Minus One

Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, joins South Park Commons Partners Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi to discuss the 17-year journey from early self-driving experiments to putting fully autonomous cars on public roads. They talk about how Waymo built its self-driving system, why simulation and evaluation became so critical, and what it takes to move from something that works in a demo to a product th...

Helmy Eltoukhy, CEO of Guardant Health, joins South Park Commons Partner Mark Jacobstein to discuss his journey from electrical engineering to building one of the leading companies in cancer diagnostics. They talk about Guardant’s path from liquid biopsy to early cancer detection, the difficult realities of building a diagnostics company, and why business model innovation can matter just as much a...

How close are we to AGI, and what happens when AI systems stop behaving the way we expect? Srinivas Narayanan, former CTO of B2B Engineering at OpenAI and former VP of Engineering at Facebook, joins South Park Commons Partner Prateek Mehta for a wide-ranging conversation on his Minus One to Zero journey, enterprise AI adoption, and AI safety. They discuss the career choices that took him from two...

What does it take to build something that lasts? Snowflake CEO and former Google SVP of Ads Sridhar Ramaswamy joins South Park Commons General Partner Aditya Agarwal to share his answer. Ramaswamy traces his journey from Google to founding Neeva, an ad-free search startup that shut down before the generative AI boom, to leading Snowflake through the AI era. He shares what defines great founders, w...

Why did OpenAI’s model hack into Hugging Face? Tom McGrath, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Goodfire, joins South Park Commons Partner Jonathan Brebner to explore one of AI’s biggest challenges: interpretability. Using OpenAI’s recent reward hacking incident as a starting point, they discuss why today’s most advanced models are still difficult to understand and why gaining visibility into how th...

Thariq Shihipar, a member of Anthropic's Claude Code team (and SPC alum), joins South Park Commons Partner Evan Tana to discuss what it takes to build at the frontier of AI, where the models, tools, and best practices are constantly evolving. Thariq traces his journey from a gaming startup to Anthropic after a chance text about Claude Code, shares why his team stopped using Plan Mode, explains...

What does it actually take to become an astronaut? Shubhanshu Shukla, the second Indian to travel to space after more than four decades, joins South Park Commons general partner Aditya Agarwal to share the answer.  During Axiom Mission 4, Shukla became the first Indian aboard the International Space Station (ISS). An astronaut with ISRO and a Group Captain in the Indian Air Force, he shares what i...

Nato Saichek, cofounder and CTO of Longshot Space, joins South Park Commons Partner Jonathan Brebner to explain why rockets won the space race for the wrong reasons—and why a 15-kilometer space gun may be the most rational path to cheap access to orbit.  Nato traces Longshot's origins from garage experiments with his cofounder Mike Grace, through building the world's largest operational ca...

Amit Jain, cofounder and CEO of Luma AI, joins South Park Commons Partner Finn Meeks to explain why the most defensible AI companies aren't just building tools—they're developing systems that can understand and simulate the world. Amit traces Luma's path from a free 3D capture app designed to gather training data, through an early bet that video generation was finally viable, to the un...

Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, joins South Park Commons partner Aditya Agarwal to discuss the cybersecurity crisis currently unfolding—and why AI is both the threat and the only viable solution. Nikesh traces his own unlikely journey from Google's Chief Business Officer to leading one of the world's most critical cybersecurity companies with no prior cybersecurity experience, sha...

Amjad Masad and Haya Odeh, cofounders of Replit, join South Park Commons Partners Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi to share what it really took to build one of AI’s most important platforms, and how it’s now enabling a new wave of million-dollar founders. Amjad breaks down why traditional ideas like ICP are breaking down in the age of AI, what’s actually changing under the hood of modern models, a...

As AI models become more powerful, safety is emerging as one of the defining challenges of our time.  Rahul Patil, CTO at Anthropic, joins SPC Partner Ankit Chowdhary to discuss why they prioritize AI safety above all else, how the company thinks about building reliable and trustworthy AI models, and the tradeoffs between speed, scale, and responsibility in the age of exponential growth. Rahul als...

Elad Gil, investor and author of High Growth Handbook, sits down with South Park Commons Partner Aditya Agarwal to challenge some of Silicon Valley’s favorite startup myths. He talks about why you might not actually need a cofounder, why data alone isn’t much of a moat, and how the strongest companies build real defensibility while others quietly fall behind. Elad also walks us through his approac...

