Summation with Auren Hoffman

43:49

Axios Co-founder Roy Schwartz: why average is...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/10/06

Roy Schwartz co-founded Axios, the news company known for smart brevity, and helped grow it to a $525 million sale to Cox Enterprises. He's now co-founder and CEO of Axios HQ, an AI-powered internal communications platform spun out of Axios. He co-wrote Smart Brevity, and his new book is Simplify. Before Axios, he was chief revenue officer of Politico. In this episode of Summation, Roy and Auren discuss: Meeting bankruptcy: wiping every recurring meeting off the calendar twice a yearAI as a c...

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41:53

Helion CEO David Kirtley on why fusion finally works

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/09/29

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 starHow a Best Buy network card helped make fusion possibleRegulating a 150 million degree machine like ...

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62:53

Alex Rampell on why the best companies have hostages,...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/09/22

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 Aure...

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61:05

Life360 founder Chris Hulls on existential amusement...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/09/15

Chris Hulls is the co-founder and executive chairman of Life360, 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 againWhy "you want to sound smart, but not interesting" is the secret rule of corporate speakWhy nobody actually...

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60:23

Felicis founder Aydin Senkut: why moats are dead and...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/09/08

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 ValleyHow capital became a commodity and people are the o...

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67:26

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

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/09/01

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 insteadWhy 90% of the time you check your phone, it's an uncomfortable ...

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45:46

SecureAuth CEO Geoff Mattson on the coming...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/08/25

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 killerThe deepfake fraudpocalypse, and the simplest thing that defends against itWhy you...

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53:33

Fmr. Senator Cory Gardner: why the AI race is won on...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/08/18

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 chipsThe bottleneck raising t...

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55:22

CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill on software's new...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/08/11

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 itWhy mature companies now adopt AI firstWhy you should never let a coding agent review its own workThe playbook ...

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65:01

Moritz Baier-Lentz on why the future of AI runs on...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/08/04

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 adviso...

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56:31

OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji: measuring...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/07/28

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 ChatGPTThe 10x jump in people handing their work to AI Why the next big ...

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66:33

Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg: why AI wins a Nobel...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/07/21

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 responsibilityWhy AI will win many Nobel prizes before it wins a single PulitzerBringing AI into the physical world, from a $30 coffee-machine display to a Wi-Fi gara...

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53:10

Fifth Wall CEO Brendan Wallace: the data center land...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/07/14

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, Brenda...

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60:04

Striveworks CEO Jim Rebesco on drone swarms, AI for...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/07/07

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 buttonthe case that aut...

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70:47

Short-seller Carson Block: a fugitive CEO, Libyan...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/06/30

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' focusthe Wirecard sagaw...

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49:36

Facet CEO Anders Jones on the biggest heist in...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/06/23

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 financethe retention data showing people stick 3x longer when you help them act, not just a...

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63:42

Charles Duhigg on the writing AI can't touch, what...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/06/16

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 dowhat GLP-1s actually do to the brain the serendipity tax: why you pay for five dead...

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46:03

SignalFire CEO Chris Farmer on why venture funds now...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/06/09

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 yearsthe engineering hiring boom hiding behind the layoff headlinesthe five functions of a VC firm and the one place data helps the leastwhy almost all conventional career advice is now badYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Chris Farmer on X a...

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39:59

GTMnow Podcast | Your First VC Meeting Will Be...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/06/02

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 capitalThe "agent-to...

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50:10

Serval CEO Jake Stauch: talent is the only moat left,...

Summation with Auren Hoffman ·

2026/05/26

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 pa...

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