Podcast
Summation with Auren Hoffman
Hosted by Auren Hoffman · EN
Non-obvious ideas that move the world. Auren Hoffman hosts leaders across tech, business, markets, and government.
Summation is the permanent home for the relentlessly curious.
Auren is CEO of NQB8, GP at Flex Capital, Chairman of Dialog; former CEO of SafeGraph and LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP).
36episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Serval CEO Jake Stauch: talent is the only moat left, hiring founders as FDEs, and building a $1B company with your wife and a newborn
6d ago00:50:10Tap to summarizeJake Stauch is the co-founder and CEO of Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform. Serval was founded in 2024 and has already raised over $125M across rounds led by Redpoint and Sequoia at a $1B+ valuation. Before Serval, Jake spent five years on the product team at Verkada and earlier founded NeuroPlus, a brain-sensing hardware company that made video games for kids with ADHD.In this episode of Summation, Jake and Auren discuss:Why Anthropic has added more ARR in the past few months than ServiceNow has in the past 20 yearsThe "forward deployed engineer" hire and why he recruits future founders instead of solutions engineersWhy talent density is the only remaining moat in the age of AIThe Silicon Valley collusion around not poaching each other's employeesYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Jake Stauch on X at @jakeserval
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Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko on why curiosity is AI’s scarcest resource
2w ago01:00:06Tap to summarizeDmitry Shevelenko is Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. He previously co-founded Tortoise, a robotics and commerce automation startup and held business development roles at Uber, LinkedIn, and Meta. He also serves on the board of Lazard. In this episode of Summation, Dmitry and Auren discuss:Why CEOs and executives are Perplexity Computer’s biggest power users and what that says about who wins the AI eraScaling Perplexity past $500M ARR with only 34% headcount growthThe $34.5B Chrome bid and the TikTok bid before itWhy AI's biggest constraint right now is adoption and not capabilityYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Dmitry Shevelenko on X at @dmitry140
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Fundrise CEO Ben Miller: VCX, Roaring Kitty's revenge, and AI killing the office
3w ago01:02:03Tap to summarizeBen Miller is the co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, an alternative asset management platform that gives individual investors access to private real estate, private credit, and venture capital. In March 2026, he listed the Fundrise Innovation Fund on the NYSE under the ticker VCX, one of the first publicly traded venture capital funds. VCX gives retail investors direct exposure to private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and SpaceX. The fund manages over $650 million and has over 100,000 individual investors. Ben is a returning Summation guest.In this episode of Summation, Ben and Auren discuss:Why VCX traded up 700% on day one while Bill Ackman's fund traded down the next weekWhy ETFs fall apart for private markets and closed-end funds are the right structureHow AI will reshape real estate by 2031 and which markets get hit hardestThe hidden truth that SoHo, Wynwood, and Miami Beach were all built by the same personYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ben Miller on X at @benmillerise
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Six-time CIA Station Chief Ralph Goff on the new doctrine of war
4w ago01:05:23Tap to summarizeRalph Goff is a 35-year veteran of the CIA, having served as a six-time Chief of Station across Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia. During his career, he also held the roles of Chief of Operations for Europe and Eurasia and Chief of the CIA's National Resources Division. Since leaving government, he advises on national security issues and speaks publicly on intelligence, geopolitics, and great power competition.In this episode of Summation, Ralph and Auren discuss:Why blackmail almost never works in espionage and ideology still doesWho is actually dying for PutinWhy China is the biggest winner of the Ukraine warHow technological surveillance transformed CIA tradecraft You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ralph Goff on Linkedin
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Glenn Youngkin on governing like a CEO, the AI power crisis, and why every operator should run for office
Apr 2800:57:44Tap to summarizeGlenn Youngkin was the 74th Governor of Virginia. Before politics, he spent nearly 25 years at The Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, where he rose to co-CEO. During his four-year term, Virginia generated $10B in surplus revenue, delivered $9B in tax relief, attracted $156B in capital investment, and became one of the first states in the country to mandate cell-phone-free classrooms.In this episode of Summation, Glenn and Auren discuss:Why every Virginia state agency got OKRs and how it transformed a 110,000-person governmentWhy decommissioning baseload power was one of the dumbest decisions ever made How Loudoun County gets more than 25% of its tax base from data centersHow a startup used AI to cut more Virginia regulations in 7 months than 3 years of manual workYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Glenn Youngkin on X at @GlennYoungkin
