Think AI

Scott Wilson is the CIO of WashU, one of the best-performing endowment funds in the world. Under his leadership, Scott has grown the endowment from $8BN to $19BN today. At one point, SpaceX was over 20% of the entire value of the endowment.

AGENDA:

00:00 – How WashU Built One of the Best-Performing Endowment Portfolios in the World

04:00 – Scott Wilson's Investment Playbook: Concentration, Conviction and Compounding

05:20 – Why Scott Sold Over 75% of WashU's Portfolio When He Joined

07:15 – How Should You Allocate a $20 Billion Endowment Between Publics and Privates?

10:00 – How WashU Finds Direct Investments That Other LPs Miss

12:15 – How WashU Made Billions From SpaceX and Kept Holding

13:25 – Why Concentration Limits Are Killing Venture Returns

16:15 – Scott's Biggest Investing Mistake

17:10 – How Much Diversification Does a $20 Billion Endowment Really Need?

19:40 – Why Mega Funds Don't Work for WashU's Investment Strategy

23:15 – How WashU Gets Into the Best Companies Before Everyone Else

25:35 – Are Private Market Valuations Now Completely Detached From Reality?

28:10 – Why Half of Today's AI Companies Could Disappear in 10 Years

30:10 – When Should LPs Sell Their Biggest Winners After an IPO?

32:00 – Why Scott Wilson Walked Away From Sequoia Capital

34:15 – The Number One Reason WashU Fires Venture Managers

35:45 – Should LPs Forgive VCs for Deploying Their Funds in Just 18 Months?

38:30 – Is the AI Boom Heading for a Massive Shakeout?

45:15 – Why European Companies Are So Much Cheaper Than US Companies

47:30 – Why WashU Still Believes China Is a Great Place to Invest

48:30 – Is Government Overreach Actually Worse in the UK Than China?

50:10 – Quickfire: The Venture Funds Scott Wishes He Had Backed

53:00 – The Best Career Advice From a $20 Billion Endowment CIO

00:58:04•November 7, 2026

The New CFO: How AI Is Rewriting the Finance Function | Figma CFO Praveer Melwani

NEW

AI is moving finance from reconciling what happened last month to helping decide what the business should do next. Figma CFO Praveer Melwani argues that the best finance teams are becoming builders themselves, automating repetitive work so they can spend more time understanding customers, running experiments, and shaping strategy. Praveer joins a16z’s Seema Amble and Ivan Makarov to share what that shift looks like inside Figma, from collections and expense analysis to M&A diligence, where the corp dev team now uses AI to prototype products and simulate how Figma leaders might challenge an investment memo. They discuss why AI “slop” is a real risk, how Figma decides what to build versus buy, and why successful internal experiments eventually need a centralized systems layer to turn one-off agents into reliable infrastructure. They also get into what this means for hiring the next generation of finance leaders. Praveer’s bar isn’t simply whether someone can use AI. It’s whether they can understand the business, interrogate the output, communicate clearly, and use automation without outsourcing their thinking.

00:50:57•November 5, 2026

20VC: OpenAI Cuts Valuation to $1.25TRN | Public Market Meltdown: GOOG Loses $500BN in 12 Hours | DoorDash Buys Instacart for $17BN | Kalshi Raises $1BN and Cognition Eyes $80BN Valuation

NEW

AGENDA:

04:00 OpenAI Cuts Valuation to $1.25 Trillion as Fundraise Shrinks
08:00 Google Loses $500 Billion as AI Stocks Sell Off
10:00 Anthropic's Growth Slows as AI Price War Intensifies
27:00 DoorDash Buys Instacart for $17 Billion
33:00 Kalshi Raises $1 Billion at $40 Billion Despite Legal Threats
41:00 Cognition Eyes $80 Billion as Baseten Hits $30 Billion and Serval $3 Billion
51:00 AI Law Firm Crosby Bids for Collapsed Legal Giant Weil
57:00 Physical Intelligence Targets $20 Billion Valuation
01:00:00 Hugging Face Deal Faces Scrutiny as Salesforce Buys Cresta for $2.7 Billion

01:09:27•November 5, 2026

Politics 101, Prediction Markets Win, FOGO | Apoorva Mehta, Alex Spiro, Anish Agarwal, Derek Blasberg

NEW

(01:05) - Midterm Election Recap
(04:19) - Prediction Markets Win
(23:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions
(25:57) - FOGO
(32:16) - Ferrari Raises Its Outlook
(36:40) - EU Plans to Downgrade Art Risk
(40:23) - Apoorva Mehta, co-founder and former CEO of Instacart and founder of Abundance, discusses Instacart’s resilience, its evolution from a widely doubted idea into a major public company, and the persistence behind its success. He also explores the future of long-running AI agents, agentic investing, and Abundance’s goal of using AI-driven capital allocation to build a highly valuable company that benefits humanity.
(01:01:16) - Alex Spiro, a prominent Quinn Emanuel trial lawyer and former prosecutor who represents high-profile founders and celebrities, discusses handling complex public cases, building an authentic legal career, and AI’s potential to streamline litigation. He also reflects on his growing business ventures, partnership with Tom Brady, and the challenges of online misinformation.
(01:34:05) - Anish Agarwal discusses his role as co-founder and CEO of Traversal, which builds an AI site reliability engineer that identifies and resolves failures in complex enterprise systems. He explains the company’s focus on Fortune 500 customers, usage-based model, growing integration with coding agents, and recent $120 million fundraise at a $1 billion valuation.
(01:42:56) - Derek Blasberg discusses his work as a New York-based fashion writer and his new book on legendary photographer Richard Avedon. He explores Avedon’s influence on fashion, photography, and culture while reflecting on AI-generated imagery, creative originality, and the renewed value of physical art and in-person experiences.

