5 Year Frontier

Daniel Darling
  • 5.0 (7)
  • ENTREPRENEURSHIP
5 Year Frontier

Fast forward 5 years to view the future of an industry through the eyes of its most innovative entrepreneurs and CEOs. Learn what key industries could look like in 5 years. Witness the evolution through the eyes of leading CEOs. Discover who gets disrupted and who wins big. Hear of mind blowing technology set to reinvent all the rules. Reshape your mental model to thrive in the change ahead. Delivered as short (~30 mins), insight-packed discussions, that will spark imagination and leave listeners with a preview of what lies ahead.

  1. #35: AI Employees, Managing Agent Workforces, Crypto Micropayments, End Of SaaS, Rewiring Developing Nations and The Future of Agents w/ Ema CEO Surojit Chatterjee

    5D AGO

    #35: AI Employees, Managing Agent Workforces, Crypto Micropayments, End Of SaaS, Rewiring Developing Nations and The Future of Agents w/ Ema CEO Surojit Chatterjee

    The future of AI employees. We cover training and managing an AI workforce, instant agentic collaboration, new AI economics, the death of SaaS, AI lifting up the developing world and the future of agents. Surojit Chatterjee is CEO of Ema — short for Enterprise Machine Assistant. Ema is on a mission to reimagine how work gets done in large organizations by building “universal AI employees.” These aren’t just standalone chatbots — they’re sophisticated, mesh-like networks of specialized agents that can autonomously execute workflows across departments like HR, customer support, sales, and compliance. What sets Ema apart is its no-code, fully agentic platform — allowing non-technical users to configure, onboard, and manage AI employees using only natural language instructions. With over 150 pre-built agents and a proprietary ensemble model called EmaFusion that orchestrates over 100 large language models, the company is pushing the edge of what’s possible in enterprise AI. Ema last raised a $50M Series A led by Accel and has become a rapid riser in the AI landscape. Surojit has one of the best product resumes in tech. He was most recently Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, helping scale one of the most important companies in the crypto economy. Before that, he led product teams at Google for nearly a decade, overseeing products across Mobile Ads, Shopping, and Search, and earlier served as Chief Product Officer at Flipkart, where he helped build India’s leading e-commerce platform. In addition to building Ema, Surojit is also an active angel investor, backing startups like Udemy and Palantir. He holds a Master’s in Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo, and an MBA from MIT Sloan. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    32 min
  2. #34: Agents In The Enterprise, Cloning Experts, Organizational Memory, Grounded Language Models, Thin AI Orgs, and The Future of Work w/ Contextual AI CTO Aman Singh

    APR 1

    #34: Agents In The Enterprise, Cloning Experts, Organizational Memory, Grounded Language Models, Thin AI Orgs, and The Future of Work w/ Contextual AI CTO Aman Singh

    Aman Singh is Co-founder and CTO of Contextual AI, a company helping enterprises deploy AI and agents with accuracy, control, and safety. Founded by the team that pioneered Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Contextual is building next-generation AI that is deeply specialized to each business — answering with the context of your organization, not just the internet. With customers like Qualcomm and over $100 million raised from Greycroft, Lightspeed, Bain Capital Ventures, and Nvidia, Contextual is fast becoming one of the most important startups in enterprise AI. Aman leads the company’s technology development and brings a deep background in research engineering. He previously worked at Hugging Face, a leading force in open-source AI, and at Meta’s FAIR lab, where he contributed to the development of RAG and cutting-edge multimodal models. He holds a master’s in computer science from NYU, where he focused on the intersection of language and vision. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    36 min
  3. #33: Autonomous Cars And Robots, Leapfrogging Tesla, Real World Models, AI Training Simulators, and the Future of Autonomy w/ Helm.ai CEO Vlad Voroninski

    MAR 18

    #33: Autonomous Cars And Robots, Leapfrogging Tesla, Real World Models, AI Training Simulators, and the Future of Autonomy w/ Helm.ai CEO Vlad Voroninski

