Joe Liemandt built Trilogy, recruited 2,000 Ivy League graduates to Austin, and is now running what he considers the higher-leverage version of the same play, K-12 education. Our host, Jason Scharf, brings a perspective no other interviewer has. He is an Alpha School parent, and he uses that to ask…
A clip from our episode "Innovation Ecosystems Are Inherited | Nait Jones"
A clip from our episode "The Western Canon in the Age of Vibe Coding | Carlos Carvalho, President, University of Austin"
A clip from our episode "We're Living Through the Cyberpunk Era of War | Jim Rebesco, CEO, Striveworks"
A clip from our episode "We're Living Through the Cyberpunk Era of War | Jim Rebesco, CEO, Striveworks"
Directed energy weapons, autonomous drones, and combat AI agents are not just real. They are deployed. Jim Rebesco, cofounder and CEO of Striveworks, breaks down what's driving this moment, and the second and third-order effects most people aren't tracking yet. AI can't be bolted onto legacy systems and expected to…
A clip from our episode "Innovation Ecosystems Are Inherited | Nait Jones
A clip from our episode "Innovation Ecosystems Are Inherited | Nait Jones"
A clip from our episode "Innovation Ecosystems Are Inherited | Nait Jones"
The hype that landed on Austin in 2021 was correct and at the same time ahead of the curve. Nait Jones, serial founder and former a16z partner who arrived in Silicon Valley in 2011 at the Web 2 moment and moved to Austin during the pandemic, argues that the fundamentals…
A clip from our episode "The Western Canon in the Age of Vibe Coding | Carlos Carvalho, President, University of Austin"
A clip from our episode "The Western Canon in the Age of Vibe Coding | Carlos Carvalho, President, University of Austin"
American universities stopped optimizing for students a long time ago. The University of Austin was built as a direct counter to that failure. Carlos Carvalho, its president, brings a statistician's precision to the diagnosis, tracing the causal chain from dropped standards to credential collapse while building an institution with no…
From our episode "Bootstrap vs. VC: Speed Costs Control | Rob Taylor, Silverton Partners"
From our episode "Bootstrap vs. VC: Speed Costs Control | Rob Taylor, Silverton Partners"
From our episode "Bootstrap vs. VC: Speed Costs Control | Rob Taylor, Silverton Partners"
The decision to bootstrap a business or raise venture capital is not just financial. It is physics. You are choosing which system to operate within, which rules will govern your company, and whose incentives will shape your options at every inflection point. Rob Taylor has lived both realities. He spent…
The current venture market is defined by a dangerous decoupling of capital from reality. While the industry chases $10B seed valuations and trillion-dollar infrastructure bets, Brian Smith and S3 Ventures are executing a "Discipline Arbitrage." They argue that the real returns in AI will not come from the massive CapEx…
