Mario Gabriele
@mariogabriele • 63,527 subscribers
Infinite games. Founder of The Generalist. Partner at Hummingbird.
Videos
"A modelless company is sitting on shifting sand." Yash Patil (Yash Patil) is the founder and CEO of Applied Compute, a company that trains custom models on company data and serves them in production. His conviction: every organization has its own definition of what good looks like, and a company that doesn't own its model is one system card away from finding out what it can no longer do. (0:00) Introduction (3:50) Betting on custom AI models (12:30) Yash's early influences and first projects (19:29) Inside OpenAI during Sam Altman's firing (28:18) What Yash admires about Sam Altman (29:43) Teaching models to reason (35:39) The core insight behind Applied Compute (45:55) Why model training never ends (51:25) The culture and people of Applied Compute (1:03:48) Final meditations Thank you to the partners who make this possible Brex: The intelligent finance platform. Guru_HQ: The AI source of truth for work. Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.
Mario Gabriele104,032 views • 25 days ago
Today, Yash Patil (Yash Patil) is the founder of Applied Compute, a $1.3 billion AI company. Before this, he was a Stanford sophomore who dropped out to join OpenAI. It all began when he emailed Sam Altman asking for a job. Altman introduced him to the residency team. They told him he had to drop out. Yash wasn't sure he could bring his parents around. So he asked Altman directly. Altman said, "Let me chat with them.” A week later, Yash joined OpenAI.
Mario Gabriele59,247 views • 18 days ago
Investor Cyan Banister (Cyan Banister) has backed SpaceX, Uber, Niantic, and Flock Safety. A majority of those investments did not emerge from a formal meeting. Uber traced back to a conviction that the taxi medallion system was a racket. Niantic grew out of watching friends charter helicopters for an obscure geolocation game. Flock Safety materialized from reading the public WiFi list at a Four Seasons cafe. Her method is not a framework. It is attention: a lifelong habit of noticing bottlenecks, tracking human obsessions, and poking at reality until it reveals something others missed. In this conversation, she covers: • Why the taxi medallion system was the real Uber insight •How she found a $7 billion company on a public wifi list • The Biz, Tizz, and Rizz framework for identifying legendary founders • Why the age of the polymath is arriving faster than most people expect • How brain-computer interfaces are surfacing thoughts from two weeks prior • Why she believes vibe manufacturing will mint the largest wave of new millionaires in a generation The signals she is reading now are worth understanding. The Generalist Thank you to the partners who make this possible .TECH domains: An identity for builders at their core: Brex: The intelligent finance platform: Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case: (00:00) Intro (03:51) Never playing the game you appear to be playing (07:18) Practicing childlike wonder as a daily discipline (10:08) Questioning belief after her stroke (13:30) Cyan’s metaphysical experiments (23:24) Non-local consciousness and creativity (27:22) Investing with extreme openness to signals (29:05) The importance of timing in investing (32:26) Meeting Travis Kalanick (34:19) Finding Flock Safety through a chance encounter (38:23) The summer of Pokémon Go (what worked and what didn’t) (39:55) Human nature and what makes something "stick" (42:15) Brain-computer interfaces and AI’s accelerating effect (52:53) “Biz, Tiz, Riz:” her framework for evaluating founders (59:20) Why Cyan lives in a retirement community part-time (1:03:50) A unique way of finding books that speak to you (1:08:44) Final meditations
Mario Gabriele184,459 views • 2 months ago
Investor Cyan Banister (Cyan Banister) recalls the bee die-off headlines: bees are dying, humanity is doomed, and we will need robot bees to survive. She explains that the solution came from a mycologist, who noticed unusual bee behavior during a walk through a forest. His observations led him to develop a treatment for the declining bee population. Her larger point is that AI makes this the norm. When the knowledge gap between disciplines closes from decades to hours, the fluid dynamics researcher stumbles into a physics breakthrough; the ecologist becomes the apiarist. The polymaths win: not because they know everything, but because they have the tools to connect what specialists cannot. The Generalist