    The future of autonomous driving and robotics. We cover simulating physical environments, helping car makers leapfrog Tesla, real world AI models, the economics of self driving cars, autonomous mines, and the future of autonomy. Vlad Voroninski is CEO and co-founder of Helm.ai. An early pioneer in training AI for autonomous cars, robotics, and aviation, Vlad has been instrumental in shifting the industry toward advanced simulation and synthetic data—a radical alternative to the traditional reliance on large-scale, manually labeled training sets. Helm.ai has raised over $100M from top investors, including Freeman Group and Goodyear Ventures, and works with major automakers like Honda and Volkswagen. Vlad Voroninski, Helm.ai's co-founder and CEO is a UC Berkeley PhD, former MIT instructor, and author of 20+ research papers on machine learning. He has been at the forefront of unsupervised learning—an approach he believes will define the future of AI. Before founding Helm.ai, Vlad was Chief Scientist at Sift Security, a machine learning cybersecurity startup that was later acquired by Netskope in 2018. After that, he set out to build Helm.ai, rethinking how AI can be trained for autonomous systems. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    25 min
  4. #32: Breaking The $4T Healthcare Cartel, AI-led Radical Transparency, Insurance Misalignment, Patient Power, and the Future of the US Healthcare System w/ Cobi Gantz CEO Chapter

    MAR 4

    #32: Breaking The $4T Healthcare Cartel, AI-led Radical Transparency, Insurance Misalignment, Patient Power, and the Future of the US Healthcare System w/ Cobi Gantz CEO Chapter

    The future of the US healthcare system. In it we cover the mission for radical transparency, challenging entrenched insurance providers, personalized healthcare, and AI’s empowerment of patient choice. Cobi Gantz is CEO of Chapter, a company revolutionizing how Americans navigate the complexities of Medicare and optimize their healthcare coverage. Founded in 2020, Chapter has rapidly become a leader in providing personalized, technology-driven Medicare guidance, aiming to simplify decision-making for seniors across the nation. They have taken on the enormous task of bringing greater transparency to the complex and multi-layered US healthcare system for the benefit of consumers. The company has raised over $100M in funding from investors such as XYZ Venture Capital, Susa and Marverick. Before founding Chapter, Cobi spent 6 years at Palantir, a $230B big data, analytics, and AI company embedded into the public and government sector. Cobi holds degrees from University Pennsylvania, an Economics degree from Wharton, and Masters in Public Policy from Cambridge. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    27 min
  5. #31: Unlocking 90% of Data, AI Bottlenecks, DeepSeek vs. Stargate, Precision Forecasting, and the Future of Data Processing w/ Voltron Data CEO Craig Dunham

    FEB 18

    #31: Unlocking 90% of Data, AI Bottlenecks, DeepSeek vs. Stargate, Precision Forecasting, and the Future of Data Processing w/ Voltron Data CEO Craig Dunham

    The future of data infrastructure. We cover the explosion in compute demand, the petabytes of untapped enterprise data, energy-efficient GPUs, DeepSeek, the $500B Stargate project, and how AI is transforming data processing. Craig Dunham is CEO of Voltron Data, a company at the forefront of accelerating data processing for AI, analytics, and enterprise-scale workloads. Voltron provides the infrastructure necessary to handle enormous amounts of data — transforming bottlenecks into breakthroughs. By championing open-source frameworks like Apache Arrow, Voltron is building the connective tissue that allows businesses to process data at orders-of-magnitude speed and efficiency, reshaping industries from finance to healthcare to national security — partnering with the likes of Snowflake and Meta. Voltron have established themselves as a key part of the AI infrastructure stack and have raised a total of $110M from the likes of Coatue, LightSpeed, Google Ventures and BlackRock. With a deep background in scaling data infrastructure businesses, Craig is Voltron’s CEO. Before Voltron Data, Craig was the CEO of Lumar, a leading SaaS technical SEO platform. Prior to that, he held significant roles including General Manager at Guild Education and Seismic, where he led the integration of Seismic’s acquisition of The Savo Group and drove go-to-market strategies in the financial services sector. Craig began his career in investment banking with Citi and Lehman Brothers before transitioning into technology. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    28 min
  6. #30: DeepSeek Deployed, How Open Source Wins, The Small Model Revolution, AI Infrastructure Wars, and the Future of AI w/ Fireworks AI CEO Lin Qiao

    FEB 4

    #30: DeepSeek Deployed, How Open Source Wins, The Small Model Revolution, AI Infrastructure Wars, and the Future of AI w/ Fireworks AI CEO Lin Qiao