TBPN is made possible by:

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Figma - https://www.figma.com

MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com

NYSE - https://www.nyse.com

Railway - https://railway.com

Shopify - https://www.shopify.com

Codex - http://openAI.com/codex

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02:14:42•November 4, 2026

The New AI Agents That Shop, Plan, and Gossip

NEW

Will we have one AI assistant that does everything, or an entire network of agents that know different parts of our lives? David Pawlan, creator of Assistant Benchmark, returns with Anish Acharya and Josh Elman to take stock of how quickly the agent landscape has changed. David has now tested more than 140 AI assistants, and they unpack what separates them, from memory and judgment to trust, shopping, and social experiences. They also explore what happens when agents start talking to each other, how they could create new kinds of social networks and serendipity, and why the most compelling agents may ultimately do more than save time. They could become a kind of secret superpower.

00:51:28•November 4, 2026

Can AI Fix Professional Networking? | Inside Cosign

What if finding your next job, co-founder, or collaborator depended less on a resume and more on who is willing to vouch for you? Cosign is building a professional network around those signals, with the longer-term goal of giving AI agents access to the relationship and reputation data that traditional networks keep locked away. a16z New Media’s David Booth and Dhruv Gupta join MTS to introduce the Cosign Awards, which recognize standout operators, companies, and products based on nominations from the people who know their work. They also unpack the bigger idea behind Cosign: mapping the people and relationships that rarely show up in public data, then making that graph accessible to both humans and agents. Looking ahead, they imagine professional networking where your personal agent can talk directly to a company’s agent, determine whether there’s a potential fit, and only bring the opportunity to you when there’s a genuine “coincidence of intent.”

00:25:21•October 31, 2026

What Happens When Everyone Can Build Software

Supabase has become one of the default backends for the AI coding era. The open source Postgres platform now has 13 million users, spins up more than a million databases every week, and roughly 70% of its new activity is coming from agents.As coding shifts from developers writing software by hand to agents building on their behalf, Supabase has been rebuilding itself around that new user.Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone joins Garry, Harj, and Jared on the Lightcone to talk about what happens when everyone can become a builder. They dive into why personal software may become as common as personal documents, how to design products that agents actually want to use, and why knowing what to build may matter more than knowing how to build it.

00:48:45•October 30, 2026

Apple Pro and Tell, Genie 4, The Gurmanator Joins | Mark Gurman, Zach Rash, Ben Liu, Amiram Shachar, Jasper Zhang

(00:31) - Apple's Pro and Tell Event
(16:29) - Genie 4
(25:50) - OpenAI Eyes Custom Google Chips
(31:24) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions
(55:14) - Mark Gurman discusses Apple’s latest products, drawing on his expertise as a Bloomberg technology journalist and prominent Apple reporter. He praises the iPhone Duo and OLED MacBook Pro while addressing manufacturing defects, software quirks, Apple’s lagging AI strategy, and its broader challenges with innovation and acquisitions.
(01:29:58) - Zach Rash discusses Coco Robotics’ autonomous sidewalk delivery robots, including its fleet of roughly 1,000 units, UK expansion through DoorDash and Deliveroo, and plans to manufacture 20,000 next-generation robots for 2027. The co-founder and CEO also explains Coco’s fleet operations, regulatory challenges, AI benchmarks, and goal of safely navigating complex urban environments at scale.
(01:40:28) - Ben Liu discusses his role as co-founder and CEO of Formation Bio, an AI-native pharmaceutical company focused on making clinical trials and drug development faster and more affordable. He explains how its $600 million fund will finance promising individual drug assets while using AI, specialized talent, and a hub-and-spoke model to bring more medicines to patients.
(01:52:37) - Amiram Shachar discusses Upwind, the cloud and AI cybersecurity company he co-founded and leads as CEO. He explains its platform-based security approach, the team’s cloud infrastructure expertise, AI’s impact on software development and cyber threats, and the company’s recent $400 million Series C funding round.
(01:59:22) - Jasper Zhang discusses founding Hyperbolic, a unified platform that aggregates and orchestrates global GPU compute, allowing customers to flexibly access, manage, and resell unused capacity. A math prodigy who completed his UC Berkeley PhD in two years, Zhang also explains Hyperbolic’s broad hardware support, strategic investor relationships, and recently raised $30 million.

TBPN is made possible by:

Ramp - https://ramp.com

Public - https://public.com

Cisco - https://www.cisco.com

Console - https://www.console.com

CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com

Figma - https://www.figma.com

MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com

NYSE - https://www.nyse.com

Railway - https://railway.com

Shopify - https://www.shopify.com

Codex - http://openAI.com/codex

Follow TBPN:

https://TBPN.com

https://x.com/tbpn

https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235

https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

02:07:00•October 28, 2026

The New Startup Playbook | Box CEO Aaron Levie

Can a 10-person startup outperform a company with hundreds of employees? Box CEO Aaron Levie argues AI agents are giving small teams a level of leverage that simply wasn't economically possible before, creating a window for startups to outrun incumbents. In this episode of Speedrun Office Hours, Aaron explains why founders are shifting from doing the work themselves to orchestrating agents, and why that puts a new premium on strategy, taste, and knowing exactly what to build. He makes the case that nearly every industry and job function could support specialized AI agents, potentially creating hundreds of new billion-dollar companies. They also discuss why enterprise AI may capture much of the next wave of model improvements, how dramatically cheaper AI labor could unlock demand that doesn't exist today, and one thing Aaron thinks AI won't change: distribution. If you build it, they still won't necessarily come.

00:34:24•October 25, 2026

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