The Unstoppables with Hurratul

Oura’s IPO could be worth up to $2.2 billion, but the more revealing number is 73%. And at the midpoint price, Oura expects about $533 million in net proceeds, with roughly $526 million earmarked for taxes tied to employee RSUs, which is short for restricted stock units.   In the base offering, 73% of the shares are secondary shares being sold by existing shareholders, while only 27% are primary s...

a16z announced the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a new school for young builders in San Francisco. The founding class will be about 50 students in a one-year, tuition-free fellowship starting in September 2027. What stands out is the admissions signal: proof of work matters heavily. What have you actually built, shipped or created? Students also get more than $50,000 in compute credits, a $5,000 tr...

Heidi just raised $340 million, but only $100 million is equity. The more interesting part is the structure. The other $240 million comes from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, which is designed to finance customer acquisition without additional equity dilution. If customer acquisition becomes predictable enough to finance separately, founders may not need to sell permanent ownership to fund...

Amazon expects $2.4 billion of initial generator deliveries from Generac. But the deal also gives Amazon something unusual: the right to potentially buy Generac shares. Here’s the concept: a warrant gives you the right, but not the obligation, to buy shares later at a preset price. Most of Amazon’s warrant shares vest as Amazon spends more with Generac. The vesting happens at specific payment thre...

AI may be accelerating scientific design faster than experimental validation can keep up. Anthropic says Claude optimized more than 30 open-source AI models used for tasks such as protein design, structure prediction and genomics in just under four weeks, with roughly 4× average speedups and minimal loss of precision. But faster computation creates a new constraint: those ideas still have to be te...

According to a16z, AI startups have two ways to sell into the enterprise. Lighthouse and Landgrab. It's a sharp map. Today we're going a layer deeper. The premise underneath it is the one worth sitting with. The buyer who signs is pricing their own risk, not evaluating your product in the abstract. From that, we have two questions. How exposed is the buyer. And does social proof travel. That gives...

The most popular online payment processor on the planet just got a takeover bid at a discount to what payments businesses normally fetch. 439 million users. Roughly 44 percent of the global online payment market. And revenue still growing. And the market cheered. Here is the consensus. Stripe, alongside Advent International, has offered around $53 billion, according to Reuters. $60.50 a share, a 2...

OpenAI wants to go public at $1 trillion, and this month it signaled it would rather wait until 2027 than list for a dollar less. So the question worth sitting with is simple: what would have to be true for that number to hold? Start with the scorecard. PitchBook rates the leading AI labs across five dimensions: revenue quality, capital efficiency, governance, moat durability, and how much of thei...

We can think of this as the liquidity-legitimacy loop. When liquidity becomes constrained, capital does not spread out. It moves toward the managers LPs already trust. The latest PitchBook NVCA Venture Monitor shows why. US venture exits reached $2.19 trillion in the first half of 2026, more than all venture exits of the previous decade combined. Yet distributions to LPs remain constrained. That d...

Enterprise AI may not be won by the company with the strongest model. It may be won by the company that can make AI work inside real organizations. According to TechCrunch, Microsoft’s new Frontier Company, backed by a $2.5 billion commitment and 6,000 industry and engineering experts, signals an important shift. The AI race is moving from capability to deployment. The question is no longer just:...

A startup called Engram has emerged from stealth with $98 million in funding from some of Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firms. Founded by researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, and Cornell, the company is already partnering with Microsoft, Notion, and Harvey. But the funding isn't the real story. The real story is that Engram is building what it calls a learned memory layer for AI. Today'...

Artificial intelligence is rewriting how companies are built and how they get funded. The next generation of founders and investors will look nothing like the last. So what stays uniquely valuable when AI makes knowledge, execution, and coordination almost free? In this episode of The U Lab Podcast, I sit down with Jing Kuang, Founding Partner of Y+ Ventures and Co-Founder of Cresca, for a rigorou...

