Uncapped with Jack Altman

Andrew Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, the AI chip company he founded in 2016 around a single radical insight: that winning in compute requires not incremental improvement but a fundamentally different architecture. Cerebras is the creator of the world's largest chip, the Wafer Scale Engine, and counts the US government, sovereign cloud providers, and OpenAI among its customers.Alongside Eric Vishria from Benchmark, we discussed why Andrew believes that if you are going to attack Goliath, being 10% or even twice as good is not an available strategy and you have to aim for 100x or 500x better. Andrew walked through Cerebras's near-death experience: 18 months of board meetings where the only thing to report was "still can't make it," spending $8 million a month, and what kept the team going. He explained how we go from sand to a ChatGPT answer and why the US semiconductor supply chain is in a precarious position. Andrew shared what most people get wrong about what makes Nvidia great (it’s not CUDA), and why he thinks of himself as a professional David in an ongoing battle with Goliath. Timestamps:(0:00) Intro(1:07) Why Andrew started Cerebras in 2016(2:54) Eric on why he invested despite having no chip experience(4:10) Attacking Goliath(9:44) Near-death experiences and the Valley of Death(10:44) 18 months of "still can't make it"(12:16) Solving a 75-year-old compute problem(13:26) What comes after Wafer Scale(16:19) The chip supply chain explained(22:30) Why the US punted a strategic industry(25:51) How to be a good hardware board member(27:50) Hardware vs. software investing(29:05) The pivot from training to inference(27:00) Specialization vs. flexibility(35:22) Young product leaders and seasoned hardware engineers(39:14) External relationships and TSMC(42:20) The AI infrastructure buildout(44:12) The data center supply chain(53:14) Speed creates markets(54:10) Disaggregation with AMD and AWS(55:24) What actually makes Nvidia great(57:30) Near-death experiences and the DNA of a Goliath fighter(59:58) Andrew's childhood next to William ShockleyLinks:https://x.com/andrewdfeldmanhttps://x.com/cerebrashttps://x.com/ericvishriahttps://x.com/jaltmahttps://uncappedpod.com/[email protected]

Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the leading local commerce platform in the United States. Since co-founding DoorDash in 2013, Tony has built the company into a publicly traded business operating across 40 countries, spanning restaurants, grocery, convenience, retail, and advertising. We discussed how Tony thinks about AI spend and what it means to be an "atoms company" in a world racing to consume tokens. Tony shared his framework for directing AI toward customer outcomes rather than pure exploration, and why DoorDash's physical world infrastructure becomes more valuable as AI agents mature. We also got into the 70-year consumer trend behind DoorDash's growth, how the company built the fastest $1B ads business in history while protecting the consumer experience, why every DoorDash employee still does deliveries to this day, and what Tony means when he says DoorDash is still only single digit percentages of its core market. Timestamps (0:00) Intro (0:44) AI spend and token consumption (2:59) Directing AI toward customer outcomes (5:08) How DoorDash uses AI today (8:18) Atoms vs. bits (12:47) What LLMs can do for the DoorDash app (17:09) Was the $35 burrito obvious in 2013? (20:39) The 70-year food consumption trend (22:20) Consumer trends beyond food (26:41) Sequencing: seven years on restaurants before groceries (29:37) Building the ads business (33:13) 1% better every day  (34:23) Math and humanity (38:37) Growth levers at scale (41:09) Speed, drones, and autonomous delivery (43:39) Why everyone at DoorDash still does deliveries (44:16) What Tony is most excited about (46:14) Keeping startup intensity at year 13 Links: https://x.com/jaltma https://x.com/t_xu https://uncappedpod.com/ [email protected]

Saam Motamedi is a General Partner at Greylock Partners working with enterprise software entrepreneurs at the seed and early stages who are focused on new opportunities in intelligent applications, cybersecurity, AI, and data infrastructure. In 2019 at just 26 years old, Saam became the Greylock’s youngest General Partner in its 54-year history – a remarkable achievement at an institution that had backed Airbnb, AppDynamics, Coinbase, Discord, Figma, Instagram, LinkedIn, among others. Saam’s portfolio spans 14+ companies with collective valuations exceeding $10 billion. Abnormal Security, which Greylock incubated in its offices in 2018 with Saam as founding investor, grew into a multi-billion-dollar email security powerhouse. Cresta, where he led the Series A in 2019, became the leading generative AI platform for contact centers. Snorkel AI, Braintrust, Orb, and a portfolio of other infrastructure companies position Saam at the center of AI's business model transformation. We covered: Durable components to great firms Inside look at how Greylock operates Cracking the code on incubations Alpha in today’s venture strategies --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (1:32) Greylock turning 60 this year (4:11) What’s persisted since 1965 (8:59) Apprenticeship (11:34) What's durable in venture (16:29) Greylock’s ethos (19:33) Incentive misalignments (24:44) Breadth vs depth in venture (29:28) Managing the team on inputs (34:00) Why incubations are so hard (43:22) Finding alpha (52:38) Greylock’s approach to portfolio services (59:18) Assessing wild revenue ramps (1:08:10) Horizontal vs vertical SaaS (1:11:34) Friendships and work (1:16:26) Saam's biological age --- More on Saam: https://greylock.com/ https://x.com/saammotamedi More on Jack: https://www.altcap.com/ https://x.com/jaltma --- https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Email: [email protected]

Trae Stephens is a Partner at Founders Fund. He is also Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril, a defense tech company focused on autonomous systems, and Co-founder of Sol, a next generation wearable e-reader. Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion. He was also an integral part of the product team, leading the design and strategy for new product offerings. Prior to Palantir, Trae worked as a computational linguist building enterprise solutions to Arabic/Persian name matching and data enrichment within the United States Intelligence community. He began his career working in the office of then Congressman Rob Portman and in the Political Affairs Office at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. immediately following the installation of Hamid Karzai’s transitional government. We covered: Hard tech and the future of warfare AI morality and “good quests” How Anduril scales manufacturing Founders Fund’s investing philosophy Contrarianism and concentration The ethics of autonomy and national defense --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:35) Choosing good quests in the AI era (7:35) Ethics behind solving certain problems (11:29) Working with regulators (16:54) What’s left to prove at Anduril (18:32) Anduril, SpaceX, and Tesla at scale (22:30) The future of warfare (24:48) Juggling Anduril and Founders Fund (29:07) A system that rewards going deep (31:21) What’s made Founders Fund great (37:30) The king-making strategy in VC (40:26) Concentrating in the winners (43:55) Where there’s alpha in the market (47:22) Theological revival in traditional faith --- More on Trae: https://foundersfund.com/ https://x.com/traestephens More on Jack: https://www.altcap.com/ https://x.com/jaltma --- https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Email: [email protected]