Venture with Grace
Grace Gong
10 episodes
Kevin Boyd, University of Chicago CIO on AI and Enterprise Transformation
8 Nov · 1 h 2 min
- The University of Chicago has rolled out Anthropic's Claude to all students, faculty and staff, prompting campus debate over appropriate AI use.
- Boyd says the university builds more AI tools in-house rather than buying, using agents for finance triple-matching so humans handle exceptions.
Jay Zhao, Leonis Capital Founder on Research-Driven AI Investing
7 Nov · 1 h 3 min
- Leonis Capital is closing a $75m Fund III with $1.3m first cheques, deploying 2027 to 2030.
- Zhao says AI agents will need new infrastructure for identity, compliance and payments, and software moves from systems of record to systems of action.
Inference at Scale: Building the Infrastructure for AI’s Next Phase
6 Nov · 19 min
- NEA's Aaron Jacobson says inference is under-invested and will be the world's largest market, requiring trillions in capex.
- Hippocratic AI's Debajyoti Datta says its voice agent runs 30 to 35 models under 400 milliseconds for billions of daily interactions.
Ori Goshen, AI21 Labs CEO on AI Agents, Language Models & Enterprise AI
5 Nov · 58 min
- Open-source token consumption jumped from 15-20% in June to about 80% in November as open-weight models close the gap with frontier labs.
- Ori Goshen pitches partnering as the third option between building and buying, with AI21's Lab-as-a-Service embedding researchers to define evals and cost.
Fireside chat — AI native services - the next frontier of VC investing
5 Nov · 20 min
- Jake Saper argues AI native services will outgrow SaaS and target the 80% of the US economy in services.
- Dan Mishin's Manifest uses AI agents to cut immigration case turnaround from two months to two days and costs 15-20%.
Austin Spiegel, Sift CEO on Hardware Data, Telemetry and Engineering
5 Nov · 56 min
- Sift unifies hardware telemetry into a single source of truth so a problem in orbit can be traced back to a rocket test.
- Sift stores telemetry in object storage with tiering to cut costs as customers scale to hundreds of terabytes per month.
Jerry Tworek, Core Automation CEO on AI Reasoning, Agents and Research
1 Nov · 51 min
- Core Automation, led by CEO Jerry Tworek, is challenging the transformer architecture behind today's AI assistants, betting that a different design can learn more efficiently.
- The company is building models that learn from each customer's own data on the fly, instead of relying on labs buying ever more data for specific professions.
Vitaly Gordon, Faros AI Leaders on AI Engineering & GTM
1 Nov · 57 min
- Vitaly Gordon, Faros AI's CEO, argues most companies spend less than 5% of labor cost on AI, and that teams should prioritize outcomes over token volume.
- Gordon says the goal is outcome maxing, lowering the price per outcome, which often means using more AI rather than less.
Juha Vartiainen, IQM Co-Founder on Quantum Computing & Global Strategy
1 Nov · 54 min
- IQM co-founder Juha Vartiainen says on-premise quantum systems are gaining ground over cloud as countries demand control of their data and processing.
- IQM has sold close to 30 quantum computers, delivered about 20, and holds a pipeline of roughly 10 worth about 100m, mostly to government-funded public institutions.
Ashley Kramer, ElevenLabs CRO on AI, Enterprise Growth and Voice
30 Sept · 1 h 0 min
- Ashley Kramer, ElevenLabs' Chief Revenue Officer, says executives become AI native by using AI deeply and constantly, and ElevenLabs is customer zero for everything it builds.
- ElevenLabs' AI SDR agent Dom, launched weeks before the interview, saved Kramer's SDR team 180 hours in one month and helped close two deals.