Mario Gabriele165,226 views • 2 months ago
"We don't need to live like this." Matan Grinberg (Matan Grinberg) is the founder and CEO of Factory, a startup building AI agents, called droids, that handle software engineering the way no single AI lab wants them to: independent of any one model. His conviction is that AI's real constraint isn't capability. It's that the industry keeps building tools locked to one company's model, leaving that company free to dictate the terms of how you can use it. (0:00) Intro (3:50) Noether’s theorem explained (10:53) Why there will always be more problems to solve (20:10) Why Factory abstracts away model choice (35:33) How Matan got into string theory (41:53) Startup founders vs. theoretical physicists (52:53) The origins of Factory (1:08:11) Matan’s predictions for the future of AI and Factory Thank you to the partners who make this possible .TECH domains: An identity for builders at their core: Brex: The intelligent finance platform: Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case:
Mario Gabriele40,427 views • 18 days ago
Anil Varanasi (Anil Varanasi), co-founder and CEO of Meter, is building a new kind of networking company for the AI era. Alongside his brother Sunil, he has helped raise more than $350 million to challenge incumbents like Cisco with a vertically integrated approach spanning hardware, software, deployment, and ongoing operations, all delivered through a utility-style model. Together we explore: • The “burden of knowledge” and why progress is getting harder across fields • Why most companies over-index on technology and ignore business model innovation • The three ways companies create advantage: technology, delivery, and business model • How Meter’s trade-in model borrows from the automotive industry • Why Anil believes “common knowledge” is often wrong Thank you to the partners who make this possible - .TECH domains: An identity for builders at their core: - Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings: - Brex: The intelligent finance platform: Timestamps (0:00) Introduction to Anil Varanasi and Meter (10:25) What Meter actually does (22:55) Why Anil didn’t pursue filmmaking (29:59) The dynamic of working with his brother as a co-founder (35:15) Lessons from successful companies (41:10) Scrapping 18 months of work (59:39) Networking as infrastructure and utility (01:07:28) Rethinking education
Mario Gabriele61,757 views • 3 months ago
Davide Asnaghi (Davide Asnaghi) is the co-founder and CEO of Diode Computers, Inc., a Brooklyn-based startup using AI to design and manufacture circuit boards in the United States. Before Diode, Davide worked on Apple’s Special Projects Group and spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen studying Asia’s electronics manufacturing ecosystem. That experience convinced him that PCB design, despite powering everything from smartphones and satellites to medical devices and autonomous systems, remained one of the most overlooked layers of the tech stack. Since its founding just two years ago, Diode has landed Physical Intelligence and Saronic as customers and partnered with Anthropic to help Claude become a better electrical engineer. The company’s ultimate ambition: to make hardware as nimble as software. In our conversation, we explore: 1. Why the West outsourced PCB manufacturing to Asia in the 2000s and why bringing it back matters for American competitiveness 2. What Shenzhen’s manufacturing culture does better than Silicon Valley (and what the U.S. can learn from it) 3. How Diode’s models can one-shot much of schematic design and compress hardware timelines from months to weeks 4. The three-week YC pivot that transformed Diode from a design validation tool into a full-stack manufacturer 5. Why circuit boards are the “forgotten middle child” between silicon and software 6. How Diode partners with Anthropic to make LLMs better electrical engineers 7. What it takes to build a hardware company in 2025—and why the talent bar must stay incredibly high 8. How Italian, American, and Chinese cultures shaped Davide’s approach to entrepreneurship and manufacturing Thank you to the partners who make this possible .TECH domains: An identity for builders at their core: Guru_HQ: The AI source of truth for work: Brex: The intelligent finance platform: (0:00) Intro (4:15) Why Davide calls himself a copper merchant (5:53) Diode’s mission to rebuild PCB manufacturing in the U.S. (7:58) What success looks like (9:00) Growing up in northern