FAANG to MANGOS For nearly two decades, one acronym defined the technology industry: FAANG. Today, a new acronym is going viral on X: MANGOS. It stands for Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX, a group that could soon dominate the next era of technology as several companies prepare to go public. But here's what caught my attention. FAANG was built around the internet. MANGOS is bein...

Most people assume AI is making it harder for new college graduates to find jobs. A recent analysis highlighted by a16z points to a more surprising possibility. What if remote work is a bigger factor? Researchers found that unemployment among younger college graduates has deteriorated more than for older workers, with the gap appearing particularly pronounced in occupations that can be performed r...

What happens when intelligence becomes so powerful that access to it starts coming with conditions?   This week, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the first public version of its Mythos model. But alongside the launch came something unusual: strict safety limits, blocked responses in high-risk areas, and a mandatory 30-day data retention policy, even for some enterprise customers that previously...

SpaceX is expected to raise at least $85 billion in what could become the largest IPO in history. But the most interesting question is not what happens on the listing day. It is what business SpaceX actually becomes over the next decade. The bull case is that SpaceX is no longer just a launch company. Starlink could become a global communications platform. AI compute could become a multi-billion-d...

Google just signed a deal to pay SpaceX $920 million per month for AI compute. Google is already one of the largest owners of AI infrastructure in the world. Yet it is still renting massive amounts of external compute capacity. That tells us something important. The bottleneck in AI is no longer intelligence. It is capacity. For decades, technology companies competed for users. Today, even the lar...

What actually determines startup success inside Silicon Valley? Is it capital, product, execution - or something deeper? Silicon Valley is often described as a capital ecosystem. In reality, it may be one of the world's most sophisticated trust ecosystems. In this episode of The U Lab Podcast, Sacha Ledan, Co-Founder & Partner at Raisable Founder Hub and former Associate Director at Stanford G...

This episode is a deep dive into what it really takes to scale a nonprofit globally - not from theory, but from execution. In this conversation, I sit down with Chesca Colloredo-Mansfeld, co-founder of MiracleFeet, which has treated over 100,000 children across 37 countries. What stood out to me is how intentional her journey has been. This wasn’t chaos turning into impact - it was clarity, convic...

In this episode, I sit down with James Keyes - former CEO of 7-Eleven and Blockbuster, bestselling author, and a leader whose journey is defined by resilience, reinvention, and an indomitable spirit. We talk about the hardest chapters of his life, the mindset that allowed him to keep rising, and the discipline required to lead through uncertainty. His story is a masterclass in grit, clarity, and l...

What does it take to build a tech company in the middle of a war? In this episode of The Unstoppables, host Hurratul Maleka Taj talks to Dana Sydorenko—Ukrainian veteran, AI-driven tech founder, and investor—about her incredible journey from the frontlines of combat to the frontlines of innovation. Dana opens up about: Her life as a combat paramedic during the war in Ukraine How she launched a def...

What if embracing death was the secret to living fearlessly? In this transformative episode of The Unstoppables, host Hurratul Maleka Taj sits down with Jill Greenbaum - Buddhist practitioner, Appreciative Inquiry expert, and End-of-Life guide - to explore the profound connection between mortality and unstoppable living.   Most people avoid thinking about death, but what if facing it head-on could...

How do you hold onto hope when life challenges you at every turn? In this powerful episode of The Unstoppables with Hurratul, meet Professor Jack Fuchs, a man who’s faced unimaginable adversity as a leader, a father, and a mentor. From being fired as a company leader to witnessing his son struggle with bullying and mental health issues, Jack’s story is a testament to the strength of the human spir...

We often find ourselves overwhelmed by everyday frustrations, convinced that our struggles are insurmountable. But then, there are stories like Gricha’s that remind us of the true meaning of resilience and the power of never giving up. Imagine a father standing against the medical fraternity’s predictions, refusing to accept that his son would never walk again. For 5 long years, Gricha fought rele...