Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth

Govind Balakrishnan is the SVP running Adobe Express. He's spent 20 years at Adobe and watched creation move from desktop to mobile to social feeds. We sat down at Cannes to talk about why AI content doesn't get views. His answer: everyone blames the algorithms, but it's humans who are tuning it out. AI now gets you 60–70% of the creative work in minutes. The last 20–30%, where you add...

Steve Jurvetson has worked with Elon Musk for 29 years and was one of the earliest investors in SpaceX and Tesla, back when space wasn't even a category for venture capital. Today he runs Future Ventures, where he bets on nuclear fusion, epigenetic editing, and analog AI chips. We recorded this live on stage, with audience Q&A at the end. We cover: Why compute has compounded for 130 years,...

📌 Head to https://granola.ai/marina and enter the code MARINA for 3 months off. Richard Socher is the fourth most-cited researcher in the history of natural language processing — he invented the word vectors and prompt engineering that run inside almost every chatbot you use. He sold his first startup to Salesforce, built You.com into a $1.5B unicorn, and in May 2026 raised $650M at a $4.65B valu...

Dr. Fei-Fei Li created ImageNet — the dataset that triggered the deep learning revolution. Now she runs World Labs, where she just raised $1 billion to teach AI something it still can't do: understand physical space. She was named Time Person of the Year in 2025 and won the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. David Rogier founded MasterClass in 2015 on the idea that everyone should have acc...

Peter Yang spent 10+ years building products at Roblox, Reddit, Amazon (Twitch), and Meta. Then he walked away from a high-paying job at Roblox to go all-in as a solo builder. His newsletter Behind the Craft has 140K+ readers, and his podcast has deep conversations with 30+ AI leaders from Anthropic, Google, Cursor, and Replit. In this episode he breaks down how: how to move from using AI like a s...

Esther Wojcicki is the "Godmother of Silicon Valley." She raised three daughters: Susan, who ran YouTube; Anne, who founded 23andMe; and Janet, a professor and anthropologist. Her parenting advice got me through the hardest parts of new motherhood, and YouTube, which Susan built, is the reason I have a career at all. In this episode we cover: The one rule that decides whether AI makes a...

Grant Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Gamma — the $2.1B AI tool that turns one prompt into a finished presentation, now used by 100 million people. We covered: How Gamma hit $100M in revenue with a team of just 50 — profitably, on only $23M of funding The two signs you have product-market fit before the money shows up, and why "your friends will lie to you" about your product How to run a full fu...

Eddie Kim is the co-founder and CTO of Gusto — the $10B payroll and HR platform that millions of small businesses run on. Gusto just launched Gusto Cofounder — an AI teammate for small businesses: payroll, compliance, and daily ops handled before they become problems. Learn more about cofounder here -> https://gusto.com/cofounder?idgm=2mm6b6i2   We covered: The two levels of using AI in a busin...

In 5 years the most valuable companies will run as a closed AI loop — every call, email, and content metric feeding back into one system that acts faster than any human team. In this video I walk through the 5 levels we're building inside my own company, from the foundation layer to the part most founders skip. If you're a founder, creator, or operator trying to make this real in your own...

📌 Head to https://granola.ai/marina and enter the code MARINA for 3 months off. Chris Pedregal built a $1.5 billion AI app in 3 years, in a category where Zoom and Google already had similar features before he launched. In this conversation he hands over the exact playbook for breaking out of a crowded market with a tiny team and a small marketing budget — a playbook anyone can use to win in the...

Howie Liu co-founded Airtable in 2012, the no-code app builder used by over 80% of Fortune 100 companies. After scaling Airtable into one of the biggest software businesses on the planet, he's now building HyperAgent: a platform where anyone can deploy AI agents into their team chats, email, and calendar without writing code. In this conversation, Howie asked me a question I couldn't answe...

Thibault Sottiaux is the head of ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI. He told me that in a few months, people who don't use AI at all will get the same benefits as those who've spent two years figuring it out. So what's actually going to be your edge in a market this competitive? Thibault opened up and shared a few of his secrets — he showed me how his own agents work and how anyone can set th...

