Summation with Auren Hoffman

Helion CEO David Kirtley on why fusion finally works

David Kirtley is the co-founder and CEO of Helion Energy, the fusion company. Helion has raised more than $1.5 billion at a $15.5 billion valuation, and Sam Altman is its biggest investor and former chairman. Before fusion, David worked on rocket and space propulsion. In this episode of Summation, David and Auren discuss: Skipping the steam turbine and pulling electricity straight out of a star How a Best Buy network card helped make fusion possible Regulating a 150 million degree machine like a hospital proton beam One cent power, and what happens when AI stops being limited by electricity You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and David Kirtley on X at @Dkirtley

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Alex Rampell on why the best companies have hostages, not customers

Alex Rampell is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $2.7 billion Apps practice and has driven much of the firm's fintech investing, including Plaid, Mercury, and Opendoor. Before a16z, Alex co-founded multiple companies including Affirm (NASDAQ:AFRM), FraudEliminator (acquired by McAfee in 2006), Point, TrialPay (acquired by Visa in 2015), TXN (acquired by Envestnet in 2019), and Yub (acquired by Coupons.com in 2013). In this episode of Summation, Alex and Auren discuss: Why Visa is the purest network effect business in the world and why it's still a duopoly The reverse Robin Hood hidden inside every rewards credit card The "hostages, not customers" test for which software companies survive AI What was once payroll becoming payments and the businesses it unlocks You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Alex Rampell on X at @arampell

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Life360 founder Chris Hulls on existential amusement and why public markets kill bold bets

Chris Hulls is the co-founder and executive chairman of Life360 ($LIF), the family safety and location-sharing app now worth over $5 billion. He was CEO for 17 years before stepping back last year. Before Life360, he served in the Air Force in Afghanistan. In this episode of Summation, Chris and Auren discuss: Why he took Life360 public in Australia and why he'd never run a public company again Why "you want to sound smart, but not interesting" is the secret rule of corporate speak Why nobody actually cares about privacy, and what finally scares him about AI Why the work of keeping a home never ends, no matter how rich you get You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Chris Hulls on X at @chrishulls

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Felicis founder Aydin Senkut: why moats are dead and alive

Aydin Senkut is the founder and managing partner of Felicis, the venture firm he started in 2006, with over $4B under management and early bets on Shopify, Notion, Canva, and Adyen. He was Google's first product manager and has been on the Forbes Midas list of top investors for 13 years running. In this episode of Summation, Aydin and Auren discuss: Why the best platform companies came from Ottawa, Sydney, and Amsterdam and not Silicon Valley How capital became a commodity and people are the only real moat left Why the trait he bets on is the willingness to reset your priors How defense went from an optional purchase to a matter of survival You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Aydin Senkut on X at @asenkut

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Nir Eyal on belief, motivation, and the end of suffering

Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked, which became Silicon Valley's playbook for building habit-forming products, Indistractable, on taking your attention back, and the new book Beyond Belief. He taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and is one of the sharpest thinkers on what to do with technology. In this episode of Summation, Nir and Auren discuss: Why to-do lists set you up to feel like a failure and what to do instead Why 90% of the time you check your phone, it's an uncomfortable emotion, not a notification Why beliefs are tools, not truths, and how swapping one can end your suffering Why this is the safest generation of kids in history and still gets a moral panic You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Nir Eyal on X at @nireyal

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SecureAuth CEO Geoff Mattson on the coming fraudpocalypse and the death of the password

Geoff Mattson is the CEO of SecureAuth, an identity security company that has raised over $200M and protects more than 50 million identities for enterprises. Before SecureAuth he was CEO of Xage Security. His work now centers on how you prove an AI agent is who it says it is. In this episode of Summation, Geoff and Auren discuss: Why an AI agent is like an Uber driver who might randomly turn into a psycho killer The deepfake fraudpocalypse, and the simplest thing that defends against it Why your agent impersonates you instead of working for you and how to fix it Why the password is finally, actually dying You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Geoff on Linkedin

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Fmr. Senator Cory Gardner: why the AI race is won on boring infrastructure and how China wins by making America hate AI

Cory Gardner is a former U.S. Senator and Congressman from Colorado and was one of the Senate's leading Taiwan and China experts, chairing the Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia and authoring the Taipei Act. He is now president and CEO of NCTA, the Internet & Television Association, whose members built the nation's largest broadband platform. In this episode of Summation, Cory and Auren discuss: Why the AI race gets won on spectrum, fiber, and memory chips The bottleneck raising the price of your iPhone, PlayStation, and router Why an open society is vulnerable to a campaign to turn Americans against AI What a China expert thinks about our dependence on chips made off China's coast You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Cory Gardner on X at @CoryGardner