Italy and spending a year in Minnesota (13:14) Why Italy produces fewer venture-backed founders (15:30) Why Hong Kong accelerated Davide’s learning (19:09) Silicon Valley vs. Shenzhen (22:05) What Davide learned in Apple’s Special Projects Team (24:11) Why Davide left Apple after two years (26:54) Meeting his co-founder, Lenny (29:32) How Davide uncovered the need for better PCB design and manufacturing (33:23) PCB manufacturing in Asia, and Diode’s approach (41:29) The YC pivot that changed Diode’s business (44:39) Inside Diode’s customer journey (48:10) Where the value is in electronics manufacturing, and Davide’s AGI thesis (51:30) What separates a working board from a great one (55:32) Where Diode fits in the electronics stack (59:55) Diode’s early near-death moment and long-term vision (1:02:30) Diode’s exceptionally high bar for hiring (1:04:48) Where Davide gets his best ideas (1:07:00) Final meditations The Generalist
Mario Gabriele37,137 views • 2 months ago
America used to be #1 in the world for nuclear energy and controlled 86% of global uranium enrichment. Today? We've fallen to last place. As we approach the January 2028 ban on Russian uranium, the United States is facing a massive fuel crisis. If we don't reshore this capability, the future of our grid may be at risk. In this episode, Scott Nolan (Partner at Founders Fund & Co-founder of General Matter) reveals his plan to take back America's lead. We discuss: • How Scott is applying the SpaceX playbook of cost reduction to uranium • The massive market opportunity in HALEU and next-gen fuel • Scott's counterintuitive advice: avoid starting companies unless the mission is this important. Timestamps (00:00) Introduction to Scott Nolan (02:24) General Matter’s mission to rebuild U.S. enrichment (08:31) Scott’s background: From SpaceX and Founders Fund to General Matter (17:50) How Scott’s focus evolved over 13 years at Founders Fund (33:30) How U.S. uranium enrichment quietly came to an end (38:34) The Russian uranium ban and the 2028 supply cliff (50:56) What the U.S. needs to actually scale nuclear energy (59:30) Why General Matter chose Paducah, Kentucky (01:07:06) The $900 million Department of Energy award (01:14:12) Final meditations
Mario Gabriele51,883 views • 5 months ago
For decades, drug discovery has shifted away from nature and toward biology-first approaches. Viswa Colluru believes that shift was a catastrophic mistake. His company, Enveda (), has raised over $500 million to build a “search engine for nature’s chemistry.” In our conversation, we explore: • Why the pharmaceutical industry abandoned nature (and why that was a massive mistake) • How Enveda built a system to decode unknown molecules in nature • The deeply personal story of his mother’s battle with leukemia and how it shaped his life’s work • Why old ideas, from immunotherapy to natural products, often hold the most latent potential • How Enveda developed 18 drug candidates for about $1 million each instead of $10-15 million • Enveda’s three leading drug candidates targeting eczema, obesity, and ulcerative colitis • Why first-in-class medicines capture the vast majority of returns in pharma • What competitive table tennis taught him about building companies Thank you to the partners who make this possible Brex: The intelligent finance platform: Ahrefs Brand Radar: Find your brand in AI results: Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case: (00:00) Introduction to Viswa Colluru (07:06) Early pull toward technology (14:24) Studying Biotechnology (24:23) Innovation vs. novelty (32:05) Joining Recursion (40:42) What launched Enveda (49:53) Chemistry-first approach (52:17) Raising $225K and investing $55K personally (56:04) Initial studies and targets (1:18:27) Enveda’s long-term vision (1:21:31) Book recommendation
Mario Gabriele29,427 views • 2 months ago
In 2016, Cyan Banister (Cyan Banister) went around telling anyone who would listen that everyone was about to be catching invisible Pokémon in the street. The response was unanimous: she was insane. She had arrived at the conviction through observation. Her friends were playing an obscure geolocation game called Ingress and the obsession was unmistakable. When Google spun out Niantic, she moved immediately. What followed was, in her words, the closest humanity has come to world peace: strangers converging in parks, crossing boundaries, catching the same invisible things. The lesson she draws is simple: human obsession is a signal; most investors never notice it.
