Podcasts · Technology · Business
Summation with Auren Hoffman
Auren Hoffman
291 episodes
Non-obvious ideas that move the world. Auren Hoffman hosts leaders across tech, business, markets, and government.
More about the show
Summation is the permanent home for the relentlessly curious.
Auren is CEO of NQB8, GP at Flex Capital, Chairman of Dialog; former CEO of SafeGraph and LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP).
Episodes page 1 of 6
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Hiring in the AI era: Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait
Daniel Chait is the co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse, the hiring platform behind thousands of companies. Before Greenhouse, he co-founded Lab49, a technology consultancy for Wall Street. He's also the author of Talent…
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Olo CEO Noah Glass: the right to be known
Noah Glass is the founder and CEO of Olo, the digital commerce platform behind ordering, payments, and loyalty for many of America's biggest restaurant brands. He started Olo in 2005 with ordering by text message,…
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Protege CEO Bobby Samuels on the data nobody has unlocked yet
Bobby Samuels is the co-founder and CEO of Protege, a platform that licenses real-world data from industries like healthcare and media to companies building AI. Protege has raised $65 million from Andreessen Horowitz,…
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Axios Co-founder Roy Schwartz: why average is worthless now
Roy Schwartz co-founded Axios, the news company known for smart brevity, and helped grow it to a $525 million sale to Cox Enterprises. He's now co-founder and CEO of Axios HQ, an AI-powered internal communications…
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Helion CEO David Kirtley on why fusion finally works
David Kirtley is the co-founder and CEO of Helion Energy, the fusion company. Helion has raised more than $1.5 billion at a $15.5 billion valuation, and Sam Altman is its biggest investor and former chairman. Before…
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Alex Rampell on why the best companies have hostages, not customers
Alex Rampell is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $2.7 billion Apps practice and has driven much of the firm's fintech investing, including Plaid, Mercury, and Opendoor. Before a16z,…
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Life360 founder Chris Hulls on existential amusement and why public markets kill bold bets
Chris Hulls is the co-founder and executive chairman of Life360 ($LIF), the family safety and location-sharing app now worth over $5 billion. He was CEO for 17 years before stepping back last year. Before Life360, he…
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Felicis founder Aydin Senkut: why moats are dead and alive
Aydin Senkut is the founder and managing partner of Felicis, the venture firm he started in 2006, with over $4B under management and early bets on Shopify, Notion, Canva, and Adyen. He was Google's first product…
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Nir Eyal on belief, motivation, and the end of suffering
Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked, which became Silicon Valley's playbook for building habit-forming products, Indistractable, on taking your attention back, and the new book Beyond Belief. He taught at Stanford's…
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SecureAuth CEO Geoff Mattson on the coming fraudpocalypse and the death of the password
Geoff Mattson is the CEO of SecureAuth, an identity security company that has raised over $200M and protects more than 50 million identities for enterprises. Before SecureAuth he was CEO of Xage Security. His work now…
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Fmr. Senator Cory Gardner: why the AI race is won on boring infrastructure and how China wins by making America hate AI
Cory Gardner is a former U.S. Senator and Congressman from Colorado and was one of the Senate's leading Taiwan and China experts, chairing the Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia and authoring the Taipei Act.…
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CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill on software's new bottleneck and zero to $50m ARR in 2 years
Harjot Gill is the co-founder and CEO of CodeRabbit, the AI code review company that became the most installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab. Over about two years, CodeRabbit went from zero to over $50M in ARR and a $1B+…
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Moritz Baier-Lentz on why the future of AI runs on video games
Moritz Baier-Lentz is one of the foremost investors in gaming, AI, and frontier technologies—including companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir, Etched, Decart, and Recursive. He founded Goldman Sachs's global gaming…
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OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji: measuring the greatest technology of our time
Ronnie Chatterji is the Chief Economist at OpenAI, where he leads research on how AI reshapes growth, jobs, and the economy. He is also an economics professor at Duke. He was previously the White House CHIPS…
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Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg: why AI wins a Nobel before a Pulitzer
Felix Rieseberg leads engineering for Claude Cowork and Claude Code Desktop at Anthropic. Before that he led desktop and web infrastructure at Notion and built software at Stripe, Slack, and Microsoft. In this episode…
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Fifth Wall CEO Brendan Wallace: the data center land grab and the most stable asset on earth you still can't buy
Brendan Wallace is the Founder, CEO & CIO of Fifth Wall, the largest investment firm focused on technology for the built environment, with ~$3B in capital, the firm is driving the growth of nearly 170 companies,…
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Striveworks CEO Jim Rebesco on drone swarms, AI for warfighters, and the end of air superiority
