Podcast

John Linden is the CEO of Mythical Games. Backed by a16z (and recently achieving unicorn status), Mythical Games is a game technology studio at the intersection of blockchain and games. In this episode we discuss his past work as Studio Head for the Call of Duty franchise, the past and future of blockchain gaming, what unique unlocks are enabled by web3 for games, and an announcement about their work building an EVM-compatible chain (in anticipation of the Merge). Show notes here.

David Aronchick is CEO and Co-Founder of Expanso. Backed by General Catalyst, Hetz Ventures, and Array Ventures, Expanso, simplifies data governance with an architecture that streamlines management and control of data flows without losing functionality, delivering compute over data. David discusses his journey from big tech firms to co-founding Kubeflow at Google, leading innovative startups and now building Expanso, where they are revolutionizing distributed data processing, enabling edge computing to help organizations innovate and scale quickly.

Omar Yehia is the Head of Investments at Matter Labs, creators of zkSync. Backed by a16z, Variant, Dragonfly, & more, Matter Labs is scaling Ethereum with zero-knowledge proofs to accelerate public blockchain adoption. In this episode we discuss zkSync’s evolution from testnet to mainnet alpha, the breadth of the ecosystem (and Omar’s opinion on most exciting directions), how he thinks about capital allocation on behalf of Matter Labs, and his predictions for the various possible futures of the crypto space.

Jason Li is Co-Founder at Solayer. Solayer is building the restaking network, a decentralized cloud platform that provisions network security and performance for applications on demand, natively on Solana. In this episode, Jason unpacks why (re)staking is one of the strongest narratives in crypto today, it's importance to the development of crypto, and how Solayer is leveraging the economic principles of staking with its unique innovative network bandwidth optimization approach, and how it can extend security beyond Solana.

Mike Hanono is the Founder & CEO at Talus. Backed by WAGMI Ventures, Polychain, dao5, & more, Talus is building at the intersection of crypto & AI. In this episode we discuss the current state of AI and blockchain technology, smart agents (and the corresponding usefulness of blockchains), Mike’s perspective on what wastes time during the early stages of a startup, what future possible trajectories could look like, & much more.