Uncapped with Jack Altman

Trae Stephens is a Partner at Founders Fund and co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company building autonomous systems for the U.S. military and its allies. As of May 2026, Anduril is valued at $61 billion. Prior to co-founding Anduril, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on the intelligence and defense space.

Alex Pall is half of the Grammy Award-winning duo The Chainsmokers. Beyond music, Alex is entrepreneur and co-founder of Mantis VC, a venture firm that invests opportunistically in early stage tech-enabled startups. Some of their investments include Alchemy, Chainguard, Kalshi, Roblox, and Rogo. We had a wide ranging conversation that broke down the creative stories behind a few of their top hits including “Closer,” “Something Just Like This,” and “Don’t Let Me Down.” We also explored the creative process at the highest level and how Alex’s experience in music influences the way he approaches

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, a design software company that went public in July 2025. Founded in 2012, Figma transformed how people design, prototype, and build products together. After a $20 billion acquisition attempt by Adobe collapsed in 2022 because of regulators, Dylan helped Figma rebound stronger than ever. Just three years later, Figma listed its shares at nearly $20 billion and its stock price more than tripled on its first trading day. A few highlights: Expanding a sleepy market Merging of designers and product roles Counter-narrative to polarizing CEOs If models

Kyle Vogt is a serial entrepreneur and engineer often recognized as the co-founder and former CEO of Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by General Motors for $1 billion. Before Cruise, he co-founded Twitch, which transformed how people watch and share gaming online. Kyle is now building a new company at the frontier of intelligent home automation, aiming to bring advanced robotics into everyday life. A few highlights: Labs beginning to see their ChatGPT moment Most robots will be specialized, not humanoids Robots will be cooking steaks in less than 5 yrs Indefinitely operating wit

Vlad Tenev is the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD), which transformed financial services by introducing commission-free stock trading and democratizing access to the markets for millions of investors. As of Q3 2025, the company is doing $1.27 billion in revenue with 11 business lines each doing roughly $100 million. We discuss the evolution of online brokerage platforms from Schwab to E-Trade to now Robinhood. Vlad delves into the launch of Robinhood, the impact of the global financial crisis, and how mobile and high-frequency trading have transformed finance. The conversation ex

Mel Williams is a co-founder and Partner at TrueBridge Capital Partners, a fund of funds with $8 billion in AUM focused on venture capital. Since 2007, Mel’s team has backed firms like Thrive, Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Alt Capital, and powers the data behind the Forbes Midas List. Before TrueBridge, Mel co-founded UNC Management Company (UNCMC), where he worked closely with the President/CIO to manage over $2 billion of endowment capital for the University of North Carolina. We covered: Investing in frothy markets Doubling down on winners Seed vs multi-stage Picking managers --- Timestamps:

Pat Grady and Alfred Lin are partners at Sequoia and were recently named as the storied firm’s new co-stewards. Alfred joined the firm in 2010, where he has led major investments into category-defining companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Kalshi. Pat has been a partner at the firm for nearly 19 years and has led Sequoia’s growth-stage investing since 2015, backing companies like Snowflake, OpenAI, and Harvey. In this episode, we unpack how Sequoia actually works: their partnership model, how they pick outliers, and what stewardship means inside one of the most respected firms in venture capita

In this episode, the Benchmark partnership explains why they’ve resisted scale, eliminated residual economics, and built an equal partnership designed to endure. We talk about what that choice enables – for founders, for decision-making, and for practicing venture as a craft rather than a factory. Peter Fenton is the longest-serving full-time general partner at Benchmark. Over the last two decades, Peter led investments in Twitter, Yelp, Elastic, Docker, Zuora, and many others. More recent investments include Sierra, Ollama, ClickHouse, and Airtable. Peter has been on the Forbes Midas list 18

Vinod Khosla and Keith Rabois are Managing Directors at Khosla Ventures. Vinod is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist. In 2004, Vinod formed Khosla Ventures to focus on both for-profit and social impact investments that have included OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and many more. Vinod previously co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers, which led to an IPO. He later went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in 1982, serving as its first chairman and CEO. After joining Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers (KPCB

At 23, with no legal background, Max Junestrand co-founded Legora to transform how lawyers work. Legora recently (March 2026) raised $550 million at a $5.55 billion valuation in a Series D funding round to accelerate its expansion across the United States. Over the past year, Legora has grown from 40 to 400 team members across the globe and the platform supports tens of thousands of lawyers each day across 800 customers in more than 50 markets. Max shares the story of building Legora, what it really means to build AI-native software from day one, why legal work is uniquely suited for AI, and h

Daniele Perito is Co-founder and Executive Chairman of depthfirst, an AI-native security platform that understands your code, business logic, and infrastructure to find real vulnerabilities, slash false positives, and give developers actionable fixes in their workflow. Daniele is also Co-founder and Board Member of Faire, where he previously served as Chief Data Officer and helped build the company’s data, risk, and analytics foundations from the early days to a multi-billion dollar valuation. Before co-founding Faire, Daniele worked at Square and was on the founding team of Cash App, where he

