Liam Fedus and Dogus Cubuk are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Periodic Labs, a startup building “synthesis superintelligence.” In practice, that means an AI system that closes the loop between hypothesis, experiment, and learning.

Liam previously led post-training at OpenAI, where he was one of the creators of ChatGPT. Dogus spent years at Google DeepMind leading a large team of chemists and materials scientists. Together, they’ve brought those two trajectories to bear on a problem that has stymied science for decades: not just discovering new materials, but making them reliably and at scale.

In this conversation, we explore the limits of language models, the commercialization bottleneck in materials science, why Periodic chose high-temperature superconductors as its first target, and what Liam learned from watching ChatGPT go from an internal product to one of the most successful products of all time.

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Every timestamp

(00:00) Intro

(02:05) Periodic’s mission

(03:14) What it takes to build a synthetic superintelligence

(04:48) Why “thinkism” falls short

(05:46) Why Periodic is pursuing high-temperature superconductors

(07:21) How Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity

(09:36) Why synthesizing new materials is so difficult

(16:44) Dogus’s path to AI

(20:18) Liam’s path to AI

(23:28) Lessons from launching ChatGPT

(25:24) Why Dogus and Liam chose each other

(27:01) How Periodic attracts top talent

(29:50) Inside an experimental loop at Periodic

(35:10) What AI learns across experiments

(40:10) What Periodic builds versus buys

(44:37) Balancing diversity and depth across experiments

(49:23) The difference in LLM performance on math vs. science

(51:26) Why Periodic doesn’t depend on better models

(53:20) Periodic’s short-term goals

(54:09) The competitive landscape

(55:39) Final meditations

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Liam and Dogus’s complete reading list

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (recommended by Liam): https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359
• Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (recommended by Dogus): https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Lord-Science-Albert-Einstein/dp/0192806726

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Other resources

• Periodic Labs: https://periodic.com
• Bell Labs: https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs
• QBasic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic
• Google DeepMind: https://deepmind.google
• Google Brain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Brain
• OpenAI: https://openai.com

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Where to find Liam Fedus

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-fedus-26547811

X: https://x.com/LiamFedus

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Where to find Dogus Cubuk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekin-dogus-cubuk-9148b8114

X: https://x.com/ekindogus

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Scott Morton is the founder and CEO of Revel, a software platform for testing and controlling complex hardware systems. Before founding the company in 2024, Scott spent nearly a decade at SpaceX building control software for Falcon 9 and Starship. That experience helped him recognize a broader problem: while rockets, nuclear systems, supersonic aircraft, and other advanced machines have grown increasingly sophisticated, the software used to test and control them is often fragmented and decades old. Revel was created to close that gap. The company has raised $180 million, was reportedly valued at just over $1 billion, and counts Impulse Space and Radiant Nuclear among its customers. Its platform scales from small benchtop tests to industrial systems with hundreds of thousands of telemetry channels. Revel has also created its own programming language, RevelCode, designed to combine performance and accessibility with the runtime safety required for high-stakes physical systems.

In our conversation, we explore:

• How AI can accelerate high-consequence software teams without replacing rigorous testing and review
• Why hardware test and industrial-control software still relies on tools created in the 1980s and 1990s
• What Scott took from Elon Musk about betting on teams before you know the answers
• Why Revel created its own programming language
• The “runtime safe” philosophy: what it means and why it matters
• Revel’s one-to-many model and the hardware frontiers it’s touching
• The strategic case behind Revel’s $150 million Series B
• How Revel’s edge showed up in an industrial-control bake-off
• How Scott hopes to preserve Revel’s engineering culture as it scales toward 500 people
• Revel’s long-term mission – and what it means for the hardware renaissance

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(02:04) Why no one will vibe-code a nuclear reactor

(04:15) Revel’s engineering edge

(05:27) What Revel actually does

(06:34) Why industrial software has stagnated

(07:52) Why previous startups couldn’t crack it

(10:26) The limits of building control software in-house at SpaceX

(15:20) Lessons from nearly a decade at SpaceX

(20:22) Why Revel built RevelCode

(24:46) Will Revel open-source the language?

(25:25) Scott’s early projects and builder mentality

(32:28) Where his drive comes from

(33:50) What Scott took from Elon – and what he chose to leave behind

(36:02) Scott’s standards as CEO

(38:56) Scaling from small tests to industrial systems

(43:40) Deploying Revel and the hiring bottleneck

(45:23) How Revel finds and assesses talent

(46:21) Emerging frontiers in hardware

(49:36) Revel’s unusually smooth trajectory

(51:05) How AI fits into Revel’s platform

(52:42) Revel’s long-term vision

(54:18) Final meditations

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Follow Scott Morton

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-morton-68334a15

X: https://x.com/scottgmorton

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Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/an-ex-spacex-engineer-on-elon-musk

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Farooq Malik is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a financial infrastructure company powered by stablecoins. Growing up in an immigrant family, Farooq saw firsthand the friction involved in moving money across borders. Alongside co-founder Charles Yoo-Naut, Farooq spent years building infrastructure before stablecoins became mainstream, betting that tokenized money would eventually become a foundational layer of the global financial system. Today, Rain powers card issuance, payments, and other financial products built on stablecoin rails, helping companies move money faster and operate across markets.

