Radical Talks

Radical Ventures

Going beyond AI headlines with the researchers, founders, and investors shaping what comes next.

  1. 3 jun

    Talent Flows in AI

    Yvonne Likomanova, Senior Director of Talent at Radical Ventures, digs into what's really driving the AI talent flows. Drawing on a career that spans Stripe, Cruise, Applied Intuition, Yvonne shares where the world's best researchers and engineers are setting their sights. The conversation covers why elite talent is leaving frontier labs for a new class of research-first institutions, what candidates are really optimizing for beyond compensation, and what founders need to get right today to compete for the people who will define their company's trajectory.

    40 min.

  2. 6 mei

    Building-AI Native Advertising

    Michael Rubenstein, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Firsthand, joins Radical's Molly Welch to dig into what's broken in digital advertising — a trillion-dollar-plus industry that AI isn't just improving, it's replacing entirely. Drawing on a career that spans DoubleClick, AppNexus, and now Firsthand, Michael makes the case for why the future belongs to brand agents, not ads. The conversation covers how Firsthand's infrastructure meets consumers at the moment of intent, why the real bottleneck is structural rather than technical, and what has to be true for this new model to go mainstream without leaving brands behind.

    39 min.

  3. 22 apr

    Powering the AI Era

    Varun Sivaram, Founder & CEO of Emerald AI, joins Radical Partners Molly Welch and Rob Toews to explore what's actually holding back AI infrastructure. While the conversation around AI bottlenecks tends to focus on chips and models, Varun explains why the binding constraint is power, from grid capacity limits and interconnection backlogs to the widening gap between compute demand and energy supply. Drawing on his path from senior energy official in the Biden White House to CTO of India's largest solar company to founding Emerald AI, the discussion unpacks why the fix is software, not just more generation, how Emerald's Conductor platform turns data centers into flexible, grid-responsive assets, and what has to be true for AI infrastructure to scale without breaking the grid.

    52 min.

  4. 25 mrt

    Building an AI-Native Startup

    When Ori Eldarov started Offdeal, he wasn't thinking about AI as a productivity hack. He was thinking about what it would take for a small team to compete with firms that had been doing this for decades. Thirteen people. Nearly $10 million in their first full year. This founder-first take was recorded during our October AI Founders Masterclass, before agentic workflows entered the mainstream conversation. The technology has moved fast but the principles remain the same.

    35 min.

  5. 25 feb

    Radical Talks, Masterclass Edition: Arsham Ghahramani on Understanding the Venture Mindset

    Arsham Ghahramani, CEO and Co-Founder of Ribbon, joins Radical Partner Sanjana Basu to unpack fundraising from the founder’s side of the table. With a PhD in AI focused on cancer research and early experience scaling recommendation systems at Amazon, Arsham brings both technical depth and operating perspective to the conversation. Now he leads Ribbon, an AI hiring platform that has conducted over one million interviews and raised $8M+ to date. They break down what actually drives venture conviction, how founders should think about fund theses and stages, and why investor relationships start long before a formal raise. From the reality of two-seconds-per-slide pitch reviews to navigating process opacity with clarity, this episode offers a pragmatic look at how to approach capital with strategy and confidence.

    43 min.

  6. 11 feb

    Radical Talks, Masterclass Edition: Jim Fan on The Future of Robotics and Embodied AI

    Jim Fan, Director and Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA, joins Radical Partner Molly Welch to explore what's holding back embodied AI and robotics. While large language models have advanced rapidly, Jim explains why progress in the physical world depends less on ever-larger models and more on solving fundamental problems: exploration-driven learning, scalable data pipelines, and synthetic simulation. Drawing on his journey from OpenAI to leading NVIDIA's Project GR00T, they discuss the robotics data bottleneck, why foundation models matter, and what must happen before robotics reaches its "GPT-4 moment."

    45 min.

  7. 21 jan

    Beyond Chips: Rare Earth Magnets and the Future of AI Infrastructure

    John Maslin, CEO and Co-Founder of Vulcan Elements, joins Radical Partner Molly Welch to unpack the overlooked physical infrastructure behind AI. While chips dominate most conversations, John explains why rare earth magnets are a foundational dependency across data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, robotics, EVs, and defense systems, and why today’s globally concentrated supply chain poses real economic and national security risk. Drawing on his work rebuilding domestic magnet manufacturing, the discussion explores what it takes to reshore critical industrial capacity, why execution matters more than policy alone, and how physical constraints will increasingly shape AI at scale.

    30 min.

  8. 7 jan

    Radical Talks, Masterclass Edition: Jonathan Frankle on the Future of Enterprise AI

    Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle joins Radical Partner Vin Sachidananda for a special conversation from Radical Ventures’ AI Masterclass Series. Together, they explore what it takes to move AI from academic insight to real-world, enterprise-scale deployment. Drawing on Jonathan’s experience co-founding Mosaic ML and now leading research at Databricks, the discussion covers why early efficiency gains feel “quaint,” how open-source serves as scientific proof, and why evaluation remains the missing infrastructure for enterprise AI adoption. A practical conversation for founders and technical leaders building AI systems that need to perform in production.

    54 min.
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Going beyond AI headlines with the researchers, founders, and investors shaping what comes next.

Informatie

  • Maker
    Radical Ventures
  • Jaren actief
    2020 - 2026
  • Afleveringen
    24
  • Beoordeling
    Veilig
  • Copyright
    © Radical Ventures
  • Website van aflevering
    Radical Talks