AI in the Real World with Foundation Capital

In this episode, Joanne is joined by Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View, to unpack what it will take for AI to move from individual productivity gains to true org-level transformation. The conversation builds on Joanne and Leo’s recent essay on the great reorg, which argues that AI’s full impact will only arrive when companies redesign how work gets done from first principles.  Today, AI is...

Tennr co-founder and CEO Trey Holterman joins Joanne to talk about what it takes to make AI work in healthcare, and why the answer is not simply "better models." Tennr focuses on patient flow: the process of getting patients from one provider to the next with the right records, insurance information, clinical context, and scheduling in place. It's a problem that sits in the messy middle of healthc...

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Joanne Chen sits down with Ken Goldberg, professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Ambi Robotics, a company applying AI-enabled robotics to transform the logistics industry. Ken has spent more than four decades working at the intersection of robotics and AI, focusing on one of the most persistent challenge...

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Karan Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, a company pioneering the use of state space models (SSMs) for AI applications. Karan shared his journey from pursuing a PhD at Stanford to co-founding Cartesia with Albert Gu - taking their academic research on SSMs and turning it into a product that is...

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Rohan Taori, a researcher on Anthropic's multimodal pre-training team. Within the AI community, Rohan is best known for co-creating Alpaca, a project that demonstrated how fine-tuning Meta's LLaMA model could achieve ChatGPT-level performance for under $600. Rohan shares his journey from early wo...

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi speaks to Chris "Tito" Sestito, the co-founder and CEO of HiddenLayer. HiddenLayer is a cybersecurity platform purpose-built for AI systems. Tito's journey into AI security began at Cylance, where he led the response to one of the first real-world AI attacks. This experience led him to start HiddenLayer, which...

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital General Partner Joanne Chen speaks with Melody Meckfessel, the CTO of Jasper. Melody has been a pioneering technical leader and co-founder of two startups. She spent 15 years running engineering teams at Google, where she helped shape Google Cloud and improve search. Here, she shares her journey from the early days of search to t...

Welcome to AI in the Real World! I'm Andrew Han, a partner at Foundation Capital, and I'll be your host today. I work closely with technical founders who are building software to solve hard, valuable problems. I'm excited to chat with Darius Lam, founder and CEO of NEX, a recent addition to our portfolio. Darius was previously head of product for computer vision at Cerebras, another Foundation Cap...

Welcome to AI in the Real World. I'm Steve Vassallo, a General Partner at Foundation Capital. In this series, we talk with leading AI researchers about their groundbreaking work and how it's being applied in real businesses today. Joining me is Sean Lie, co-founder and CTO of Cerebras Systems. I've known Sean since early 2016 before leading the Series A investment in Cerebras. At the time, Sean wa...

Welcome to AI in the Real World. I'm Joanne Chen, a General Partner at Foundation Capital. On this show, I speak with leading AI researchers about how cutting-edge models are being applied in enterprises today. Joining me today is Eugene Cheah, the founder of Recursal AI. Recursal is working to commercialize RWKV, a new AI architecture that Eugene played a key role in developing. Eugene believes R...

In this episode, I'm joined by Chi Wang, a principal researcher at Microsoft and the creator of AutoGen, an open-source framework that allows developers to combine LLMs, tools, and human input to build multi-agent AI systems. By enabling AI agents to collaborate, learn from each other, and contribute their unique skills, AutoGen is unlocking a new frontier of AI capabilities. It's quickly gained t...

Welcome to AI in the Real World! I'm your host, Joanne Chen, a General Partner at Foundation Capital, where I work closely with startups that are reshaping business with AI. In this series, I'll be holding in-depth discussions with leading AI researchers. Together, we'll explore how state-of-the-art AI models are being applied in the real world. To kick things off, I'm excited to speak with Joon S...