In our conversation, we explore:

• How stablecoins combine the advantages of cash and electronic money
• The barriers that still make moving money across borders expensive and inefficient
• The parallels between being an immigrant and being an entrepreneur
• How Farooq and Charles met through On Deck and decided to build together
• What Rain gained by building before the market was ready
• How Rain earned the trust of early partners who later became customers
• What The Art of War taught Farooq about patience
• The misconception that stablecoins are only for emerging markets
• Why the payments market is big enough for multiple winners
• Why he believes Rain’s infrastructure is well positioned for a future shaped by AI agents

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Thank you to the partners who make this possible

Brex: The intelligent finance platform.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(02:46) An overview of Rain and global-first financial infrastructure

(06:57) The barriers to moving money and how technology can reduce them

(15:34) How stablecoins behave like cash

(18:46) The economic opportunity of a more efficient monetary system

(22:06) How Farooq’s childhood as an immigrant shaped him

(26:00) Farooq’s first entrepreneurial venture

(29:11) Lessons from Farooq’s career before founding Rain

(36:09) Connecting with Charles through On Deck

(39:51) From Sign and Wire to Rain

(42:18) Why Rain bet on stablecoins

(47:25) How a Rain card works

(49:15) How Rain thinks about its business

(51:12) Lessons from The Art of War

(54:30) Rain’s approach to hiring and management

(55:47) Why the US is a stablecoin hub

(59:10) Why there’s room for more than Stripe

(1:03:39)How Farooq and Charles stay aligned with limited meetings

(1:05:54) Rain’s most critical mantras

(1:08:56) Why Rain is ready for AI agents

(1:12:30) Final meditations

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Follow Farooq Malik

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhmalik

X: https://x.com/rooqster

Website: https://fhmalik.com

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Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/38x-in-ten-months-inside-one-of-fintechs

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Yash Patil is the 23-year-old founder and CEO of Applied Compute, a $1.3 billion company helping businesses train custom AI models on their own data: smaller, cheaper, and purpose-built for the work they actually do. Before founding the company, Yash dropped out of Stanford and spent two years at OpenAI working on post-training infrastructure and Codex. He left with one core conviction: every company that runs its critical workflows on someone else’s model is building on shifting sand. Applied Compute is his answer to that problem, already serving customers including DoorDash, Cognition, and Mercor.

In our conversation, we explore:

• Why “own or be owned” is becoming existential for any company that relies on frontier AI models
• What it was like inside OpenAI the weekend the board fired, and then reinstated, its CEO
• Why post-training is where competitive advantage is now being built, and what reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards actually is
• Why evals have become the new production environment, and why companies will never share them with frontier providers
• How a specialized model built for DoorDash outperformed frontier models on a narrow, high-value task
• Why cost, not capability, is now the primary driver pushing companies toward custom models
• Why Yash believes AI’s transformation of the economy will unfold over decades, and why near-term fears about mass job displacement are misplaced

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Thank you to the partners who make this possible

Brex: The intelligent finance platform.

Guru: The AI source of truth for work.

Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.

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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/own-or-be-owned-why-every-company

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Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction

(03:50) Fable 5 and the case for owning your own models

(09:22) Why Applied Compute is betting on custom AI models

(12:30) Yash's early influences and first projects

(17:42) His brief time building at Stanford

(19:29) Leaving Stanford for OpenAI

(25:58) Inside OpenAI during Sam Altman's firing

(28:18) What Yash admires about Sam Altman

(29:43) Teaching models to reason

(35:39) The core insight behind Applied Compute

(39:40) How Applied Compute works with its customers

(45:55) Why model training never ends

(48:56) Why not every task needs a frontier model

(51:25) The culture and people of Applied Compute

(54:50) Applied Compute's training infrastructure

(58:43) The coming compute crunch and other predictions

(1:03:48) Final meditations

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Follow Yash Patil

X: https://x.com/ypatil125

Website: https://yashpatil.me

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yash-s-patil

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Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/own-or-be-owned-why-every-company⁠

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Bryon Hargis is the co-founder and CEO of Castelion, a defense startup building low-cost hypersonic missiles designed to be manufactured at scale. Before founding Castelion, Bryon spent more than a decade at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and nearly six years at SpaceX, where he worked on national security space programs and saw firsthand how iterative engineering and manufacturing speed could reshape aerospace. Castelion’s first missile, Blackbeard, is slated for integration on the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet in roughly a year.