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Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta on why trades are AI-proof, the trillion-dollar home services market, and why software stopped being a capital asset
Apr 2100:58:53Tap to summarizeMarco Zappacosta is the co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, the home services marketplace he started in 2008. Thumbtack connects homeowners to 300,000+ local service professionals, with nearly 100M projects started on the platform. In this episode of Summation, Marco and Auren discuss:Why home services is bigger than groceries but barely any is booked onlineHow AI collapsed Thumbtack's product pod sizesWhy Silicon Valley underrates leadership and overrates management The single trait to screen every executive hire forYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Marco Zappacosta on X at @mlz
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Eric Ries on why "bad governance" outperforms, the case against shareholder primacy, and AI's Chernobyl moment
Apr 1400:58:46Tap to summarizeEric Ries created the Lean Startup methodology and authored the bestselling book of the same name, which has sold over a million copies. He's also the founder and executive chairman of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the co-founder of Answer AI (an AI R&D lab), and the author of the upcoming book Incorruptible, releasing May 26th.In this episode of Summation, Eric and Auren discuss:why "bad governance" companies have outperformed "good governance" since 2008financial gravity - the invisible force that bends companies away from their missionthe foundation-controlled blueprint behind Novo Nordisk, IKEA, and Zeisswhy vibe coding is headed for its Chernobyl momentYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Eric Ries on X at @ericries
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Fmr. German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg on NATO, nuclear energy, and how to disagree without blood
Apr 701:01:18Tap to summarizeKarl-Theodor zu Guttenberg became Germany's youngest Minister of Defense in history, and previously served as Minister of Economics and Technology. He is the chairman and founder of Spitzberg Partners, an investment and advisory firm, a bestselling author, and co-founder of Open Minds Media, where he produces films and podcasts. He co-hosts one of Germany's most popular podcasts.In this episode of Summation, KT and Auren discuss:Why Germany's defense spending hovered at 1% of GDP for decades and what finally forced a changeThe nuclear exit decision that was driven by a single state election and backfired spectacularlyHow Rheinmetall surpassed Volkswagen in market cap and what it signals about Europe's industrial reorientationWhy Germany's total stock market cap is less than a single US company like NvidiaYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg on Linkedin.
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Fmr Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on chips, China, and lessons from Andy Grove
Mar 3100:58:10Tap to summarizePat Gelsinger is the former CEO of Intel and longtime Silicon Valley leader. He joins Auren to unpack the forces reshaping technology, geopolitics and leadership.After more than 30 years at Intel (including serving as its first CTO) and nearly a decade as CEO of VMware, Pat now sits at the intersection of deep tech and purpose-driven innovation as executive chair and head of technology at Gloo and general partner at Playground Global.In this episode of Summation, Pat and Auren discuss:Why the US now imports more from Taiwan than from China -- and what that means for national securityThe case for a U.S. sovereign wealth fund to counter China’s tech investments in semiconductors, energy, and rare earth mineralsWhat happened when Intel gave $70B back to shareholders instead of building fabs, and why tech companies need technologist CEOsAndy Grove's 35-year mentoring relationship with Pat, starting with a cold call that changed his careerYou can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Pat Gelsinger on X at @PGelsinger
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Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim on mathematical superintelligence, why math is harder than code for LLMs, and the end of buggy software
Mar 2400:48:54Tap to summarizeVlad Tenev (Robinhood co-founder/CEO) and Tudor Achim (former helm.ai CTO) are the founders of Harmonic, an AI lab pioneering the path toward mathematical superintelligence. Together, they developed Aristotle, a model that eliminates hallucinations by reasoning in Lean code rather than natural language. By shifting from probabilistic guesses to formal logic, Aristotle produces 100% verified mathematical outputs. The model recently demonstrated its breakthrough capabilities by achieving gold-medal performance at the International Math Olympiad. In this episode of Summation, Vlad, Tudor, and Auren discuss:Why AI models struggled at math for so long How Aristotle helped 10x the total corpus of formally verified Erdos problems in just a few months Why formal verification will make all software dramatically saferHow the first Millennium Prize problem will be solved by 2027-2028You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren, Vlad Tenev on X at @vladtenev, and Tudor Achim on X at @tachim
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