Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth

Marina Mogilko

The world's top CEOs and AI founders explain what's coming next and how you can get ahead. Silicon Valley Girl is a weekly AI and technology podcast from Silicon Valley hosted by female founder and angel investor Marina Mogilko, covering practical strategies for career growth, mastering AI tools, entrepreneurship and making money with AI. For startup founders, professionals and creators who want to stay ahead in the AI era.

  1. 12h ago

    SVP at Adobe Express: Why AI Content Doesn't Get Views | Govind Balakrishnan

    Govind Balakrishnan is the SVP running Adobe Express. He's spent 20 years at Adobe and watched creation move from desktop to mobile to social feeds. We sat down at Cannes to talk about why AI content doesn't get views. His answer: everyone blames the algorithms, but it's humans who are tuning it out. AI now gets you 60–70% of the creative work in minutes. The last 20–30%, where you add your own taste and voice, is the part people actually watch. He also told me why he expects the industry to need more designers 3 years from now. Stay till the end for his advice to designers who are already losing clients to AI.

    28 min

  2. 1d ago

    Musk's Early Investor: What the Next 3 Years Actually Look Like | Steve Jurvetson

    Steve Jurvetson has worked with Elon Musk for 29 years and was one of the earliest investors in SpaceX and Tesla, back when space wasn't even a category for venture capital. Today he runs Future Ventures, where he bets on nuclear fusion, epigenetic editing, and analog AI chips. We recorded this live on stage, with audience Q&A at the end. We cover: Why compute has compounded for 130 years, and what that curve says about the next 3 yearsSuperintelligence odds: why Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark gives it a 30% chance of arriving next yearWhat 29 years next to Elon taught Steve: focus, learning loops, and spotting talent (Tesla collects more AI training data in 4 days than Waymo has in its entire history)The 50-year question Steve asks every founder before writing a checkHis 30-day plan if you're one person with a crazy ideaWhere he's investing now: fusion, meat without slaughter, free healthcare via your phoneWhen machines do everything, what's left for us Links: 📌 Subscribe to my free newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools, career strategies, and building with AI: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=SteveJurvetson 🔗 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ 𝕏 : https://x.com/siliconvalleymm 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko 💼 My Companies & Products: https://Marinamogilko.co

    42 min

  3. Jun 26

    Why You Need to Rethink Your Career Now | Richard Socher

    📌 Head to https://granola.ai/marina and enter the code MARINA for 3 months off. Richard Socher is the fourth most-cited researcher in the history of natural language processing — he invented the word vectors and prompt engineering that run inside almost every chatbot you use. He sold his first startup to Salesforce, built You.com into a $1.5B unicorn, and in May 2026 raised $650M at a $4.65B valuation for Recursive: an AI that runs its own experiments and rewrites itself. In this conversation he explains why he thinks the self-improvement loop arrives within two years, which jobs grow and which disappear, and his hack for seeing the future — look at what only the wealthy can afford today, then ask which of it is bottlenecked on intelligence. Stay till the end for the first question he'd ask a superintelligence.Feeling behind on AI and don't know where to start? Start here. Feeling behind on AI and don't know where to start? Start here. We cover: Reward hacking: why an AI told to raise customer satisfaction will quietly spin up a million bots that rate themselves 5/5 — and the new job of "reward engineering" that comes with itHis two-year timeline for recursive self-improving superintelligence — and why energy, not intelligence, becomes the next bottleneckWhy superintelligence isn't one thing: the "volumetric" view of intelligence, and the one dimension no lab is working on — an AI choosing its own goalsThe elasticity rule for which jobs grow and which vanish — why illustrators got hit hard but software engineers are in more demand than everHis hack for seeing the future: what only the wealthy can afford today — a personal tutor, a private assistant, a full medical team — and which of it is bottlenecked on intelligenceWhy home robots are stuck on a hardware problem, not a software oneHow he recruited co-founders away from DeepMind, OpenAI, and MetaWhether a PhD is still worth it in AI — and what he tells parents to have their kids study insteadWhere he'd invest right now: why "AI is to biology what calculus was to physics"His first question to a superintelligence — and what still gives people meaning in 2035 Links:📌 Subscribe to my free newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools, career strategies, and building with AI: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=RichardSocher🔗 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/𝕏 : https://x.com/siliconvalleymm💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko📌 My Companies & Products: https://Marinamogilko.co

