Venture Capital

Context, Compute, Capital, Culture: 13 Lectures From Stanford's CS153

Context, Compute, Capital, Culture: 13 Lectures From Stanford's CS153

Enrichment is the bottleneck to nuclear. Nuclear is the bottleneck to electricity. Electricity is the bottleneck to AI. That slide came from the 7th of 13 sessions in Stanford's CS153: Frontier Systems. A course about frontier AI spent its midpoint on uranium. I worked through all 13 in September 2026, from Anjney Midha's opening map of the stack to guests from ElevenLabs, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Microsoft. This recap walks the course in order and reads it through the four lenses Midha gave the class: context, compute, capital and culture. It ends on the number I'll carry forward: Google depreciates its compute hardware over six years, and NVIDIA ships a new architecture every year.

Where Does The Money Actually Go? A Recap of Stanford's MS&E 435

Where Does The Money Actually Go? A Recap of Stanford's MS&E 435

Jensen Huang's five-layer cake goes up twice in Stanford's MS&E 435, and both times the guest gets the same question: you have $100, which layer do you put it on? I worked through all 9 in August 2026. The shape underneath them: semiconductors took 79% of AI gross profit in 2026 and applications took 7%, the inverse of cloud software. This recap walks the course in order, from $59M per megawatt to a 16% antibody hit rate, and argues that "compute is scarce" has become the industry's substitute for a depreciation estimate. Nine lectures, and the number that decides whether any of it pays never appears on a slide.

Datacast Episode 129: Early-Stage Product Management, Product-Led Revenue, and Startup Monologues with Diana Hsieh

Datacast Episode 129: Early-Stage Product Management, Product-Led Revenue, and Startup Monologues with Diana Hsieh

Diana Hsieh is the Head of Product and Co-Founder at Correlated. She thrives on working with enterprise software startups. She was previously the first PM at infrastructure startups, including Cockroach Labs and Timescale. Before that, she was a VC at Norwest, focused on investing in early-stage enterprise software companies. Diana is always on the hunt for her next favorite coffee shop on weekends.

Datacast Episode 128: Building Trust with Founders, VC Funding for the Cloud, and The Next Platform for Data Apps with Jason Risch

Datacast Episode 128: Building Trust with Founders, VC Funding for the Cloud, and The Next Platform for Data Apps with Jason Risch

Jason Risch is an investor on the enterprise team at Greylock - investing in security, AI/ML, data, infrastructure, and developer tools. Before joining Greylock, he incubated ML companies at AI Fund and was a management consultant at McKinsey. Jason is a Bay Area native, graduated from Stanford, and when not working, can be found reading, hiking, playing Age of Empires, and cheering on Stanford Football.

Datacast Episode 125: The Next Wave of Developer Platforms, Data Products, and Software Infrastructure with Sakib Dadi

Datacast Episode 125: The Next Wave of Developer Platforms, Data Products, and Software Infrastructure with Sakib Dadi

Sakib Dadi is a vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners in their San Francisco office, where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments in developer platforms, data products, and software infrastructure. He has been involved with Bessemer’s investments, including Prefect, Coiled, Arcion, Periscope Data, Okera, Guild Education, and Sila Nanotechnologies. Before joining Bessemer, Sakib worked in product at Viagogo, an international marketplace for buying and selling tickets for live events.

Datacast Episode 124: The Open-Source Cloud Playbook, The Modular Future of Data and AI Infrastructure, and Meta-Learning as a VC with Casber Wang

Datacast Episode 124: The Open-Source Cloud Playbook, The Modular Future of Data and AI Infrastructure, and Meta-Learning as a VC with Casber Wang

Casber Wang is Partner at Sapphire Ventures. He focuses primarily on security, enterprise infrastructure, and data analytics.

He is on the boards of Huntress, JumpCloud, StarTree, Tetrate, Upytcs, and Zesty. For his work, Insider listed Casber as an Enterprise VC Rising Star Investor and as an emerging investor charting the industry’s future on the 2022 EVC List.

Prior to Sapphire, he was part of the technology investment banking group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he worked on a number of high-profile IPO and M&A transactions. He also spent time at Wish, a leading mobile commerce platform in North America and Europe.

Datacast Episode 109: Developer Productivity, Real-Time Data Infrastructure, and The Fat-Tailed Nature of Enterprise Software with Nnamdi Iregbulem

Datacast Episode 109: Developer Productivity, Real-Time Data Infrastructure, and The Fat-Tailed Nature of Enterprise Software with Nnamdi Iregbulem

Nnamdi Iregbulem, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, is a self-taught programmer and lifelong technology nerd. His mission is to increase total software output by supporting entrepreneurs building technical tools for technical people. He focuses on investments in technical enterprise software such as developer tools, application infrastructure, and machine learning.

Datacast Episode 108: Computer Vision, Product Management, and Enterprise Investing with Tom Rikert

Datacast Episode 108: Computer Vision, Product Management, and Enterprise Investing with Tom Rikert

Tom Rikert is the co-founder and CEO of Masterful AI, the training platform for computer vision that helps developers build models faster and with much less labeling. He is a former VC and invested in enterprise software and AI/ML at Andreessen Horowitz. Before VC, he held product management roles at Wildfire (acquired by Google), YouTube, and Autodesk. He began his AI/ML journey at MIT and started his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics. Tom lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter and loves going fast, whether on a mountain bike or flying racing drones.

Datacast Episode 107: Investing At The Nexus of Computational Sciences with Grace Isford

Datacast Episode 107: Investing At The Nexus of Computational Sciences with Grace Isford

Grace Isford is a Partner based in Lux Capital's New York City office. She invests in companies innovating at the nexus of the computational sciences – data, AI and ML infrastructure, network and compute infrastructure, and cutting-edge technological applications, especially in healthcare and financial services. She focuses on data and machine-learning startups that are hyper-personalizing user experiences and transforming legacy industries, as well as fintech and blockchain infrastructure companies building the next-gen developer stack and payment rails.

Datacast Episode 102: Early-Stage Investing, Modern Venture Capital, and Trends in Enterprise Infrastructure with Astasia Myers

Datacast Episode 102: Early-Stage Investing, Modern Venture Capital, and Trends in Enterprise Infrastructure with Astasia Myers

Astasia Myers is a Partner on Quiet Capital's enterprise team leading investments in ML, data infrastructure, open-source, developer tools, and security. She focuses on pre-seed, seed, and Series A.

Prior to joining Quiet, Astasia was an investor in Redpoint's early-stage enterprise team, where she partnered with Dremio, LaunchDarkly, Solo.io, Preset, Hex, Cyral, among others. Before that, she worked at Cisco Investments, where she focused on cloud-infrastructure M&A and investments, including Cohesity, Datos IO, Elastifile, Guardicore, Springpath, and the funding of internal stealth projects.