Jim Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an AI ops company deployed across the US Army, Navy, and combatant commands. In April, Striveworks announced a $70M enterprise agreement with the Pentagon, giving…
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Short-seller Carson Block: a fugitive CEO, Libyan spies, and $50B fraud
Carson Block is the founder of Muddy Waters Research, one of the defining activist short-selling firms of the last decade and a half. Since 2010, Muddy Waters has published forensic research exposing accounting fraud…
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Facet CEO Anders Jones on the biggest heist in finance, how advisors really sell permission, and the great boomer wealth transfer
Anders Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Facet, a fintech company built to bring high-quality, flat-fee financial advice to an underserved market: the mass affluent. Facet has raised over $250M and manages more than…
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Charles Duhigg on the writing AI can't touch, what GLP-1s really do to your brain, and the serendipity tax
Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better, and Supercommunicators. His work focuses on the science of…
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SignalFire CEO Chris Farmer on why venture funds now last 20 years and the hiring boom behind the layoffs
Chris Farmer is the founder and CEO of SignalFire, an early stage venture firm managing over $3 billion. In this episode of Summation, Chris and Auren discuss: • why the time to return 1x has stretched to 9+ years…
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GTMnow Podcast | Your First VC Meeting Will Be Agent-to-Agent
This episode is a rebroadcast of Auren's appearance on the GTMnow podcast --------------------------------------------------- Auren Hoffman (Flex Capital) joins the GTMnow podcast to share some of the most contrarian…
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Serval CEO Jake Stauch: talent is the only moat left, hiring founders as FDEs, and building a $1B company with your wife and a newborn
Jake Stauch is the co-founder and CEO of Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform. Serval was founded in 2024 and has already raised over $125M across rounds led by Redpoint and Sequoia at a $1B+…
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Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko on why curiosity is AI’s scarcest resource
Dmitry Shevelenko is Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. He previously co-founded Tortoise, a robotics and commerce automation startup and held business development roles at Uber, LinkedIn, and Meta. He also serves…
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Fundrise CEO Ben Miller: VCX, Roaring Kitty's revenge, and AI killing the office
Ben Miller is the co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, an alternative asset management platform that gives individual investors access to private real estate, private credit, and venture capital. In March 2026, he listed…
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Six-time CIA Station Chief Ralph Goff on the new doctrine of war
Ralph Goff is a 35-year veteran of the CIA, having served as a six-time Chief of Station across Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia. During his career, he also held the roles of Chief of Operations for…
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Glenn Youngkin on governing like a CEO, the AI power crisis, and why every operator should run for office
Glenn Youngkin was the 74th Governor of Virginia. Before politics, he spent nearly 25 years at The Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, where he rose to co-CEO. During his four-year…
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Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta on why trades are AI-proof, the trillion-dollar home services market, and why software stopped being a capital asset
Marco Zappacosta is the co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, the home services marketplace he started in 2008. Thumbtack connects homeowners to 300,000+ local service professionals, with nearly 100M projects started on the…
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Eric Ries on why "bad governance" outperforms, the case against shareholder primacy, and AI's Chernobyl moment
Eric Ries created the Lean Startup methodology and authored the bestselling book of the same name, which has sold over a million copies. He's also the founder and executive chairman of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the…
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Fmr. German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg on NATO, nuclear energy, and how to disagree without blood
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg became Germany's youngest Minister of Defense in history, and previously served as Minister of Economics and Technology. He is the chairman and founder of Spitzberg Partners, an investment…
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Fmr Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on chips, China, and lessons from Andy Grove
Pat Gelsinger is the former CEO of Intel and longtime Silicon Valley leader. He joins Auren to unpack the forces reshaping technology, geopolitics and leadership. After more than 30 years at Intel (including serving…
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Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim on mathematical superintelligence, why math is harder than code for LLMs, and the end of buggy software
Vlad Tenev (Robinhood co-founder/CEO) and Tudor Achim (former helm.ai CTO) are the founders of Harmonic, an AI lab pioneering the path toward mathematical superintelligence. Together, they developed Aristotle, a model…
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Retired 4-star General John Allen on Iran, AI hyperwar, and Taiwan’s future
John Allen is a retired four-star Marine Corps general who commanded 150,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan and built a 65-nation coalition as Special Presidential Envoy to the Global Coalition Against ISIS. After…
