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earliest innings.
Perspectives on venture, company building, technology, and the people moving markets forward.
Aug 13, 2026
Ignite AI: Why the Next Great AI Companies Will Be Technology-First with Emmanuel Vallod | Ep288
Why will the next great AI companies be technology-first? Emmanuel Vallod explains why defensible AI starts with real technical breakthroughs, not thin wrappers around existing models.
Aug 10, 2026
Ignite Startups: Taylor Offer on The Relationship Intelligence Platform Changing Go-to-Market | Ep287
AI made outbound sales cheaper, faster, and far noisier. Taylor Offer explains why Atrios is betting that trusted introductions will become the next major go-to-market channel.
Aug 9, 2026
Last Week Ignite August 9, 2026: Discovery Got Cheap, Deployment Got Expensive
Ten problems that had defeated mathematicians for decades fell to a machine, and the compute bill came to roughly $2,000. Five days later the company that built that machine said it could not rule out the model was too dangerous to release.
Aug 3, 2026
Ignite Political Economy: The Geopolitical Risks Founders Are Underpricing with Frank Lavin | Ep286
International expansion is not just a sales decision. Frank Lavin explains why founders must enter early, limit fixed costs, build government relationships, and treat geopolitics as an operating variable.
Aug 2, 2026
Last Week Ignite August 2, 2026: Everybody's Earnings Ran Through Anthropic
Brian Bell, Team Ignite Ventures. Coverage window: Sunday, July 26 through Sunday, August 2, 2026.
Jul 31, 2026
The Loop Closed on Cost First
Scroll to the bottom of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 release notes, past the coding scores and the customer testimonials, and there is a small table headed "Self-improvement."
Jul 27, 2026
Ignite Startups: Passive Sensors, Drone Swarms, and the Future of Air Defense with Deo Arlo | Ep285
Most counter-drone pitches begin with the weapon. How fast is the interceptor? How large is its payload? How far can it travel? How cheaply can it destroy an incoming drone? Deo Arlo thinks that starts one step too late.
Jul 26, 2026
Last Week Ignite July 26, 2026: The Week Containment Became a Line Item
For three years the AI industry has argued about containment as a philosophy seminar. This week it became an incident report, a draft bill, a legal memo, and a budget line.
Jul 23, 2026
My Advisor Called Our Website “Ghetto.” So I Vibe-Coded a New One With AI.
One of my advisors recently told me that our website looked "ghetto." I'm not going to lie: it hurt my feelings.
Jul 20, 2026
Ignite AI: The Future of Voice AI Testing and Self-Improving Agents with Tarush Agarwal | Ep284
A voice agent that nails a demo can still fall apart on a real call. Cekura's Tarush Agarwal on why text-based testing isn't enough, why multi-turn attacks crack customer-support bots 92% of the time, and what it actually takes to make a voice agent production-ready.
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