5 Year Frontier

Daniel Darling

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. #37: Global Energy Race, Creating With Carbon, CO2 As Fuel, Powering Mars, And The Future Of Clean Energy w/ AIRCO CEO Greg Constantine

    5月13日

    #37: Global Energy Race, Creating With Carbon, CO2 As Fuel, Powering Mars, And The Future Of Clean Energy w/ AIRCO CEO Greg Constantine

    The future of carbon conversion. We cover the global energy race, turning CO2 into biofuels, propelling interplanetary travel, modular military refueling stations, and the future of clean energy. Guiding us will be Greg Constantine CEO of AIRCO, one of the most ambitious startups reimagining the role of carbon in our economy and climate future. Headquartered in New York, AIRCO has developed a proprietary technology that captures carbon dioxide and converts it into high-value products, including sustainable aviation fuel, rocket fuel, and even consumer-grade ethanol. Rather than burying carbon underground, AIRCO turns it into something useful—fueling commercial flights, defense operations, and potentially even Mars missions. To date, AIRCO has raised over $100 million from a roster of strategic investors including Carbon Direct Capital, Patriot Capital, Toyota, JetBlue, and has secured large contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA—including recent work on developing rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere. Greg Constantine brings a rare blend of operating and investing experience—previously holding senior roles at Diageo and serving as a venture partner at LocalGlobe, where he backed early-stage deep tech and climate companies. Now, he’s at the helm of one of the most frontier-pushing climate startups in the world, blending advanced chemistry, automation, and strategic focus to rewire how we think about carbon. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    24 分鐘
  2. #36: Sales Co-Pilots, AI Revenue Intelligence, Procurement Agents, CRO in 2030, and The Future of Selling w/ Clari CEO Andy Byrne

    4月29日

    #36: Sales Co-Pilots, AI Revenue Intelligence, Procurement Agents, CRO in 2030, and The Future of Selling w/ Clari CEO Andy Byrne

    The future of selling. We cover AI-copilots for sales, forecasting engines for CROs, real-time procurement layers, and the future of revenue intelligence. Guiding us will be Andy Byrne CEO of Clari, the #1 Enterprise Revenue Platform trusted by over 1,500 companies managing more than $4 trillion in revenue. From pipeline to close, renewal to expansion, Clari brings end-to-end visibility, control, and predictability to every revenue-critical function in the enterprise. The company has raised $520 million in funding from top-tier investors including Blackstone, Silver Lake, Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures. Recognized as a 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ winner and growing at 227% over three years, Clari is leading a movement to modernize how businesses run their revenue process — transforming it from siloed and reactive to unified, intelligent, and data-driven. Andy is a defining voice in the future of revenue operations. A serial entrepreneur and two-time CEO, Clari marks the fourth company he’s helped build with backing from Sequoia Capital — a rare feat that speaks to his track record and long-term vision. Known for being thoughtful, resilient, and a true builder, Byrne has helped scale Clari into a global platform used by the world’s most sophisticated sales and finance teams. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vc See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    26 分鐘
  3. #35: AI Employees, Managing Agent Workforces, Crypto Micropayments, End Of SaaS, Rewiring Developing Nations and The Future of Agents w/ Ema CEO Surojit Chatterjee

    4月15日

    #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 分鐘
  4. #33: Autonomous Cars And Robots, Leapfrogging Tesla, Real World Models, AI Training Simulators, and the Future of Autonomy w/ Helm.ai CEO Vlad Voroninski

    3月18日

    #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 分鐘
  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

    2月18日

    #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 分鐘

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簡介

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.

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