Mario Gabriele22,677 views • 2 months ago
Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, a robotics company building a general-purpose “AI brain for the physical world.” The company has raised more than $1 billion in funding to develop foundation models that allow robots to operate across many machines, environments, and tasks rather than being programmed for a single purpose. In our conversation, we explore: • The moment a lecture from Sergey Levine convinced him to abandon his PhD research direction and pivot fully to deep learning • The case for building a general “AI brain” for the physical world rather than a single specialized robot • The role of real-world data in training robots, the limits of simulation, and how deployment could create a powerful data flywheel • The unique challenges of physical intelligence and why robots must operate with far higher reliability than language models Thank you to the partners who make this possible - Brex: The intelligent finance platform: - Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings: Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:05) Karol’s early fascination with robots (18:21) Karol’s entry point to robotics and PhD program (25:49) Combining robotics with LLMs: The Taylor Swift demo (30:48) The 1970s SHRDLU AI experiment (39:40) How research shapes what Physical Intelligence builds (49:07) The return of reinforcement learning in robotics (1:00:00) NVIDIA’s simulation engines (1:07:31) Compensating for missing senses
Mario Gabriele 🦊27,871 views • 4 months ago
The conventional wisdom is that American manufacturing cannot compete on cost as our labor is too expensive. A factory worker in Ohio will never be as cheap as one in Shenzhen. Bryon Hargis (Bryon Hargis) thinks this misses the point entirely. "In aerospace, the thing that costs money is everybody's time," he said. Cut the time, and the cost follows. Not by paying workers less, but by designing systems that need less labor to build: fewer steps, higher yield, parts that can only go together one correct way. The problem is that America has spent decades doing the opposite. Its development process is so labor-intensive that it is approaching the limit of what it can afford to build at all.
Mario Gabriele10,521 views • 1 month ago
For decades, America’s electrical system has rewarded utilities for building more infrastructure, not for lowering costs. The result is a grid that expanded but rarely improved. Zach Dell, co-founder and CEO of Base Power, is building a different kind of power company. In our conversation, we explore: • How a failed college solar project and early energy experiments in India pulled Zach into the power industry • How the U.S. grid’s regulatory structure discourages innovation and why Texas’s deregulated market creates space for new power companies • Base’s “make, move, store, sell” framework for thinking about the full power stack • How aggressive AI adoption is compressing cycle times and why slow adopters risk falling behind Thank you to the partners who make this possible - Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings: - Brex: The intelligent finance platform: (00:00) Introduction to Zach Dell and Base (09:31) Lessons from Phil Jackson on aligning talented teams (21:49) Justin’s strengths as a co-founder and how their partnership formed (30:55) Why Base became the obvious focus (41:44) How Base works in two market types (50:43) The Gen 2 hardware mistake and the lesson in risk management (58:45) How hiring at Base has evolved (1:06:29) Final meditations
Mario Gabriele24,787 views • 4 months ago
Prediction markets are no longer a fringe curiosity. They are becoming one of the most revealing instruments in modern finance. Platforms like Polymarket, once a niche corner of crypto, now regularly clear billions in monthly volume as traders speculate on everything from political outcomes to sports to cultural events. Few people saw this future as early, or as clearly, as Joey Krug. A decade before prediction markets went mainstream, Joey dropped out of college to co-found Augur, the first decentralized prediction market protocol. He later became one of the most influential investors in the category by backing Polymarket at Founders Fund. In this conversation, Joey shares why the moment for prediction markets has finally arrived, what has changed, and how these markets are reshaping information flows across society. You can listen to it here 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: And a big thanks to the incredible sponsors that support our work: ✨ Guru – The AI source of truth for work: ✨ Auth0– Secure access for everyone. But not just anyone:
Mario Gabriele 🦊37,109 views • 7 months ago
Tudor Achim (Tudor Achim) is the co-founder and CEO of Harmonic, a startup working to solve one of AI’s hardest problems: mathematical reasoning. In our conversation, we explore: • Why Tudor believes math is the fundamental toolkit to understand the world • How Aristotle works and the applications beyond pure mathematics • The reinforcement learning process that lets Harmonic generate synthetic training data and solve problems humans have never attempted • Why Tudor believes AI could surpass human mathematicians on specific tasks within 2–3 years • Why the future of mathematics looks more like GitHub than academic journals Thank you to the partners who make this possible - Brex: The intelligent finance platform: - Guru_HQ: The AI source of truth for work: - Rippling: Stop wasting time on admin tasks, build your startup faster: Timestamps (00:00) Intro (06:28) The mathematical foundations of music (and why Tudor keeps them separate) (12:52) Defining intelligence (22:55) The two breakthroughs that made mathematical AI possible in 2023 (35:25) An overview of Aristotle: the world’s first always-correct mathematical agent (45:34) Math in AI now and what’s next (56:02) History’s alternating rhythm of thinking and measuring (1:00:18) Final meditations
