SambaNova CEO on Raising $1B at $11B: "It's a Land Grab Right Now"

Apollo bought Yahoo and AOL from Verizon in 2021 for about $5B. 5 years later, Yahoo has returned Apollo’s capital in one of the fastest returning deals in the firm’s history.

Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO of Vercel, joins Sourcery from the company's San Francisco headquarters to discuss how AI agents are transforming software development, infrastructure, and the economics of SaaS. Vercel has reportedly reached $600M in annualized revenue, growing 148% YoY, with more than 485,000 paying teams and a $9.3B valuation. Its infrastructure powers applications for OpenAI, Meta, Stripe, Shopify, DoorDash, and more. AI agents now account for 60% of Vercel deployments, up from just 3% at the beginning of 2026. Guillermo explains why coding is becoming dramatically cheaper, why companies may eventually generate software instead of buying it, and how the internet is shifting from human interfaces to agent-native infrastructure. We cover open vs. closed AI models, autonomous agents, cybersecurity, the future of SaaS, exploding compute demand, and how the role of software engineers is changing.

Dr. Nworah Ayogu, MD, MBA, Partner at Thrive Capital, joins Sourcery to discuss how AI is transforming drug discovery, medicine, and the economics of healthcare. A Harvard-trained physician, founding team member of Cityblock Health, former General Manager of Amazon Clinic and first Chief Medical Officer of Amazon Pharmacy, Nworah is now a partner at Thrive Capital. The investment firm has grown to over $65bn in AUM and its healthcare portfolio includes Neuralink, Nudge, Isomorphic Labs, OpenEvidence, OpenAI, Oscar Health, and Cadence. We cover AI's potential to accelerate drug development, Isomorphic Labs and Demis Hassabis, Neuralink's brain-computer interfaces, OpenEvidence's rapid adoption among physicians, personalized medicine, and the emergence of 10X doctors and nurses. We also explore some of Thrive’s breakout healthcare incubations, the next generation of trillion-dollar healthcare companies, and why AI's most important breakthroughs may happen in medicine rather than software. Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are the speaker's own as of the recording date and are subject to change. Thrive funds and their affiliates have investments in certain companies discussed in this episode. References to those companies are illustrative, do not represent all investments made by Thrive, and should not be viewed as recommendations or indications of future investment performance. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Perplexity Founder & CEO Aravind Srinivas believes the next wave of American economic growth could come from smaller, AI-native businesses, not just the largest technology companies. Perplexity, valued at ~$20B with more than $2B in reported funding and backing from NVIDIA, SoftBank, IVP, NEA, Accel, Jeff Bezos, and Elad Gil, has evolved from an AI answer engine into a platform for autonomous agents, research, and knowledge work. I sat down with Aravind at Perplexity's new San Francisco headquarters to discuss the economics of AI, the future of entrepreneurship, and why agents could enable a generation of smaller, more profitable companies. Aravind reveals that Perplexity's revenue is growing 5x year over year, enterprise adoption is accelerating, and one solopreneur is spending over $1M annually on Perplexity Computer while generating $3M in annual revenue. We also explore Perplexity's bet on local AI, its work with NVIDIA and Apple, and why the company has no plans to build its own data centers despite the massive infrastructure buildout underway.

USV spent 20 years keeping its funds small on purpose. Its new $900M raise is the largest fund cycle in the firm’s history. I sat down with USV General Partners Fred Wilson, Rebecca Kaden and Michael Mignano at the firm’s New York office to unpack why one of venture capital’s most disciplined early-stage firms is getting bigger now, and what they think the next era of AI will look like. Together with General Partner Nick Grossman, they’re leading USV into its next chapter. USV was early to Twitter, Coinbase, Stripe, MongoDB, Twilio, Etsy, Duolingo and Abridge. More than 20 years after Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham laid out the firm’s original internet thesis, Fred believes AI today looks a lot like the internet in 2003. The infrastructure is here, but many of the defining applications have yet to be built. We get into why AI is making products cheaper to build but breakout companies potentially more expensive to create, why ARR can hide weak retention, the growing importance of founder storytelling, personal AI agents, the “Rebel Alliance” around open AI infrastructure, and why energy may be one of the cleanest bets on AI. At the center of USV’s new thesis is “obliterate, don’t automate.” Instead of making existing industries incrementally more efficient, AI could completely restructure them. Fred’s version is simple. Don’t hire a lawyer, use an AI lawyer. Don’t hire an accountant, use an AI accountant. Don’t hire a doctor, use an AI doctor.