Larry Cheng, co-founder and managing partner at Volition Capital, joins us to explore why capital efficiency is more important than ever for founders. He explains how capital discipline can coexist with high growth, shares lessons from backing Chewy early, and breaks down why the best companies know how to build without overspending.

We also dig into the resurgence of CapEx in frontier tech. Larry shares how Volition is thinking about hardware-enabled SaaS, and offers a framework for evaluating return on capital — whether you're acquiring users, building hardware, or rolling up businesses.

We also covered Circle’s explosive IPO, the Rippling–Deel legal battle, Alpha School’s AI-powered academic results, and Anthropic’s appointment of a national security advisor to its board.

Quinn Slack, co-founder and CEO of Sourcegraph, joins Kyle to explore how AI is transforming software development and why the “AI coding agent” is becoming the center of gravity in the modern engineering stack. Quinn walks through Sourcegraph’s new tools—Cody and AMP—and explains how model-product fit, not feature checklists, is what will define winners in this fast-moving market.

They discuss why Sourcegraph made counterintuitive bets like hiding model selection and emphasizing multi-tenant design, how customer trust enables bold product choices, and why building in sync with new model capabilities is more important than chasing traditional differentiation.

We also covered Anysphere’s $900 million fundraise at a $9.9 billion valuation, Anduril’s $2.5 billion round at a $30.5 billion valuation, OpenAI’s court battle over chat log retention, and Anthropic’s launch of Claude Gov models for classified U.S. environments.

Hermeus just became the first private company to fly a hypersonic-capable aircraft — and it’s only the beginning.

Today, AJ Piplica, founder and CEO of Hermeus, joins to break down the first successful flight of the Quarterhorse Mk 1, explain what hypersonic flight actually is, and share why this milestone could reshape both national defense and commercial aviation.

We also covered Reddit’s lawsuit against Anthropic, Windsurf’s model access problems, Bolttech’s $147M fundraise, and Mistral’s new AI coding assistant

Reddit has always been a cultural force online — but today, it's also something else: a core piece of the internet’s AI infrastructure.

In this episode, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman joins Eric to talk about the company’s first year as a public company, why Reddit still feels like it’s just getting started, and how it’s navigating a new era where AI-generated content is flooding the internet. They discuss Reddit’s evolution from a link aggregator to a community engine, the irony of becoming an LLM training backbone, and why Huffman thinks Reddit can preserve its human core even as it grows.

We also covered recent headlines including SpaceX’s projected $15.5 billion in revenue for 2025, Meta’s billion-dollar deal to extend the life of an Illinois nuclear plant, Colossal Labs’ plan to release dire wolf howls later this year, and Amazon’s newly announced film about the OpenAI boardroom drama.

Today on Tech Today, Kyle is joined by Zavain Dar, founder and managing partner of Dimension, to talk about what he calls the “self-inflicted corrosion” of American hegemony. In a viral tweet, Zavain laid out two pillars of the U.S.’s strength, immigrant-driven innovation and global alliances, and argued that both are being systematically undermined. In this episode, he explains why the U.S. is pouring concrete over the very wellspring of scientific and technological leadership that made it dominant for decades.

They also discuss the immigrant roots of America’s most valuable companies, the geopolitical dynamics forcing allies to hedge toward China, and how elite researchers and founders are starting to bypass the U.S. altogether.

We also covered Neuralink’s $650 million raise, xAI’s $5 billion debt deal, IBM’s Seek AI acquisition, and TechCrunch’s exit from Europe.

Immigration isn’t just a humanitarian issue—it’s a strategic lever for American innovation. Jeremy Neufeld, Director of Immigration Policy at the Institute for Progress, joins us to explain how student visas, OPT, and H-1Bs quietly power the U.S. tech and startup ecosystem. He breaks down why high-skilled immigration is essential to America’s edge in AI, what a modern-day “Project Paperclip” might look like, and how visa policy missteps are helping competitors like China.

We also get into why 70% of top AI startup founders came through the student visa pipeline—and why only a fraction get to stay. Plus, Jeremy lays out the path forward for building a more talent-friendly immigration system that strengthens national security rather than weakens it.

We also covered a new potential dwarf planet beyond Neptune, Grammarly’s $1B revenue-based financing deal, Andreessen’s latest AI megadeal, and China’s bid to lead the humanoid robot market.

Marc Freed-Finnegan, co-founder and CEO of Chalk, joins us to talk about why AI infrastructure needs to shift from training to inference—and how Chalk is powering sub-5ms pipelines for customers like Whatnot, MoneyLion, and Sunrun. He explains why Chalk is taking on Databricks, why fresh data is more valuable than ever, and what it means to run Python at real-time scale.

We also dive into Marc’s fintech roots, Chalk’s origins, and the company’s approach to supporting complex ML use cases across fraud detection, content moderation, and clean energy. Plus, Marc shares his take on why infrastructure—not models—is often the biggest bottleneck in getting AI into production.

Finally, we covered Amazon’s first AI licensing deal with The New York Times, Meta’s XR partnership with Anduril, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s warning about AI job losses, and a $38M raise for grid tech startup Heron Power.

In this episode, Kyle talks with Sam Bowman, editor of Works in Progress and Head of Publishing at Stripe, about one of the most important but under-discussed ideas in energy policy: the regulatory science that made nuclear energy unaffordable. Sam unpacks the origins and impact of the Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiation model and the ALARA regulatory principle, and explains how they led to decades of cost overruns and stagnation in nuclear power.

They also dive into the editorial mission behind Works in Progress, how it surfaces “new and underrated ideas to improve the world,” and why optimism, practicality, and longform rigor are at the heart of the magazine’s approach. We also covered Salesforce’s Informatica acquisition, AI models sabotaging shutdown scripts, shrinking entry-level roles in tech, and Apple’s plans for smart glasses.