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, whic

Mike Volpi is a General Partner at Hanabi Capital, with a background that spans senior operating roles and nearly two decades of investing. Mike currently sits on the boards of several innovative companies, including Scale AI, ClickHouse, Ferrari, and Confluent, where he is known as a thoughtful sounding board and a steady presence through the highs and lows of startup life. Mike is a retired partner at Index Ventures, where he led investments in category-defining companies across AI, software, and infrastructure. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at Cisco, including as Chief Str

Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi. Kalshi is a regulated prediction market exchange valued at $22B in 2026 where people trade on the outcomes of real-world events – things like inflation prints, Fed decisions, elections, or weather events. Instead of betting against a house, users trade against each other in a market, and prices reflect the collective probability of an outcome happening. Before starting Kalshi, Tarek worked as a quantitative trader at Goldman Sachs as a structured credit and equities analyst and at Citadel as a global macro trader. During his time at these firm

Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that manages $60 billion in assets under management. He is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are. Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Online’s E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company’s flagship Shop@AOL se

Max Mullen is the co-founder of Instacart and an active investor having invested in 100+ companies including Gumloop, Mercury, Owner among others. He also runs a founder community in San Francisco called Workshop. We discussed the full arc of building Instacart from a contrarian idea that investors rejected to a $10B consumer marketplace. Max highlighted the scrappy early days, marketplace product-market fit, and key inflection points like retailer partnerships and the Amazon–Whole Foods moment. We also explored what makes great consumer founders, why the best ideas look wrong at first, and ho

Bret Taylor is the founder and CEO of Sierra, an AI agent company transforming customer service. Bret’s legendary career includes being CTO of Meta, co-CEO of Salesforce, chairman of the board at OpenAI, co-creating both Google Maps and the Like button, and founding three companies. We unpacked the so-called “SaaS-pocalypse” and what AI agents mean for the future of enterprise software. We talked through the shift from systems of record to autonomous agents, outcome-based pricing, platform transitions, Codex and the transformation of software engineering, and who is structurally positioned to

Kevin Hartz and Bennett Siegel are co-founders and GPs at A*, a five year old early-stage venture capital firm with $1B in AUM. A* has invested in companies like Notion, Cape, Whop, Paraform, Simile, Krea, Mercor, Watney Robotics, Andera and others. Kevin is also the co-founder of Eventbrite (NYSE: EB) and co-founder and board member of Xoom, an online money transfer service that IPO’d in 2013 and later acquired by PayPal for $1.1B. Notable investments, primarily at the seed/early stages, include PayPal, Airbnb, Pinterest, Reddit, Anduril, and Palantir among others. Bennett was previously a pa

Tobi Lütke is the co-founder of Shopify, where he has served as the company's CEO since 2008. Under his leadership, Shopify grew from an online snowboard shop in Ottawa, Canada in 2004 to the world's leading e-commerce platform, powering over 4 million merchants in more than 175 countries. The company went public in 2015 at a $1.27 billion valuation and has since grown to a market cap exceeding $100 billion. As a programmer Tobi has served on the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and has created many popular open source libraries such as the Typo weblog engine, Liquid and Active Merchan

Joe Lonsdale is the Founder and Managing Partner at 8VC, an early-stage venture capital firm managing over $6 billion in capital. In 2003, he founded Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR), a global software company known for its work supporting US and its allies’ defense and intelligence. Since then, he has founded over a dozen prominent companies, including Addepar, a wealth management platform helping investors manage over $7 trillion, and OpenGov, the leading cloud software provider for local governments which recently sold for $1.8 billion. Joe was an early investor in Anduril, Oculus (acq. FB), Guardant

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/Pers

Brad Lightcap serves as OpenAI's COO, overseeing its business, operations, and strategic partnerships across Research, Applied AI, and go-to-market. He also manages the OpenAI Startup Fund. Previously, Brad was part of Y Combinator Continuity and led finance and operations initiatives at Dropbox. We discussed the shift from chat-based AI to agents that can take action, and what that means for software and the broader economy. We also covered how these systems are being built and deployed, how tools like Codex are changing how work gets done, and what this next phase of AI unlocks for startups

Ron Conway is the Founder and a Managing Partner of SV Angel. He has been an active angel investor since the mid-90s and has received wide recognition for his role in the tech ecosystem. He has been included on Vanity Fair’s 100 most influential people in the Information Age, awarded Best Angel at the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards, and has been named on Forbes Magazine's Midas list of top “deal-makers” since 2011. Prior to founding SV Angel, Ron was with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions (1973-1979), Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President, and CEO (1979-1990),

In this episode, the team behind Y Combinator reflects on what has — and hasn’t — changed since the early days of YC, and how AI is reshaping what it means to be a founder. They discuss how they evaluate builders now, why execution still matters more than competition, and what YC is prioritizing as the startup landscape evolves. At its core, the mission remains the same: increase the number of great startups in the world. Garry Tan is president and CEO of Y Combinator and a group partner. He was a partner at Y Combinator from 2011 to 2015, where he built key parts of the YC experience for foun