    The future of AI infrastructure. We cover Open Source supremacy, DeepSeek disruption, building small expert models, and staying ahead of the blazing pace of AI innovation. Lin Qiao is the CEO and co-founder of Fireworks AI, a company pioneering scalable AI infrastructure to help businesses build, customize, and deploy AI models and applications with speed and efficiency. Fireworks provides seamless access to over 100 AI models, including those from OpenAI, DeepSeek, and other leading providers, making enterprise AI adoption faster and more flexible. Founded in 2022, Fireworks AI has already gained high-profile customers such as DoorDash, Verizon, and Upwork. Backed by Sequoia, the company has raised $77 million to date and is currently valued at $550 million. Lin brings a wealth of experience in AI infrastructure and engineering leadership. She has held key technical roles at IBM and LinkedIn, but is best known for her tenure at Meta, where she led a team of 300+ world-class engineers in AI frameworks and platforms. She played a pivotal role in scaling PyTorch, deploying it across Facebook’s global data centers and billions of devices, cementing it as one of the most widely used open-source AI frameworks today. Lin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara and a Master’s in Computer Science from Fudan University in China. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    28 min
  7. #29: Floating Data Centers, Decarbonized Compute, New AGI Infrastructure, Foundation Models for Molecules, and the Future of Materials w/ Orbital Materials CEO Jonathan Godwin

    JAN 29

    #29: Floating Data Centers, Decarbonized Compute, New AGI Infrastructure, Foundation Models for Molecules, and the Future of Materials w/ Orbital Materials CEO Jonathan Godwin

    The future of material science. In it we talk about discovering new materials with AI, carbon neutral compute, data centers in space, and the convergence of biology and materials. Jonathan Godwin CEO of Orbital Materials, a material sciences company that leverages AI to discovery and design of advanced materials, particularly for clean energy, carbon capture, and data center applications. Founded in 2022 out of London, Orbital have raised over $20M in funding from the likes of Radical Ventures, Nvidia, and Toyota. They have already developed the world fastest and most accurate AI model for simulating advanced materials, including their own proprietary foundation model. The startup has also entered a multi-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop new data center decarbonization and efficiency technologies. Jonathan’s impressive background includes a tenure as a senior researcher at Google DeepMind, where he honed his expertise in artificial intelligence. He holds advanced degrees in physics and computational sciences, with a degree from University College London. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    28 min
  8. #28: Advertising On Autopilot, End of Cookies, Privacy-First Marketing, Next Gen Agencies, and the Future of Online Advertising w/ Prescient AI CEO Mike True.

    12/03/2024

    #28: Advertising On Autopilot, End of Cookies, Privacy-First Marketing, Next Gen Agencies, and the Future of Online Advertising w/ Prescient AI CEO Mike True.

    The future of online advertising. In it we cover co-pilot for marketers, brand ecosystems, disrupting ad agencies and a privacy first internet. Mike True is CEO of Prescient AI, a marketing technology company advancing the use of predictive AI models to maximize paid advertising efficiency and return on spend. Their technology works counter to how $700B in online ad spend is done today, by not relying on tracking users via cookies and instead building a platform to help marketers succeed when a privacy-first internet arises and cookies go away. With the most precise solution in the market Prescient can forecast future campaign performance across multiple channels three months out with a 90% level of accuracy. Calling over 100 iconic eCommerce brands as their customers Prescient has raised $20M from VC firms such as Headline, Blumberg, as well as the first check from us here at focal. CEO Mike True has been helping brands take advantage of AI and analytics solutions throughout his career prior to starting Prescient, working at IBM, Oracle, and App Annie. Mike has become a great friend and a founder held in high-regard as reshaping the online advertising industry. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    21 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

Fast forward 5 years to view the future of an industry through the eyes of its most innovative entrepreneurs and CEOs. Learn what key industries could look like in 5 years. Witness the evolution through the eyes of leading CEOs. Discover who gets disrupted and who wins big. Hear of mind blowing technology set to reinvent all the rules. Reshape your mental model to thrive in the change ahead. Delivered as short (~30 mins), insight-packed discussions, that will spark imagination and leave listeners with a preview of what lies ahead.

Information

  • Creator
    Daniel Darling
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2025
  • Episodes
    36
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Daniel Darling
  • Show Website
    5 Year Frontier

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