Invest Like the Best

Nubank founder David Vélez, now serving 140 million customers across Latin America, says banking is still in its Blockbuster era, with most of the world's banking running through branches and incumbents, and that AI will make digital banks dramatically more efficient than the players they compete with. The notable admission: Nubank rebuilt its entire organization around AI after missing the moment the technology started working, and is now entering the US market. For consultants: a rare concrete example of a large company treating AI as a reorganization problem rather than a tool rollout.

Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman argues the next era of neuroscience is about writing to the brain, precise control over specific brain states, after decades focused on reading from it, and claims the leading AI companies are really building toward this. Interesting frontier science, but well outside the org design lane; file under long-horizon context.

Noah Shinn built Instinct, a personal agent with its own phone and computer that acts on your behalf online, growing 10% a day while still invite-only. He covers how long it takes users to trust an agent with their credit card and inbox, why he refuses an ad model, and why all software may collapse into one interface. For consultants: a live read on how fast trust in agents is forming, the same trust curve client organizations will walk.

Gabe Stengel, co-founder and CEO of Rogo, the AI platform for finance, believes the best investors will spend the next several years reinventing their firms around AI. The conversation covers why the last mile and the harness around the models matter so much, what happens when every portfolio manager can deploy thousands of agents against a problem, which investing skills become more valuable as AI improves, the move from seat-based to outcome-based pricing, and the 40 investor rejections Gabe received before his Series A.

Michael Moritz, who led Sequoia Capital for nearly two decades, discusses his memoir Auslander, about his family, Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany and rebuilt their lives in Wales. The conversation covers the imprint his parents left on him, his decades-long method of asking founders about their childhoods, the Time profile that ended his relationship with Steve Jobs, Alex Ferguson's approach to managing players, and why he still struggles to feel proud of anything he has done.

Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal columnist and author of Special Providence and God and Gold, lays out the five step playbook that carried the Dutch, then the British, then America to global leadership, and why the same pattern keeps beating centralized continental powers. Also covered: the four schools of American foreign policy, the rise of the tech Hamiltonians, what the drone war in Ukraine means for the Pentagon, and why the erosion of deterrence is the deeper story in the Middle East.

Sarah Guo, founder and managing partner of Conviction, the venture firm she built to back AI-native companies from their earliest days, goes inside the frontier: what the small group of people actually building AI believe right now, why some of the field's best researchers are wrestling with their own sense of purpose, and how close we are to robots in the home. At the center is her conviction that no single company will own the future of AI, and what that means for founders, investors, and anyone allocating time and resources.

Neil Movva, founder of Sail, is building what he calls a token factory: an inference company designed for a future where AI agents run in the background for hours or days rather than answering a human in real time, so latency matters less and cost matters more. The conversation is a detailed tour through the full stack of intelligence (software, chips, and power), his scavenger strategy for buying the chips and power nobody else wants, and his contrarian view on Nvidia.