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Adrian Aoun on healthcare as a product, Apple's AI problem, and why you should have kids now
Adrian Aoun helped found Torch, a health data platform that was acquired by OpenAI earlier this year. He's also the co-founder of Seneca, which raised $60 million to build autonomous drones for wildfire suppression.…
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Tod Sacerdoti (Flex GP and Pipedream CEO) on seed at scale and SaaS mispricing
Tod Sacerdoti is the CEO and co-founder of Pipedream, which recently sold to Workday. Tod is also a general partner at Flex Capital, where he's invested in over 400 companies including Chime, Vercel, Replit,…
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Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia on bowling alone, AI bots, and why the heartland is happier than the coasts
Nirav Tolia is the co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor (NYSE: NXDR), the neighborhood social network with over 105 million users across 350,000 communities worldwide. After stepping down as CEO in 2018, he returned to lead…
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Lt. General Mike Fenzel (Ret.) on bad data, bad experts, and why we can’t exit wars
Lieutenant General Mike Fenzel recently retired as a three-star Army General. He most recently served as the United States Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, navigating one of the world’s…
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Martin Shkreli on prison, beating Bloomberg, and being hated
Martin Shkreli is the co-founder of DL Software, the parent company of Godel Terminal, a Bloomberg competitor for financial data. He previously founded the biotech companies Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals and the…
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World of DaaS is now Summation
World of DaaS is now Summation with Auren Hoffman. While we’re proud of our roots in the data world, our conversations have evolved. Summation better reflects our obsession with finding the non-obvious ideas that shape…
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Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth - The $30 Trillion Knowledge Work Market, Training Frontier AI Models and Building Stage Five Culture
Jonathan Siddharth is the founder and CEO of Turing, a $2.2 billion AI company that provides coding and reasoning data to train frontier models for OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic and more. Turing’s mission is to…
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Chapter CEO Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz - medicare complexity, $100B fraud and how tech can fix it
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz is the co-founder and CEO of Chapter, an AI-powered Medicare navigation platform valued at $1.5 billion that helps seniors navigate coverage and enrollment. In this episode of World of DaaS, Cobi…
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Industry Ventures Founder Hans Swildens - how secondaries became the dominant path for VC exits
Hans Swildens is a partner and Head of Industry Ventures at Goldman Sachs. Industry Ventures is one of the pioneers in the secondary market for venture capital, managing several billion in assets across LP stakes,…
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Economist Glenn Hubbard - The Fed’s dilemma, AI productivity, and why experts lost trust
Glenn Hubbard is Dean Emeritus and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School. He served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush from 2001 to…
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Rembrand CEO Omar Tawakol - why product placement works better than traditional ads
Omar Tawakol is the CEO and founder of Rembrand, an AI-powered virtual product placement company. He founded BlueKai, a data management platform acquired by Oracle for $400M+ in 2014, and Voicera, an AI meeting…
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We the Builders Podcast l From LiveRamp ($RAMP) to NQB8: Auren Hoffman’s Founder Journey
This episode is a rebroadcast of Auren's appearance on the We the Builders podcast. We The Builders: https://twitter.com/WeThe_Builders Host Suffiyan Malik: https://twitter.com/suffiyanmalikk Substack:…
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FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller - why pricing data businesses trade at 30x EBIT despite 4% growth
Craig Fuller is the founder and CEO of FreightWaves, a freight media company, and SONAR, a supply chain data platform. He’s also the founder of Firecrown, which owns more than 50 publications across aviation, marine,…
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Wispr Flow CEO Tanay Kothari - voice AI deep dive
Tanay Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice-first AI assistant that recently raised $56 million in Series A funding. In this episode of World of DaaS, Tanay and Auren discuss: • Why Apple and…
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The LM Brief: India as the Next Epicenter of AI?
Microsoft is investing $17.5 billion to turn India into a global AI powerhouse — from training 20 million workers to building new data infrastructure. We break down what this means for the future of AI talent,…
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YipitData CEO Vin Vacanti - why hedge funds dominate data usage (and corporations don't)
Vinicius Vacanti is the co-founder and CEO of YipitData, an alternative data intelligence platform that analyzes billions of consumer data points daily for institutional investors and corporations. The company reached…
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The LM Brief: The Syntax Illusion
This week’s World of DaaS LM Brief: MIT’s new research reveals how large language models can be fooled by their own grammar. By prioritizing sentence structure over sense, these systems risk producing confident but…
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