Compound Interest from Semafor Business

The World Cup prints money — an estimated $10 billion this year. FIFA keeps almost all of it. The business case for the host cities shouldering much of the costs, however, isn’t so clear. New York-New Jersey Host Committee CEO Alex Lasry joins Liz and Rohan this week to break down what’s really in it for New York (and, ahem, New Jersey), why he thinks you can’t put a price on the opportunity, and...

One of Silicon Valley’s top political fixers, Bradley Tusk, built a career helping startups like Uber and FanDuel brawl their way to legitimacy — in his words, “legalize disruptive sh*t.” His message to AI companies: You have no idea what’s coming. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Amazon Business. This episode is commercial content produced by Semafor Global Studio with Amaz...

Anant Bhalla had a front-row seat to Wall Street's takeover of the life insurance industry, which turned a sleepy corner of American finance into a multitrillion-dollar investment engine. Now, even he’s worried it’s gone too far. He talks to Liz and Rohan about “zombie” insurers, ratings shopping, and where the next big blowup will happen. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with Am...

In this special episode of Compound Interest, Semafor’s Chief Commercial Officer Rachel Oppenheim sits down with Todd Heimes, Vice President and General Manager at our season sponsor, Amazon Business. Todd and Rachel sit down to discuss how Amazon Business is reshaping how organizations buy. Heimes has been scaling Amazon since he started there in 1999, and has been growing Amazon Business since i...

Klarna, best known as a buy now, pay later giant, came of age during the e-commerce boom. But as AI takes over everything, including our shopping, Liz and Rohan ask Sebastian about what an agentic commerce future means for his business, if Klarna will eventually become a bank, the truth about his AI customer service experiment, whether people should really be financing their DoorDash orders, and m...

Bitcoin evangelist Anthony Pompliano has reinvented himself as the champion of a new kind of investor: digitally native, high-net-worth, and deeply skeptical of Wall Street expertise. He joins Liz and Rohan to talk about his AI-powered CFO product, why he thinks independent investors outperform the pros, what's left in crypto worth caring about, and the uncomfortable politics of the Trump family's...

If you ski or snowboard, you probably have an opinion of Rob Katz’s business. The Vail Resorts CEO joins Liz and Rohan on Compound Interest to talk about the criticisms of crowding, lift lines, and pricing of the season pass that changed winter sports forever. Katz also explains why the company doesn’t hedge weather, how the industry’s high-end clientele complicates customer relations, why he isn’...

Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast has been at the forefront of a new kind of business media for more than a decade. Co-host Joe Weisenthal joins Liz and Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith to talk about how the business of business media has evolved throughout his career and how he and Tracy Alloway approach making a podcast that gets into the weeds of supply chains for an audience that ranges from high...

Chris Bogart spent years at Cravath before building Burford Capital into the world's largest litigation finance firm — turning lawsuits into investible assets. Liz and Rohan dig into the financialization of corporate fights, Burford’s $16 billion beef with Argentina, and what it would take to finally let private equity buy a piece of Big Law. This season of Compound Interest is in partnership with...

Marc Lore built Diapers.com, sold it to Amazon. Built Jet.com, sold it to Walmart. Now he’s trying something different: taking Wonder — his vertically integrated food-delivery startup — all the way to a public offering. Semafor Deputy Editor-in-Chief Shelly Banjo joins Liz to dig into how he’s betting that robots, influencers, and AI-directed meal plans can finally crack the code on profitable foo...

Mark Cuban is on a mission to rid the US health care system of the middlemen he blames for soaring costs. Liz and Rohan dive into his approach with Cost Plus Drugs, which aims to disrupt the little-known middlemen driving up prescription drug prices. He also discussed soaring valuations in sports, his own regrets around the Dallas Mavericks sale, and offers a surprising assessment of TrumpRX. This...

Colossal, the biotech startup working on de-extincting the woolly mammoth and the dodo, thinks it can make trillions of dollars — almost none of it from consumer-facing products. Liz and Rohan dive into it all with CEO Ben Lamm, who has already spun out four businesses as he’s built the bioscience business with a focus on serving governments and nations looking to build drought-resistant plants, p...

John Arnold — one of the greatest energy traders of his generation — turned his sights on philanthropy nearly two decades ago, applying the same ROI-driven focus that made him billions to charitable giving. He walks Liz and Rohan through his vision for fixing higher ed, the problem with sports betting and prediction markets, and the Trump-driven chaos in the energy markets. This season of Compound...

Oura, whose rings are the favored accessory of finance bros and Silicon Valley longevity-maxxers, is doing something unusual in tech: Running toward a heavily regulated market. CEO Tom Hale explains why the company’s future is in the clinical world, plus what he thinks wins the wearables war and what it’s like doing business with the Pentagon right now. This season of Compound Interest is in partn...

America needs millions more homes. Private-equity firms, red-tape nightmares, and homebuilders’ profit motive are all to blame. One startup, an offshoot from Airbnb, has a solution: fully-built, crane-plopped tiny homes in your backyard. Liz and Rohan dive into how Samara is trying to redefine what housing looks like, and whether it’s the start of a new asset class for Wall Street. This season of...

Private equity and private credit was long a perk for the rich and well-connected. But now Wall Street’s investment giants are pitching their products to everyday Americans, who have piled in — and are now piling out in a panic. Is this democratizing finance or a recipe for disaster? Liz and Rohan dive into that and much more with Alisa Wood, the KKR executive leading their retail charge. This sea...

David Ulevitch leads Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund, a $1.776 billion pot dedicated to defense, energy, public safety, and other national priorities. We talked about whether those industries deserve their conservative coding, why venture capital — with its roots in capital-light code — has a right to win in heavy industry, and why he doesn’t want the “moral liability” of deciding how...

Bilt Rewards launched in 2019 with a simple idea. If you can get credit-card rewards for buying a round of drinks, why can’t you get them for paying your rent? After a shambolic and short-lived partnership with Wells Fargo, the company is back with bigger ambitions: to be the platform powering 12% of the economy — housing services — plus a big chunk of what people spend on dining, workouts, health...

Uber changed the way people work and the way they move. Now CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is trying to figure out what role people play in his business, as AI and autonomous vehicles change the economics of transportation and impossibly, make it easier for people — or things — to get from Point A to Point B. He talks with Semafor about his AI-driven robotaxi mission control, what self-driving cars will lo...

Business is changing in subtle and seismic ways. Every Tuesday starting March 3, Compound Interest from Semafor Business will pair journalists Liz Hoffman and Rohan Goswami with the operators, experts, and innovators behind the world’s most consequential companies, to decode why big parts of the economy work the way they do. Sign up to get the Semafor Business briefing delivered right to your inbo...