    50 min

  4. Jun 25

    Fei-Fei Li: In 10 Years There Will Be Only 2 Kinds of Workers

    Dr. Fei-Fei Li created ImageNet — the dataset that triggered the deep learning revolution. Now she runs World Labs, where she just raised $1 billion to teach AI something it still can't do: understand physical space. She was named Time Person of the Year in 2025 and won the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. David Rogier founded MasterClass in 2015 on the idea that everyone should have access to world-class teachers. He has an MBA from Stanford and now builds all his own work tools with Claude Code instead of buying software — including a to-do list app that auto-deletes anything sitting on the list for more than a day and a half. In this episode, we get into what AI can already do and what it still can't, why the two loudest takes on AI — that it'll save the world, and that it'll take all the jobs — are both wrong, and what your kids' schooling and your own career actually look like in 10 years. We cover: Why Fei-Fei Li says "the cost of intelligence goes to zero" is an irresponsible claim — and what human intelligence actually includes beyond languageSpatial intelligence: the four things AI still can't do (understand, reason about, generate, and interact with 3D space) — and why World Labs is betting $1B on itThe barbell effect in the workforce: why being "decent" at anything isn't enough anymore, and the two roles that will thrive — top 1% specialists and high-agency generalistsWhy AI tutoring delivers the same learning in 60% less time — and why the real obstacle to changing education isn't the technologyDavid's full CEO stack: custom apps he built himself, "Davidify" — his own AI clone he gave his team — and why he stopped buying softwareThe one thing to do when an employee is scared to try AI: sit down with them, not send a YouTube linkWhat the job of product manager looks like today vs. five years ago — and why Fei-Fei only hires PMs who are riding the waveFei-Fei's advice for non-tech professionals: find someone under 25 and let them show you their world for a weekendHow long until AI handles the laundry — Fei-Fei's actual estimateLinks:📌Subscribe to my free newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools, career strategies, and building with AI: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=FeiFeiLi 🔗 Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/⁠⁠ 𝕏 : ⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠ 💼 LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠ 📌 My Companies & Products: ⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co

    47 min

  5. Jun 19

    The 5 Levels of AI-Native: How to Get From Level 1 to Level 5 in 30 days | Peter Yang

    Peter Yang spent 10+ years building products at Roblox, Reddit, Amazon (Twitch), and Meta. Then he walked away from a high-paying job at Roblox to go all-in as a solo builder. His newsletter Behind the Craft has 140K+ readers, and his podcast has deep conversations with 30+ AI leaders from Anthropic, Google, Cursor, and Replit. In this episode he breaks down how: how to move from using AI like a search engine to building systems that run your work, how to build a personal AI that knows your strategy, and the one thing to do this week to get ahead. We cover: The 5 layers of AI adoption, from "I ask ChatGPT questions" to "AI runs my whole operation," and how to find which layer you're actually onWhy you should stop using ChatGPT and Claude chat and switch to Codex or Claude Code, even if you've never written a line of codeThe one-day reset: cancel every meeting, brain-dump your real workflows out loud, and let AI turn them into skills that save hours every weekTRICK: the personal advisor skill — a one-page Google Doc with your goal, your principles, and what gives vs. drains your energy, so your AI checks your decisions before you make themHow he uses learnings.md so his AI remembers the right things about him and gets smarter every conversationThe "last 10%" rule that keeps AI content from becoming slop, and why human taste is the whole job nowHow he builds a working personal app (a fitness tracker, a scam-email blocker for his parents) in a couple of hoursHis honest fears: getting dumber on a flight with no wifi, and what he's doing differently to raise kids who still learn the fundamentalsThe exact action plan for your next 7 days to go from consumer to builderLinks: Subscribe to my free newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools, career strategies, and building with AI: ⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=PeterYang⁠ 🔗 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/⁠ 𝕏 : ⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠ 💼 LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠ 📌 My Companies & Products: ⁠https://Marinamogilko.co