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CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill on software's new bottleneck and zero to $50m ARR in 2 years

Harjot Gill is the co-founder and CEO of CodeRabbit, the AI code review company that became the most installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab. Over about two years, CodeRabbit went from zero to over $50M in ARR and a $1B+ valuation. It is his third startup. In this episode of Summation, Harjot and Auren discuss: Why the bottleneck in software just moved from writing code to reviewing it Why mature companies now adopt AI first Why you should never let a coding agent review its own work The playbook that took CodeRabbit from zero to $50M+ in two years You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Harjot Gill on X at @harjotsgill

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Moritz Baier-Lentz on why the future of AI runs on video games

Moritz Baier-Lentz is one of the foremost investors in gaming, AI, and frontier technologies—including companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir, Etched, Decart, and Recursive. He founded Goldman Sachs's global gaming practice and was previously a partner, IC member, and head of gaming at Lightspeed. Moritz is part of the founding team of General Intuition, an AI research lab training agents on video game data, which has raised a $133M Seed round and a $320M Series A. He is also a senior advisor to OpenAI, McKinsey & Co., and TPG Capital. In this episode of Summation, Moritz and Auren discuss: Why video games are the best data set for the next phase of AI The idea that humans only truly learn during play Why Germany's fear of risk is cultural Getting into Stanford with an essay about Diablo II You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Moritz Baier-Lentz on LinkedIn or his website.

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OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji: measuring the greatest technology of our time

Ronnie Chatterji is the Chief Economist at OpenAI, where he leads research on how AI reshapes growth, jobs, and the economy. He is also an economics professor at Duke. He was previously the White House CHIPS coordinator implementing the $52B CHIPS Act, and before that the chief economist at the US Department of Commerce. In this episode of Summation, Ronnie and Auren discuss: The three things people actually do with ChatGPT The 10x jump in people handing their work to AI Why the next big leap in AI is adoption and not capability The case that AI could cause a population boom You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ronnie Chatterji on X at @RonnieChatterji

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Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg: why AI wins a Nobel before a Pulitzer

Felix Rieseberg leads engineering for Claude Cowork and Claude Code Desktop at Anthropic. Before that he led desktop and web infrastructure at Notion and built software at Stripe, Slack, and Microsoft. In this episode of Summation, Felix and Auren discuss: The next AI step function: going from solving a problem to owning a responsibility Why AI will win many Nobel prizes before it wins a single Pulitzer Bringing AI into the physical world, from a $30 coffee-machine display to a Wi-Fi garage opener Why "here's what your team can learn from the Navy SEALs" is bad management advice You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Felix Rieseberg on X at @felixrieseberg

Fifth Wall CEO Brendan Wallace: the data center land grab and the most stable asset on earth you still can't buy

Brendan Wallace is the Founder, CEO & CIO of Fifth Wall, the largest investment firm focused on technology for the built environment, with ~$3B in capital, the firm is driving the growth of nearly 170 companies, backing category-defining PropTech leaders such as Opendoor, Procore, Blend, Hippo, and Bilt Rewards. It's supported by ~115 of the world's largest real estate owner-operators including CBRE, Hilton, Hines, Marriott, Public Storage, Related, and Starwood. Before Fifth Wall, Brendan was at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, and he co-founded Identified (sold to Workday) and Cabify. In this episode of Summation, Brendan and Auren discuss: How remote work protected mediocrity for years The data center land grab: powered land, 2037 grid connections, and bring-your-own-solar How land is the most stable asset on earth and there's still no way to buy an index of it Why "capital-intensive businesses are bad for venture" is no longer true You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Brendan Wallace on X at @BrendanFWallace

Striveworks CEO Jim Rebesco on drone swarms, AI for warfighters, and the end of air superiority

Jim Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an AI ops company deployed across the US Army, Navy, and combatant commands. In April, Striveworks announced a $70M enterprise agreement with the Pentagon, giving nearly a million defense personnel access to its platform. Jim was previously a partner at Virtu Financial, a pioneering high-frequency trading firm. In this episode of Summation, Jim and Auren discuss: why the real question in AI warfare is who pushes the button the case that autonomy favors big nation states, not insurgents why it costs $200,000 to procure anything in the Pentagon what high-frequency trading and war have in common You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Jim Rebesco on LinkedIn

Short-seller Carson Block: a fugitive CEO, Libyan spies, and $50B fraud

Carson Block is the founder of Muddy Waters Research, one of the defining activist short-selling firms of the last decade and a half. Since 2010, Muddy Waters has published forensic research exposing accounting fraud at publicly traded companies across China, Europe, and the US and has been right enough times that 11 companies have been delisted as a result. In this episode of Summation, Carson and Auren discuss: why outright fraud is only 20-25% of Muddy Waters' focus the Wirecard saga why high-trust countries like Germany are a paradise for criminals how the thing that killed Enron is still completely legal You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Carson Block on LinkedIn and on X @muddywatersre

