Coverage
Venture Capital
The venture conversation: founders, GPs, and the allocators who fund what comes next. Sentiment and coverage from the shows where venture capital talks to itself.
Refreshed nightly · readings through August 5, 2026
What the Venture Capital conversation reads like
Sentiment across the five topics we score, measured only on venture capital shows. Trailing 30 days against the same window a quarter ago; thin cuts fall back to a 90-day read.
Future Outlook
80.9
Economy
45.4
Industry Forecast
73.7
AI
71.1
Innovation
87.5
Future Outlook
12-mo avg 80.4 · points from average
Economy
12-mo avg 46.4 · points from average
Industry Forecast
12-mo avg 71.5 · points from average
AI
12-mo avg 69.8 · points from average
Innovation
12-mo avg 83.4 · points from average
Each topic against its own 12-month average (the zero line), within venture capital shows only. Above means the conversation is running hotter than normal for that topic; below, cooler.
Latest in Venture Capital
newest across the tracked shows
Aug 3, 2026
How Bespoke faked AI until it actually worked (w/ Akemi Tsunagawa) | E2320
Akemi Tsunagawa, founder of Bespoke and two other companies operating in Japan, discusses how she initially faked an AI chatbot service for tourists by having humans respond until the technology caught up, securing Narita Airport as a customer. She explores Japan's labor shortage crisis driven by population decline, her training platform BeTrained for foreign workers, and her emerging robotics venture targeting shipyard automation—while identifying a unique opportunity to acquire profitable but successor-less factories.
Jul 31, 2026
Why AI has no taste and how to fix it (w/ Thais Castello Branco) | E2319
Thais Castello Branco, founder of Taste Labs, discusses why AI models excel at objective tasks like coding and math but fail at subjective creative work like design and writing. She explains how her company raised $18.5M to teach frontier models about aesthetics through curated preference data and a network of paid "tastemakers," and explores whether AI will accelerate or destroy cultural discovery.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Jul 31, 2026
Chip Stocks Crash, $20B Fund Margin Called, Frontier Labs: SLOW DOWN AI, Mamdani's Grocery Stores
Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 25-year-old hedge fund manager who left OpenAI to start his own fund, discusses the recent margin call that liquidated his public portfolio after a 20%+ correction in chip stocks. The besties analyze the leverage-driven collapse, macro conditions driving the correction (treasury yields, inflation, fiscal spending), and China's competitive moves in AI and semiconductor manufacturing, while also exploring productivity tailwinds from renewable energy, AI efficiency gains, and nuclear fusion development.
Jul 31, 2026
AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off
Equity hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane discuss Sam Altman's call to 'pace' AI development following OpenAI's model breach at Hugging Face, examining whether the industry is genuinely pumping the brakes or merely spooked. The episode covers Amazon's 5,000-satellite initiative challenging SpaceX's dominance, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus's new AI lab Prentis raising $100M at $1B valuation, Pangram's $9M funding for AI detection tools, and DoorDash's in-house drone delivery program.
Jul 29, 2026
Banning Chinese robots isn't regulatory capture | E2318
A venture capital roundtable discussing the FCC's ban on Chinese humanoid robots as a national security measure, the recursive self-improvement (RSI) letter signed by 1,100+ AI researchers calling for coordination on frontier AI development, and the competitive landscape for autonomous vehicles and drone delivery. The panel debates whether these regulatory moves represent legitimate security concerns or regulatory capture, with discussion of how China's manufacturing advantages in robotics pose challenges to US competitiveness.
Jul 29, 2026
‘If this isn't addiction, I don't know what is’: Light Phone's founders get real about screen time and building for the anti-smartphone generation
Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier, co-founders of Light Phone, discuss their decade-long mission to build intentionally simple phones that resist the attention economy. They unveil the Light Flip, a new flip phone with no external screen, and explain how design principles from the original Motorola Razr inform their anti-smartphone philosophy. The founders address the growing "Summer of Ludd" movement, the resurgence of simple tech devices among Gen Z, and their SDK strategy that lets users build custom tools without an app store.
The Venture Capital roster
6 shows
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Term-level trends, competitor mentions, and custom segments within the venture capital conversation are available as custom research. See the Conversation Index or get in touch.