    29 min

  6. Jun 16

    Godmother of Silicon Valley: How to Raise a CEO | Esther Wojcicki

    Esther Wojcicki is the "Godmother of Silicon Valley." She raised three daughters: Susan, who ran YouTube; Anne, who founded 23andMe; and Janet, a professor and anthropologist. Her parenting advice got me through the hardest parts of new motherhood, and YouTube, which Susan built, is the reason I have a career at all. In this episode we cover: The one rule that decides whether AI makes a kid smarter or just lets them cheat themselves: do the work first, then ask AI to grade it like a teacherWhy she's against banning phones, social media, or AI for kids, and what she'd teach insteadTRICK: the five-part system (Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, Kindness) she used to raise three founders, and how to run it on yourself as an adultHow to rebuild trust in yourself if you were raised to chase everyone else's approvalThe three sentences she told Anne when 23andMe was falling apartThe billion-dollar bet Susan almost didn't make, the one that became YouTubeWhy she still tells parents to push for college in the AI ageWhat she says to every mom who's afraid AI will take her kid's jobLinks:Subscribe to my free newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools, career strategies, and parenting in the AI age: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=EstherWojcicki🔗 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/𝕏 : https://x.com/siliconvalleymm💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko📌 My Companies & Products: https://Marinamogilko.co

    42 min

  7. Jun 12

    Grant Lee : From "The Worst Idea" to a $2.1B Company | Gamma

    Grant Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Gamma — the $2.1B AI tool that turns one prompt into a finished presentation, now used by 100 million people. We covered: How Gamma hit $100M in revenue with a team of just 50 — profitably, on only $23M of fundingThe two signs you have product-market fit before the money shows up, and why "your friends will lie to you" about your productHow to run a full fundraise in two weeks — Grant did 100+ pitches and how he turned a wall of no's into yes'sHow to tell if an idea is worth a year of your life (he picks by energy, not spreadsheets)Why a top investor called Gamma "the worst idea I've ever heard" — and what that investor actually got right The exact first-30-days plan he gives any founder starting today Links: Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=GrantLee Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠ My Companies & Products: ⁠⁠https://partnerships.marinamogilko.co

    44 min

  8. Jun 11

    Your Next Cofounder Is an AI | Edward Kim, Co-Founder & CTO of Gusto ($10B)

    Eddie Kim is the co-founder and CTO of Gusto — the $10B payroll and HR platform that millions of small businesses run on. Gusto just launched Gusto Cofounder — an AI teammate for small businesses: payroll, compliance, and daily ops handled before they become problems. Learn more about cofounder here -> https://gusto.com/cofounder?idgm=2mm6b6i2   We covered: The two levels of using AI in a business, and why almost everyone is still stuck on the first oneHow Gusto's AI found $70M in tax credits owners had no idea they qualified for, including one pool company now collecting $50K a yearHow to hand off the "work before the work" so payroll runs itself two days early and all you do is tap approveHow to run your whole back office from a text message, with your Notion and spreadsheets plugged straight inHow to stay ahead of tens of thousands of changing tax rules without reading a single one Links: Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=Edward Kim Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠ My Companies & Products: ⁠https://partnerships.marinamogilko.co #GustoPartner

    35 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.6
out of 5
9 Ratings

About

The world's top CEOs and AI founders explain what's coming next and how you can get ahead. Silicon Valley Girl is a weekly AI and technology podcast from Silicon Valley hosted by female founder and angel investor Marina Mogilko, covering practical strategies for career growth, mastering AI tools, entrepreneurship and making money with AI. For startup founders, professionals and creators who want to stay ahead in the AI era.

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