20 interviews
Human-Guided, AI-Amplified: How Preply Reached Unicorn Status Without Abandoning Its Tutors
On maintaining a Kyiv office during wartime, why AI should amplify rather than replace tutors, and what Ukrainian resilience means for building global companies.
It’s Been a Bumpy Ride: MacPaw’s Founder on Building from Kyiv Through a War
On growing a 540-person software company during the Russian invasion, the $50 million cost of the war, and why Ukrainian IT remains the country’s only fully operational export sector.
From Pet Cameras to Drone Autonomy: How War Changed Everything for This Ukrainian Founder
How the first Ukrainian YC company pivoted from consumer hardware to building the iPhone of defence tech — and why drone autonomy is the most important military technology of this decade.
The Technology Is Finally There: Grammarly’s Co-Founder on $1B in Funding and AI’s Communication Revolution
On waiting 16 years for the right moment, why founders should delegate scaling, and what universities teaching AI bans are getting catastrophically wrong.
Founder Mode Is a Distraction: Creatio’s CEO on Why Scaling Is More Fun Than Starting
On bootstrapping a no-code platform to unicorn status without external capital, why she considers herself CEO more than founder, and her vision for AI-native enterprise software.
Persistence, Abundance, and the Civilizational Bet
On the early days of OpenAI, why abundance is the right frame for AI's future, and what responsible development of transformative technology actually looks like.
The $5 Billion Question: How Anthropic Thinks About Scale, Safety, and the End Game
In conversation with John Collison on commercial momentum, the platform-versus-applications debate, and whether safety-focused AI can actually win.
Speed Is a Leadership Decision: Andy Jassy on AI, Risk, and What Bezos Actually Taught Him
Why moving fast requires courage not certainty, how AI changes infrastructure investment, and the hardest leadership lessons from his first years as CEO.
NVIDIA at the Center of Everything: The Decade That Changed Hardware Forever
On building the infrastructure of the AI era, why AGI is closer than most think, and what every CEO needs to understand about the reinvention underway.
Every Company Is Now an AI Company: What Microsoft's Transformation Actually Teaches Us
On growth mindset as a cultural technology, why AI is amplification not replacement, and how a company of 200,000 people can stay curious.
The Generative Web: How v0 Reached 3 Million Users and What It Means for the Next Internet
On building v0, the emergence of ephemeral apps, why frontend is AI's killer application, and what the generative web changes about how software is made.
Linear for Agents: Why the Future of Software Is Workflow, Not Feature
On building Linear's opinionated product philosophy, how its customer base became its real moat, and why agents change what project management means.
Building the Supercloud: How Cloudflare Thinks About Infrastructure at Global Scale
On Cloudflare's origins in DDoS protection, the engineering culture that enabled expansion from security to compute, and the vision for a programmable global network.
Three Anti-Patterns That Kill Engineering Organisations (and How to Spot Them Early)
The leadership mistakes that consistently derail engineering organisations, and the harder lessons about why good intentions alone are never enough.
The Craft of Multi-Product: How Figma Builds Without Losing Its Edge
The strategy behind FigJam, Dev Mode, and Figma Slides — and what it means to expand a product portfolio when your original product still defines everything.
Build Pods, Not Sprints: Gong's Anti-Scrum Playbook for Product Velocity
Why Gong abandoned Scrum, the W-shaped planning process that replaced it, and why autonomous product pods — not process — are the source of their velocity.
The Four-Point Review: How Notion Builds Software With Fewer PMs Than You'd Expect
Notion's counterintuitive approach to product management, the deliberate planning cycle that keeps 500 engineers aligned, and what building at the intersection of productivity and AI teaches you.
Small Teams, Massive Scale: Shopify's Engineering Philosophy
Why Shopify keeps its engineering teams deliberately small, how the merchant-first mission shapes technical decisions, and what acquisition integration actually looks like from the inside.
The Compounding Machine: How Stripe Thinks About Organisational and Technical Excellence
On building organisations that get better over time, the role of writing culture at Stripe, and why the technology industry has been profoundly under-ambitious.
Making a Manager: What Leadership Actually Requires (and What It Definitely Doesn't)
The management mistakes she made becoming VP at Facebook at 25, what she wishes she'd known, and the principles behind her influential book on first-time leaders.