Josh Woodward runs Google Labs, AI Studio, and the Gemini app — basically every AI product Google ships. Google just launched Gemini Spark, the AI agent that works for you 24/7 in the background. In this episode, Marina sits down with Josh during Google I/O to talk about: — Why we're moving from "doing" to "directing"— Why human judgment and taste are becoming more valuable...

Aaron Levie built Box into a $4 billion company used by 64% of the Fortune 500. Now he says we're at the best moment to build an AI company in 15 years — and the window is 3 years. In this episode, Marina sits down with Aaron to talk about what's actually happening inside enterprise AI, why younger founders have a surprising advantage right now, and which jobs are genuinely at risk vs. whi...

MacKenzie Price built Alpha — an AI-first school where kids do academics for 2 hours a day, score in the top 1% nationally across every grade, and learn from AI tutors instead of teachers. She also has a prediction. In the next 6 months, our friends, the people we work with, maybe even ourselves — will start losing jobs to AI. Which is why she's so urgent about this. The school we grew up in w...

In this episode, Marina breaks down 6 AI business models you can actually start in 2026 — from the easiest (zero tech skills required) to the most scalable (think: automated SaaS with 50% margins). No fluff, no theory. Just specific ideas with action steps you can take this week. You'll hear directly from: Reid Hoffman  (LinkedIn founder, legendary investor) on how to double your income right...

What 6 AI tools are the smartest people in the room actually using every day?  I asked the same question to dozens of founders, investors, and AI leaders this year — which AI tool changed your income the most? Six tools kept coming up. In this compilation, Mo Gawdat (former Chief Business Officer at Google X), Allie K. Miller (former Global Head of ML at AWS), and Gary Vaynerchuk (CEO of VaynerMed...

What would you build today if you had to start from zero?  I asked 6 founders the same question: with just a laptop, AI, and no funding — what would get you to $10,000 a month in 90 days? In this podcast they share how they'd build a business today from scratch: what to build, how to choose a niche, marketing advice, and how to get your first paying customer by day 30. Gary Vee, Amjad Masad (R...

Job postings with AI skills now pay $18,000 more per year (Lightcast, 2025). By 2030, 39% of today's skills will be outdated. These are the ones that won't.  So I asked the people building these AI tools and working inside the biggest AI companies in the world — what skills will make you irreplaceable in the AI era? From every conversation, 7 skills kept coming up — the ones that actually keep you...

John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that made quantum computing possible. At 67, he retired from UC Santa Barbara to build Qolab, his quantum hardware startup. President Trump named him to the PCAST science council with Zuckerberg, Brin, and Huang — the only physicist in the room. This is the uncut Davos conversation. What we cover:— How quantum computing could repl...

Roman Yampolskiy has spent 15 years at the University of Louisville studying one question: can we control AI? His answer is no. And in 2026, the early evidence is showing up inside his own department — a 28% drop in co-op placements for CS students. Prediction markets for AGI have collapsed from 2045 down to 2028–2030. So I asked him the question everyone actually wants answered: if 99% of jobs re...

If you lost everything tomorrow — your money, your network, your reputation — and had to rebuild from zero in 2026, what would you actually do? I asked the founders who've already done it. In this episode, I talk to Samir Vasavada (CEO of Vise), Young Zhao (CEO of Opus Clip), Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity), Daniel Priestley, and Amjad Masad (CEO of Replit) about the exact strategies they...

AI is already solving problems scientists said were impossible — and we're just getting started. In this episode, Yossi Matias, VP of Engineering & Research at Google, explains why we're living through the golden age of research and what that means for your career, your kids, and your future. We cover: Why AI agents and vibe coding are actually  underhyped How Google's AI co-scient...

Which Jobs Survive AI by 2030? Saadia Zahidi (WEF) Reveals What the Data Actually Shows Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director at the World Economic Forum, joins Silicon Valley Girl live from Davos to break down the WEF Future of Jobs Report — and what it actually means for your career. The data: 78 million new jobs are coming by 2030. But 23% of all roles will go through major disruption. And roughly 1...

📌 Try Granola — the AI notepad that turns meetings into action: https://www.granola.ai/marina or use code MARINA at checkout for 3 months free. Luis von Ahn built Duolingo into a company with 100M+ monthly active users and $1B in the bank — and he's never done a single layoff. While every other CEO is blaming AI for firing people, he's hiring more. In this episode, Luis breaks down exactl...