Grant Lee, cofounder and CEO of Gamma, joins South Park Commons General Partner Jonathan Brebner to discuss how his AI storytelling platform is taking on PowerPoint and Google Slides. Grant shares how Gamma survived the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, how they stayed lean while scaling to a $2B valuation, and why he believes “different beats better” when competing against entrenched incumbents. He a...

When Tony Xu cofounded DoorDash 13 years ago, he was rejected by more than 100 investors. Today, it’s a $70B+ behemoth dominating the delivery industry.  Tony joins SPC General Partner Aditya Agarwal to reveal how DoorDash won the delivery war and answer the burning question of whether AI agents pose a threat to his company. He also shares why customer obsession became the company’s guiding princi...

In 2018, Andrew Yang warned that automation would destabilize society by displacing millions of jobs. Eight years later, he says the crisis is no longer hypothetical—"you're already seeing it." Andrew joins his early mentor, SPC General Partner Mark Jacobstein, and Aditya Agarwal to unpack where we go from here: what UBI looks like in practice, why white-collar workers are more expos...

"I think the mission basically doesn't matter." Waseem Daher, CEO of Pilot (and South Park Commons alum), has a contrarian theory about what actually drives startup success—and it's not passion for the problem you're solving.  Waseem joins General Partner Aditya Agarwal to unpack the real patterns behind building companies: why his "thinking time" after Dropbox was...

What does it feel like to bet your company on AI when everyone's talking about a bubble? Anurag Goel, CEO of Render and former employee #8 at Stripe, joins SPC Partner Jonathan Brebner to share why he's going all-in on AI infrastructure. The SPC alum breaks down the honest debates happening inside his company, why vulnerability builds more trust than the "always confident" founde...

Most things Kunal Shah says, turn into quotes that are shared across a cross-section of worlds — whether that is the startup and tech ecosystem, or simply among people looking to better understand human behaviour.  First with FreeCharge and now with CRED, he has truly traversed a journey of what it means to build for as diverse and complex a market, as India. On Minus One, he shares why technology...

This is the story behind all the IPO headlines.  In this episode of Minus One , Vidit Aatrey talks to Prateek Mehta about the high-conviction journey of building Meesho — from early uncertainty and brutal trade-offs to cracking scale in one of the hardest consumer markets in the world. We talk about why most startups fail to truly understand India, what Meesho got right (after getting a lot wrong)...

If there’s one person to listen to truly grasp the scale and intent of technology and where we’re headed, it’s Kevin Scott. The Microsoft CTO joins Aditya Agarwal to discuss navigating his Minus One days, the partnership with OpenAI, why the most valuable problems to solve are often the ones others ignore, and why building great things has never been easier, cheaper, or faster. Tune in now. Apply...

Having been a key part of building Google and Meta, and helping scale DoorDash and Block, Gokul Rajaram joins Aditya Agarwal to share his principles and patterns for deciding what’s truly worth building. Together, they draw on real stories from Silicon Valley and reflect on what it will take to unlock India’s deep tech potential. The investor gives crucial insight into the mindset, the team, and t...

If you want to know what it’s like to be the architect of nations, not just platforms - you ask a man like Nandan Nilekani . In this episode of Minus One, Nandan breaks down the ideas, effort and intent behind building Aadhaar for 1.4 billion people, his next chapter in using AI to drive social impact across India, and what his vision of the future looks like. Connect with us here: ​ Nandan Nileka...

SPC alum Tuhin Srivastava sits down with Aditya Agarwal to break down how a failed four-year startup, plus early chapters in finance and biotech, shaped the way he is scaling Baseten into one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies today. His approach is simple: kill what doesn’t work, don’t scale before you’re ready, and stop pretending you can see past three months in AI. Apply to SPC...

Rahul Chari is a leader in India’s tech evolution, from building Flipkart’s foundations, to architecting PhonePe’s planet-scale platform. Simply put, there are very few people in a country of over a billion, who have not used what he built. In this episode of Minus One, he reflects on forming lasting partnerships, building for the future, and building to last. Connect with us here: 1. Prateek Meht...