Immigration status shouldn’t depend on a paperwork nightmare. But for many immigrants, navigating the US immigration system means months of uncertainty, complicated filings, and life-changing consequences when something goes wrong. @Aizada - CEO & founder of @AlmaImmigration - knows this firsthand. After experiencing the system’s challenges herself, she founded Alma to transform how immigration legal services are delivered. Aizada joins me on the pod to discuss how Alma combines AI, technology, and experienced attorneys to make immigration law more efficient, transparent, and predictable. We explore: → Why AI could make legal services more human → Where AI will - and won’t - disrupt the legal industry → How companies are rethinking immigration as they compete for talent → Why skilled immigration matters to America’s innovation economy Special thank you to Aizada for joining the pod and to Alma for all of the amazing work they’re doing.

AI + Compute + Brain Computer Interface = Human Super Intelligence

I think this is one of the best interviews I have given in a long time. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Today we're launching Ivy, the AI operator for family offices and investment firms. She holds the firm's memory, works like a team member, and gets things done before you ask. See her live → ivy.one/

Relief uses agents to manage past-due debt for consumers. It has direct relationships with debt buyers and collectors, partners with the largest debt companies in the world, and connects users with partnered law firms when needed. The average user saves more than 50% of their balance.

AI + Quantum + Crispr = Increased Healthspan

.@SECWAR “Today, at my direction—we are announcing the creation of Autonomous Warfare Command, or AutoWarCom: A new 4-star combatant command—with service-like authorities—built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the Joint Force in the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history."

I'm pretty excited about what Leon is building with ivy.one/. It's been a game changer for our firm - a measurable 50% increase in team productivity. Leon is layering in the missing pieces of the AI stack for investment firms - security, control of data, a fully integrated platform for the firm.

Top 5 innovation waves right now (in no particular order): AI Robotics Gene Editing Space Exploration Brain Computer Interface (One man’s opinion)

Doing a speaking role at a @sydecario investor event today. There’s a great community of people coming together to provide liquidity into the venture market. I believe that the private markets are going to increasingly fill the void created by the lack of access to the IPO market. There’s a parallel here to the LBO market where firms trade amongst themselves to unlock capital. Theory - more liquidity is coming.

the surprise conclusion of the machine consciousness debate will be that people are machines.

I have raised my hand to help the Post Exit Founder chapter in NYC plan some events. We hosted some of the members at the @Interplay office for lunch. A pic below. The group is jam-packed with people that can be driving change and improving society. I think what really motivated me to volunteer was the hope that we could get a few more ex-founders back in the fray driving change. If you’ve got ideas on how to leverage this community. Ping me.

Science non-fiction

Building something great is hard. The question is: which hard are you willing to choose? That’s something @DWeisburd and I dug into on the latest episode. David chose podcasting as his hard. Three years ago, he committed to building How I Invest for at least a decade - before he knew whether it would work. There were no guarantees. Just the grind of booking guests, navigating compliance, building credibility, and showing up episode after episode. That commitment eventually turned the podcast into something much bigger: a network of investors, entrepreneurs, relationships, and venture deal flow. And that’s what I found most interesting about our conversation... The podcast wasn't just building David’s network. It was building David. We talked about: → The power of “information alpha” and “relationship alpha” → Why some emerging managers have a winner mindset—and others don't → Why founder-product fit matters → How relationships compound over time → And why the best opportunities often come from playing the infinite game My biggest takeaway: You can’t make building something great easy. But you can choose a hard worth doing. Then you have to stay in the game long enough for the compounding to begin. Big thanks to David for joining the pod.

Most people only see the front end of fintech. The app. The card. The payment. But underneath that experience is an enormous amount of infrastructure and some of fintech’s biggest opportunities are hiding there. @RoryOReilly, cofounder and CEO of @KnotAPIs, joined me on the pod to talk about how Knot is rewiring fintech and transforming financial connectivity. We dive into: - Why keeping a card “top of wallet” is harder than it sounds. - The infrastructure required to connect financial institutions with thousands of merchants. - Why security and compliance are foundational, not afterthoughts, in fintech. - Where blockchain and stablecoins could fit into the financial stack. - Rory’s unconventional path from selling shoes with his family to building fintech companies with his brother. What I particularly enjoyed about this conversation is that Knot is tackling a problem most consumers don't even realize exists. The biggest innovations in fintech may not be the products we see, they may be the infrastructure quietly making everything work. Special thanks to Rory for joining me on the pod.

Robots don't usually fail because they don't work. Poor system integration and mismatched ROI expectations cause more than half of deployment failures. Inadequate change management adds another ~20%. The tech works. The deployment doesn't. That gap is a software problem. @navya_prab maps where physical AI's second wave is opening up: interplay.vc/blog/physical-a…

Main Street is planning to hire like it's 2020. The S&P is earning like it's 2021. Both are true right now. In May, the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index fell to 95.3, its ninth straight month below its 52-year average. Buried inside: a seasonally adjusted net 9% of small-business owners plan to add jobs in the next three months — down four points from April, and the lowest reading since May 2020. Two months later, the top-line labor number caught up. June nonfarm payrolls came in at just 57,000 — roughly half the 115,000 consensus, with downward revisions to the prior two months on top. Meanwhile, the other economy is having its best year in half a decade. S&P 500 companies are on pace for their strongest quarterly earnings growth since 2021, concentrated in the AI-adjacent names that drive capex and revenue simultaneously. → Small-business hiring plans: net 9% (lowest since 2020) → S&P 500 Q1 2026 earnings growth: strongest since 2021 The takeaway isn't that Main Street is broken. It's that the two economies are running on different fuel. Big-cap earnings are being pulled forward by an AI capex cycle that concentrates spending in a narrow set of buyers and sellers. Small-business hiring is being throttled by pricing pressure, labor costs, and demand uncertainty that doesn't show up in an index dominated by ten names. Any thesis that ignores which economy a portfolio company sells into is a thesis running on the wrong data. Full analysis → interplay.vc/blog/two-econom… #SmallBusiness #NFIB #Economy #VentureCapital #AI #Interplay

The manufacturing story on your feed says two things: factories are humming, or factories are dying. Neither is what the federal data actually shows. Employment is up 333,000 workers since 2015. It's also down 305,000 since January 2023. Output is 2% below its 2015 baseline. It's also up 3.4% off its October 2024 bottom. Both facts, same series. The 2015–19 productivity gap is closing right now: output per hour is up 3.9% since early 2023, on a workforce that's shrinking. And it's closing in specific segments the aggregate hides. High-tech equipment output is up 11.1% year over year. Consumer goods is down 1.2%. The average tells you nothing. With capacity utilization 2.5 points below its long-run norm, the industrial-tech pitch that sells "more units per hour" is selling into a factory that already has room to run harder. What buyers are actually paying for right now is different. We pulled the federal data. Full read: interplay.vc/blog/manufactur…

Joined @TheFullRatchet to talk AI demand curves, startup moats, seed strategy, and building internal AI tools. Always a pleasure chatting with Nick. Check out the full episode here: fullratchet.net/514-ais-effe…

Every founder I know is asking the same question: “How should we actually implement AI across our company?” The reality is that every playbook will require customization, but there are clear patterns beginning to emerge. In this episode, Chetan Narain, Cofounder of Pepper, joins me and my colleague, Interplay Senior Partner @kevinwtung , to share how Pepper is integrating AI across its products and organization — and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. We discuss: - Where vertical SaaS ends and vertical AI begins - AI agents and guardrails - Organizational redesign - How to move fast without creating chaos If you're building a company and thinking beyond AI features toward AI transformation, I think you'll enjoy this conversation.