back from token maximalism and need proof of ROI.
29 Oct · 38 min
Democratizing Security for the Agentic Web with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht
- Dane Knecht says vulnerability reports at Cloudflare have risen sharply, with Log4j or Shellshock style incidents now arriving weekly instead of yearly.
- Knecht says the largest recent vulnerabilities have mostly come from teenagers using AI agents for bug bounties, not from nation states.
23 Oct · 41 min
The New Apex Predator: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on Adversaries Armed With AI Agents
- George Kurtz, CrowdStrike's CEO, says AI agents have flattened the threat pyramid, letting hacktivists wield capabilities once reserved for nation states.
- CrowdStrike's breakout time has fallen to minutes, averaging 29 minutes with the fastest case at 27 seconds, Kurtz says.
22 Oct · 45 min
Chasing Trillion-Dollar Companies, Founder Ambition, Token Budgets, and Regulatory Capture with Sarah & Elad
- Elad Gil says Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX each went from near zero to a trillion-dollar market cap in about five years, a pace he calls unprecedented.
- Elad Gil says most companies should consider a sale in a twelve-to-eighteen-month window and revisit the question every six months, since AI moves roughly three to four years per calendar year.
6 Aug · 39 min
Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel
- Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, warns on No Priors that there is no moat, so companies must keep building new services and understand their business before committing capital.
- Fogel says Booking's Penny agentic assistant is still too small to show up much in the numbers, even as Elad Gil says its adoption has doubled monthly.
9 Jul · 41 min
How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor
- Valar Atomics says its startup-built advanced reactor made power and directly powered an NVIDIA Blackwell chip, with its website hosted from the reactor.
- Isaiah Taylor argues nuclear needs manufacturing-style iteration, saying Valar will build on equity rather than wait for debt because US venture capital underwrites technical risk well.
2 Jul · 1 h 1 min
Really Big Test-Time Compute in AI Changes Benchmarks, Safety and Research with OpenAI Research Scientist Noam Brown
- Noam Brown argues model benchmarks are misleading because they ignore test-time compute, so the published grid hides how much better newer models like 5.5 actually are.
- Brown says the safety frameworks of labs ignore the inference budget at which a model is evaluated, even though capability now depends on money spent.
26 Jun · 36 min
Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan
- Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says he took the job at 66 because saving Intel matters to the semiconductor ecosystem and the United States.
- Tan says Jensen Huang invested $5bn in Intel, a stake now worth $25bn, and the US government is also a major shareholder.
18 Jun · 45 min
Biohub: The Future of Biology is Open-Source with Co-Founders Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Head of Science Alex Rives
- Biohub's founders say their original goal of curing all disease by century's end now looks too conservative, though the organization does not expect to cure diseases itself.
- Zuckerberg argues AI alone is not enough because biology lacks internet-scale data, so Biohub must invent new experimental methods to generate it.
10 Jun · 56 min
We Need An Ecosystem in AI, And Every Company Can Win A Place In It
- Satya Nadella argues a platform wins by creating more value around it than it captures, so any company should be able to build its own AI on Microsoft's stack.
- Nadella says each company will need private evaluations, which he calls potentially its most important intellectual property, since models learn from few samples and switching models is key.
4 Jun · 42 min
Building an AI Guardian for Enterprise with Onyx Security CEO Maxim Bar Kogan
- Maxim Bar Kogan, CEO of Onyx Security, says enterprises cannot stop AI agent adoption even as agents publish code and tokens they were not supposed to publish.
- Bar Kogan argues enterprises will not let Anthropic or OpenAI share historical agent-behavior data because those labs want to train on it, opening a gap for Onyx.
28 May · 41 min
The Story Behind Cerebras’ $63 Billion IPO with Founder and CEO Andrew Feldman
- Cerebras founder Andrew Feldman says his AI chips are 15 to 20 times faster than GPUs at inference, a speed edge he ties to new AI business models.
- Feldman says Cerebras spent about $8m a month from mid-2017 to mid-2019 unable to build a working wafer-scale chip before it finally succeeded.
21 May · 31 min
Pax Silica: Inside the Trump Administration’s Tech Strategy with US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg
- Jacob Helberg says the US will not run government-operated supply chains and will instead build commercially viable platforms with private companies that can later operate as private services.
- Pax Silica, a 14-country economic security coalition, gets its first concrete step in a 4,000-acre Philippines industrial zone treated as diplomatic property, with two years to negotiate investor protections and taxation.
14 May · 38 min
Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman
- Long Lake Management agreed to acquire American Express Global Business Travel in a deal valued at about $6.3bn, which Elad Gil calls the world's first AI take private.
- Alexander Taubman says Long Lake's acquired businesses grew zero to 5% annually before its investment and now grow more than 20% a year, crediting AI-driven capacity for more customers.
11 May · 22 min
The Future of Voice AI: Agents, Dubbing, and Real-Time Translation with ElevenLabs Co-Founder Mati Staniszewski
- ElevenLabs, founded in 2022, reports more than $300m in annual recurring revenue and 350 employees across remote hubs worldwide.
- Mati Staniszewski says the company will build any feature that research would take longer than three months to deliver, since research gives only six to twelve months of head start.
11 Dec 2025 · 42 min
From Job Displacement to AI Trainers, Brendan Foody on Work in the AI Age
- Brendan Foody, Mercor's CEO, says AI models already beat human hiring managers at assessing talent on most of Mercor's evals.
- Foody argues that creating evaluations for agents is the largest barrier to automating knowledge work, and predicts eval creation may become the most common knowledge work job in the world.
10 Apr 2025 · 42 min