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In our conversation, we explore:

• Why Bryon believes building missiles is paradoxically essential to maintaining peace
• The game theory behind warfare and why tit-for-tat strategies require credible middle-ground responses
• How China’s 2021 hypersonic test revealed not just a capability gap but a manufacturing and cost advantage
• Why traditional aerospace processes—optimized for low risk and high cost—can’t compete with rapid iteration
• What Bryon learned in his first week at SpaceX (after 12 years in traditional aerospace)
• Why building a carrier-based, air-launched hypersonic missile as a first product was the hard but right choice
• How focusing on manufacturability and cost over maximum capability can produce more effective deterrence
• Why the person who adapts faster in warfare always wins, and how that shapes Castelion’s philosophy

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Thank you to the partners who make this possible

.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.

Ahrefs Brand Radar: Find your brand in AI results.

Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(04:01) Why America needs hypersonic missiles

(07:13) China’s edge in hypersonics

(12:05) The missing middle ground in deterrence

(18:05) Preventing warhead ambiguity

(19:40) How hypersonics differ from ballistic missiles

(25:05) The economics of defensive vs. offensive systems

(28:21) How SpaceX differs from traditional aerospace

(37:40) Why Bryon chose to build in defense over space

(42:42) Key factors that drove Castelion’s success

(48:28) Designing Blackbeard, Castelion’s first hypersonic missile

(1:01:06) The importance of lower costs and quicker manufacturing

(1:10:04) Book recommendations

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Follow Bryon Hargis

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hargsb

X: https://x.com/hargsb

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Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/what-america-is-missing-between-sanctions

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Davide Asnaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Diode, a Brooklyn-based startup using AI to design and manufacture circuit boards in the United States.

Before Diode, Davide worked on Apple’s Special Projects Group and spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen studying Asia’s electronics manufacturing ecosystem. That experience convinced him that PCB design, despite powering everything from smartphones and satellites to medical devices and autonomous systems, remained one of the most overlooked layers of the tech stack.

Since its founding just two years ago, Diode has landed Physical Intelligence and Saronic as customers and partnered with Anthropic to help Claude become a better electrical engineer. The company’s ultimate ambition: to make hardware as nimble as software.

In our conversation, we explore:

1. Why the West outsourced PCB manufacturing to Asia in the 2000s and why bringing it back matters for American competitiveness
2. What Shenzhen’s manufacturing culture does better than Silicon Valley (and what the U.S. can learn from it)
3. How Diode’s models can one-shot much of schematic design and compress hardware timelines from months to weeks
4. The three-week YC pivot that transformed Diode from a design validation tool into a full-stack manufacturer
5. Why circuit boards are the “forgotten middle child” between silicon and software
6. How Diode partners with Anthropic to make LLMs better electrical engineers
7. What it takes to build a hardware company in 2025—and why the talent bar must stay incredibly high
8. How Italian, American, and Chinese cultures shaped Davide’s approach to entrepreneurship and manufacturing

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Thank you to the partners who make this possible

.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.

Guru: The AI source of truth for work.

Brex: The intelligent finance platform.

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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/our-goal-is-to-build-an-electrical-engineer

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(04:15) Why Davide calls himself a copper merchant

(05:53) Diode’s mission to rebuild PCB manufacturing in the U.S.

(07:58) What success looks like

(09:00) Growing up in northern Italy and spending a year in Minnesota

(13:14) Why Italy produces fewer venture-backed founders

(15:30) Why Hong Kong accelerated Davide’s learning

(19:09) Silicon Valley vs. Shenzhen

(22:05) What Davide learned in Apple’s Special Projects Team

(24:11) Why Davide left Apple after two years

(26:54) Meeting his co-founder, Lenny

(29:32) How Davide uncovered the need for better PCB design and manufacturing

(33:23) PCB manufacturing in Asia, and Diode’s approach

(41:29) The YC pivot that changed Diode’s business

(44:39) Inside Diode’s customer journey

(48:10) Where the value is in electronics manufacturing, and Davide’s AGI thesis

(51:30) What separates a working board from a great one

(55:32) Where Diode fits in the electronics stack

(59:55) Diode’s early near-death moment and long-term vision

(1:02:30) Diode’s exceptionally high bar for hiring

(1:04:48) Where Davide gets his best ideas

(1:07:00) Final meditations

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Follow Davide Asnaghi

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/d-asnaghi

X: https://x.com/davideasnaghi

GitHub: https://hexdae.github.io

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Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/our-goal-is-to-build-an-electrical-engineer⁠

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.