Facet CEO Anders Jones on the biggest heist in finance, how advisors really sell permission, and the great boomer wealth transfer

Anders Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Facet, a fintech company built to bring high-quality, flat-fee financial advice to an underserved market: the mass affluent. Facet has raised over $250M and manages more than $7B. Anders has seen the real finances of tens of thousands of households. In this episode of Summation, Anders and Auren discuss: why the percentage-of-assets fee is the greatest heist in finance the retention data showing people stick 3x longer when you help them act, not just advise the horizontal wealth transfer to spouses that nobody is planning for why most companies should never raise venture capital You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Anders Jones on LinkedIn

Charles Duhigg on the writing AI can't touch, what GLP-1s really do to your brain, and the serendipity tax

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better, and Supercommunicators. His work focuses on the science of habits, productivity, decision-making, and human connection. In this episode of Summation, Charles and Auren discuss: why producing the words is only 10% of an author's job, and the 90% AI can't do what GLP-1s actually do to the brain the serendipity tax: why you pay for five dead-end dinners to get the one that changes your life the three skills that separate supercommunicators from everyone else You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Charles Duhigg on X at @cduhigg

SignalFire CEO Chris Farmer on why venture funds now last 20 years and the hiring boom behind the layoffs

Chris Farmer is the founder and CEO of SignalFire, an early stage venture firm managing over $3 billion. In this episode of Summation, Chris and Auren discuss: why the time to return 1x has stretched to 9+ years and funds are lasting 20 years the engineering hiring boom hiding behind the layoff headlines the five functions of a VC firm and the one place data helps the least why almost all conventional career advice is now bad You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Chris Farmer on X at @chriswfarmer

GTMnow Podcast | Your First VC Meeting Will Be Agent-to-Agent

This episode is a rebroadcast of Auren's appearance on the GTMnow podcast --------------------------------------------------- Auren Hoffman (Flex Capital) joins the GTMnow podcast to share some of the most contrarian takes in tech today, from why AI moats are gone, to why your next VC meeting will be with a bot, to why AI is secretly going to trigger a baby boom. In this episode: Why Auren runs 500+ AI agents to source deals, and what that means for founders raising capital The "agent-to-agent" meeting prediction: by end of 2026, first VC conversations will be fully automated Why every software moat has been "blown up" and what Salesforce, LinkedIn & DocuSign need to do to survive The OpenAI x The Hustle acquisition breakdown: why it's the smartest (and cheapest) distribution play in AI Why missing a great deal is 10x more painful than making a bad one, Auren's honest VC mistake framework The baby boom thesis: why AI, IVF, self-driving cars & cheaper energy could reverse the fertility decline Why companies won't sign yearly SaaS contracts anymore, and what that means for every B2B founder Auren Hoffman is the founder of NQB8, Flex Capital, SafeGraph, and LiveRamp. He's an early backer of Replit, Perplexity, Rippling, Vercel, Coinbase, Chime, and AppLovin. Max’s socials: https://x.com/hackitmax https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/ Auren’s socials: https://x.com/auren https://www.linkedin.com/in/auren/ https://auren.substack.com/ GTMnow: https://gtmnow.com

Serval CEO Jake Stauch: talent is the only moat left, hiring founders as FDEs, and building a $1B company with your wife and a newborn

Jake Stauch is the co-founder and CEO of Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform. Serval was founded in 2024 and has already raised over $125M across rounds led by Redpoint and Sequoia at a $1B+ valuation. Before Serval, Jake spent five years on the product team at Verkada and earlier founded NeuroPlus, a brain-sensing hardware company that made video games for kids with ADHD. In this episode of Summation, Jake and Auren discuss: Why Anthropic has added more ARR in the past few months than ServiceNow has in the past 20 years The "forward deployed engineer" hire and why he recruits future founders instead of solutions engineers Why talent density is the only remaining moat in the age of AI The Silicon Valley collusion around not poaching each other's employees You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Jake Stauch on X at @jakeserval

Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko on why curiosity is AI’s scarcest resource

Dmitry Shevelenko is Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. He previously co-founded Tortoise, a robotics and commerce automation startup and held business development roles at Uber, LinkedIn, and Meta. He also serves on the board of Lazard. In this episode of Summation, Dmitry and Auren discuss: Why CEOs and executives are Perplexity Computer’s biggest power users and what that says about who wins the AI era Scaling Perplexity past $500M ARR with only 34% headcount growth The $34.5B Chrome bid and the TikTok bid before it Why AI's biggest constraint right now is adoption and not capability You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Dmitry Shevelenko on X at @dmitry140