Building an Autonomous Enterprise for Real-World Services with Netic Founder Melisa Tokmak

More from No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

1. 

   S1 · E174 · 20 Aug 2026 · 32 min

   From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak

   Max Hodak, co-founder and CEO of Science Corporation, joins Sarah Guo to discuss the future of vision, brain-computer interfaces, and the human experience. Max explains how Science’s PRIMA retinal implant could restore functional vision for people who have lost their sight, and why treating the brain as a computational system could unlock new approaches to medicine. They explore the broader potential of neural devices, from restoring lost capabilities to expanding human potential, as well as deeper questions around identity, consciousness, and whether the human experience can persist as our…

2. 

   S1 · E173 · 13 Aug 2026 · 46 min

   What Chess.com Teaches US About Superhuman Capabilities, with CEO Erik Allebest

   In a world of infinite gaming and entertainment possibilities, how does a centuries-old game stay so popular? Chess.com co-founder and CEO Erik Allebest joins Sarah Guo to explain how the evolution of technology has kept people coming back to chess, even when machines can beat us at the game. Erik talks about how the desire to build a MySpace-like community for chess led to the purchase of a domain name from a bankruptcy sale back in 2005, and scaled into a community with 10 million daily active users and 250 million total registered members. He also discusses the growth of the cultural…

3. 

   S1 · E172 · 6 Aug 2026 · 39 min

   Chasing Trillion-Dollar Companies, Founder Ambition, Token Budgets, and Regulatory Capture with Sarah & Elad

   Is the tech industry moving too quickly, or are founders letting fear of AI labs stunt their ambitions? Sarah and Elad explore the current landscape of artificial intelligence, venture capital, and startup dynamics. They discuss the realities of building multi-trillion-dollar companies, shifting market sizes and outcome-based pricing models, and how founders are reacting to the rise of major AI labs. They also talk about what the framework for startup exits should look like, the potential for researcher burnouts in the next eighteen months as ASI looms on the horizon, bottlenecks for…

4. 

   S1 · E170 · 23 Jul 2026 · 49 min

   Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang

   DoorDash is not just a delivery company. From its inception, co-founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang operated it as a robotics and autonomy company. Andy and Stanley join Sarah Guo to explain how autonomous tech and AI are reshaping consumer habits, commerce, and delivery. Andy and Stanley talk about the rollout of Ask DoorDash, a natural-language interface that’s driving both restaurant discovery and larger grocery orders. They also discuss Dot, their in-house autonomous delivery robot that has operated in Phoenix for over two years, and how it highlights the operational and hardware…

5. 

   S1 · E169 · 9 Jul 2026 · 41 min

   Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel

   When Glenn Fogel joined Priceline in 2000, the business was worth a few hundred million dollars. One week later, the Nasdaq peaked, eventually sending its stock down to a dollar a share. But over 25 years later, Booking Holdings has scaled over 1000x into an over $100 billion dollar global travel behemoth. Elad Gil is joined by Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel to discuss his career, from law school and Wall Street to working at Priceline through the dot-com crash, and to helping grow the business into a multifaceted, dynamic travel marketplace in the AI era. Glenn explains how leveraging AI…

6. 

   S1 · E168 · 2 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 1 min

   How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor

   While the rest of the nuclear industry still relies on simulations and paper designs, Valar Atomics is busy splitting atoms. In fact, they just powered an NVIDIA Blackwell chip directly with a live nuclear reactor in order to power the world’s first nuclear powered website. Sarah Guo joins Valar Atomics founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor on-site at their reactor site in Utah to talk about how Valar is shifting nuclear energy from the theoretical to the practical by building and perfecting reactors via hardware iteration. Isaiah discusses why the US stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970s,…

7. 

   S1 · E181 · 9 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 10 minNew

   Beam: The Great American Open Model with ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin

   Is the future of frontier AI open or closed? ReflectionAI co-founder and CEO Misha Laskin joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the launch of Beam, the company’s 500 billion parameter open-weight reasoning model. Misha breaks down the pre-training and reinforcement learning required to produce Beam’s reasoning efficiency, the shift in enterprise compute from renting to owning intelligence, and how he believes that open models will capture the majority of global token demand. He also talks about the open model ecosystem in China and why competition with China’s models is a good thing,…

8. 

   2 Oct 2026 · 36 min

   Frontier Chips for Frontier AI Labs, with Walter Goodwin, Founder/CEO of Fractile

   Founder and CEO of full-stack AI chip company Fractile, Walter Goodwin, joins Sarah Guo to discuss the bets he’s made on the future of the chip market as other major players like Broadcom, NVIDIA, and AMD try to accelerate their workloads. They discuss the difference in Fractile’s newer approach on model architecture with a full-stack team in the current chip landscape and the technical bets they’re making in that direction. Walter also talks about compressing the gap between the chip design cycle and its payoff period, and making a generational leap in AI inference to realize the bet in…

9. 

   24 Sep 2026 · 43 min

   Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee

   Can AI transform legacy incumbents rather than replacing them? Sequence Holdings co-founder and CEO Michael Lee joins Sarah Guo to discuss how holding company structures and engineering integrations are reshaping market leaders from the inside out. Michael details Sequence’s $7.7 billion take-private transaction of Baldwin alongside Dell Family Office (DFO), and shares his thesis on why traditional consulting models and software sales fall short for real enterprise AI transformations. They also talk about why permanent holding company structures are good for long-term compounding, real-world…

10. 

    S1 · E178 · 18 Sep 2026 · 38 min

    Why Diffusion Will Win AI Inference with Inception Co-Founder and CEO Stefano Ermon

    As generative AI hits hardware and latency bottlenecks, Stanford professor, diffusion pioneer, and Inception co-founder and CEO Stefano Ermon is betting on a radical new architecture. Stefano joins Sarah Guo to talk about Inception, and how his team is applying diffusion architecture beyond images and video into discrete text and code generation. Stefano explains the limitations of autoregressive LLMs, as well as why parallel token generation in diffusion models offers superior inference scaling and hardware utilization on standard GPUs. He also shares details about Inception’s Mercury…

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