Mario Gabriele 🦊17,899 views • 3 months ago
Carl Pei is the founder of Nothing, the consumer electronics company known for its distinctive transparent design language across smartphones and headphones. Before launching Nothing in 2020, Carl co-founded OnePlus, where he spent seven years helping build it into a major smartphone brand. But Carl’s instincts as a builder showed up much earlier. As a teenager, he taught himself to code by building Pokémon fan sites, all while moving between China, the U.S., and Sweden. That combination of early creation and constant change shaped a founder comfortable with uncertainty—and deeply motivated by questions bigger than products. Carl often thinks about time and mortality, is skeptical of early retirement, and believes creativity is humanity’s real advantage. In an industry obsessed with optimization, he’s focused on making technology feel meaningful again. Listen here: YouTube: Spotify: Apple: Big thanks to Guru–the AI source of truth for work–for sponsoring:
Mario Gabriele 🦊27,806 views • 6 months ago
Eve Bodnia is the co-founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence, which is developing energy-based reasoning models (EBMs) as an alternative to large language models. She argues that LLMs, which operate by recognizing and recombining patterns within language space, are structurally incapable of genuine reasoning. In our conversation, we explore: • The $4 vs. $15,000 benchmark, and what it tells us about the cost of guessing vs. knowing • How Logical Intelligence showed spontaneous knowledge transfer at just 16M parameters • Why systems like chip design, surgical robotics, and power grids need more than probabilistic AI • How meeting Grigori Perelman as a teenager shaped Eve’s views on ego and ownership in science Thank you to the partners who make this possible - Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings: - : Trusted identity verification for any use case: Timestamps (00:00) Introduction (03:03) Eve’s encounter with Grigori Perelman (09:02) The manifold hypothesis and language (22:58) Spirituality and creativity (27:00) Theory vs. experiment (42:08) Energy-based models explained (48:01) AGI defined (58:09) Early investors in Logical Intelligence (1:03:42) Final meditations
Mario Gabriele20,207 views • 4 months ago
We're back with another great conversation, this time with Roelof Botha! Lessons from 20 Years of Venture Capital: Roelof Botha (Managing Partner and Steward at Sequoia Capital) Sequoia Capital is synonymous with outstanding performance, backing companies like Apple, Google, Airbnb, and Stripe. In our latest episode, I chat with Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s Managing Partner, about what it takes to see the future first, capitalize on it intelligently once it arrives, and help founders build enduring companies. Roelof is especially well-placed to discuss such matters. Not only has Sequoia navigated more than 50 years of market cycles, Roelof has personally spent more than 20 years helping shape the firm’s unique approach. From honing a philosophy rooted in clear thinking and long-term vision to asking the tough question of "What would you do with only 12 months of runway?" Roelof breaks down the mindset that’s helped Sequoia thrive, and what others can learn from it. Listen now: • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: A big thank you to the incredible sponsors that make the podcast possible: ✨ Brex — The banking solution for startups: ✨ WorkOS — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS: ✨ Explo — Customer-facing analytics for any platform: Botha In this episode, we explore: → The psychological biases that most frequently derail investors → Why the first-mover advantage is often a disadvantage in technology → Why excess funding often undermines innovation → The story of PayPal's near-death experience and how it sparked its most critical innovations → How Roelof’s training as an actuary shaped his long-term thinking → How Sequoia maintains investment discipline through market cycles → Why they don’t use the word “deal” at Sequoia → How the US can maintain the lead in the AI race → The thinking behind the Sequoia Capital Fund and the firm’s organizational structure …And much more!
Mario Gabriele 🦊35,747 views • 1 year ago
Tudor Achim (Tudor Achim) is convinced that AI will surpass every human mathematician within the next three years. At the center of that claim is Aristotle, Harmonic's mathematical agent and the first of its kind. When you delegate a reasoning task to Aristotle, the answer it provides will always be correct. Every LLM available today can do math. The problem is that the answers look plausible, and looking plausible is not the same as being right. To catch the errors, you need to already be a professional mathematician. Aristotle does not ask that of you.
Mario Gabriele 🦊10,228 views • 2 months ago