Smart Venture Podcast, San Francisco, CA (2026)

09/08/2026

Rissa Cao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fish Audio, an AI voice generation and text-to-speech company building audio infrastructure for the next generation of AI-native applications.

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This episode is brought to you by Nebius — the ultimate cloud for AI innovators.
Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support unmatched by hyperscalers.
AI leaders like Meta, Shopify, and Higgsfield already partner with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus, venture-backed startups can save up to $150,000 on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startups to learn more
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Before Fish Audio, she co-founded PixAI at Mewtant, helping scale the platform to more than 10 million creators and 1 billion artworks generated. She previously worked on the product team at Meta Reality Labs and held earlier roles at Amazon Alexa. At Fish Audio, Rissa has helped scale the company to more than 8 million users and $21 million in ARR in its first year, with a focus on multilingual voice generation, low-latency inference, voice cloning, and a large community-driven voice library.

Topics
- How AI voice is evolving from text-to-speech into a foundational layer for AI-native applications.
- Building Fish Audio from zero to $21 million in ARR and more than 8 million users in one year, and the product and growth decisions that enabled that pace of scale
- The technical challenges behind voice AI, including inference cost, training efficiency, latency, and accent preservation.

09/08/2026

Good morning everyone coming today! here is our schedule!!! Starting in 5 min!

https://lnkd.in/gaAU3K3g

09/05/2026

Smart AI 100 2026. What. A. Day!

Nearly 80% of the room was founders, C-levels, VPs and investors.

Series A founders getting real time with enterprise CIOs. Partners who've backed unicorns trading notes with security chiefs from Fortune 500s.

18 months ago I wanted to build a room where my podcast guests and listeners could actually meet each other.

Yesterday, the Presidents of Cisco and ServiceNow were on the stage.

Every large technology starts small. The hardest part isn't building it. It's getting it in front of the company that can deploy it at scale.

That's the whole reason this summit exists.

On stage:
C-levels from Cisco, ServiceNow, Atlassian, Datadog, Zoom, Asana, Cerebras, Nebius, 1Password, Neo4j, Chargebee, SailPoint, Facebook (former), Moveworks (former).

Founders, C-suites and Presidents of billion dollar companies: Fireworks ($17.5B), Together AI ($8.3B), 1Password ($6.8B), Abridge ($5.3B), Core Automation ($4B), Hippocratic AI ($3.5B), Genspark ($2.6B), Rebellions ($2.34B), Horizon3.ai ($2B), Bedrock Robotics ($1.75B), Resolve AI ($1.5B), You.com ($1.5B), Serval ($1B).

The next wave: Manifest OS, Dyna Robotics, Patronus AI, Eudia, HeyGen, General Compute, MotherDuck, Elorian AI, Maxima, Reactor.

Partners and Managing Partners from a16z, NEA, Redpoint, Emergence, M12, Kindred (Forbes Midas List), XYZ (Forbes Midas List), SignalFire, Wing, SE Ventures, Seligman, Linea, DTCP Growth, Eclipse, Abstract, Mantis, Striker, N47.

To our Founding Partners, Nebius and Zoom, and our Innovation Partners Manifest, Neo4j and Sequoia: this doesn't happen without you.

Major thank you to Wayo, BrewBird, Mostest, Vanta, Fondo, Surface Labs, SVB, MiniMax, Hyperbolic, CreateOS, Wing Venture Capital, Clodo, Dojo Care and G Fellows.

And to every volunteer who showed up, you all are amazing!!!

08/30/2026

Smart AI 100 2026 is next week.

Who's coming:

- venture-backed founders, seed through Series E
- VCs actively writing AI checks
- enterprise innovators weighing buy vs. build

Come for the speakers, stay for the audience.

10 years in SF taught me the same thing every time: the most cutting-edge tech only becomes useful once SF people get their hands on it. Come build in this room.

Speakers:
Grace Gong, Founder & CEO, Smart Venture Media
Jeetu Patel, President & CPO, Cisco
Marc Boroditsky, CRO, Nebius
Julie Choi, CMO, Cerebras
Amit Zavery, President, CPO & COO, ServiceNow
Abbas Haider Ali, Chief Customer Officer, Atlassian
Emilio Escobar, CISO, Datadog
Brendan Ittelson, Chief Ecosystem Officer, Zoom
Arnab Bose, CPO, Asana
Rohan Anil, Co-Founder, Core Automation ($4B)
Debajyoti (Debo) Datta, Co-Founder, Hippocratic AI ($3.5B)
Kai Mak, CRO, Together AI ($8.3B)
Nancy Wang, CTO, 1Password ($6.8B)
Zachary Lipton, Co-Founder, Abridge ($5.3B)
Joel de la Garza, Investment Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Aaron Jacobson, Partner, New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
Guy Marion, CMO & Growth, Chargebee ($3.5B)
Wen Sang, COO, Genspark ($2.6B)
Alex Stamos, CPO, Corridor; ex-CSO, Facebook
Yousuf Khan, Founder, Clario; ex-CIO, Moveworks
Sree Kancharla, CIO, SailPoint (acquired for $6.9B)
Sri Viswanath, CEO, Sycamore; ex-CTO, Atlassian
Marshall Choy, CBO, Rebellions ($2.34B)
Snehal Antani, CEO, Horizon3.ai ($2B)
Philip Rathle, CTO, Neo4j ($2B)
Boris Sofman, CEO, Bedrock Robotics ($1.75B)
Spiros Xanthos, CEO, Resolve AI ($1.5B)
Saurabh Sharma, CPO, You.com ($1.5B)
Eric Ho, CEO, Goodfire ($1.25B)
Jake Stauch, CEO, Serval ($1B)
Russ d’Sa, CEO, LiveKit ($1B)
Dan Mishin, Founder, Manifest OS ($750M)
Lindon Gao, CEO, Dyna Robotics ($600M)
Omar Haroun, CEO, Eudia ($508M)
Rong Yan, CTO, HeyGen ($500M)
Jason Goodison, CTO, General Compute ($415M raised)
Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck ($400M)
Steve Jang, Managing Partner, Kindred Ventures (Forbes Midas List)
Ross Fubini, Managing Partner, XYZ (Forbes Midas List)
Jordan Segall, Partner, Redpoint
Cheryl Cheng, MD, M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund
Adam Ely, GM, AI Security, Check Point Software
Jake Saper, GP, Emergence Capital
David Kwon, Partner, Abstract
Kathy Ross, CEO, Sequoia One
Kyle Holm, VP, Sequoia Consulting
Andrew Dai, CEO, Elorian AI ($300M)
Yogi Goel, CEO, Maxima ($143M)
Anand Kannappan, CEO, Patronus AI ($600M)
Alberto T., CEO, Reactor ($59M raised)
Lance Matthews, Partner, DTCP Growth
Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Partner, Eclipse
Gaurav Bhogale, Partner, Mantis Venture Capital
Brian Zhan, Partner, Striker Venture Partners
Jake Flomenberg, General Partner, Wing Venture Capital
John Lin, Managing Partner, Linea Ventures
Danny Wen, Operating Partner, Wing Venture Capital
Colton Dempsey, Partner, N47
Josh Constine, Venture Partner, SignalFire
Amit Chaturvedy, Managing Partner, SE Ventures
Ashish Kakran, Managing Partner, Seligman Ventures
Tobi Coker, Partner, Felicis

08/28/2026

It was a blast speaking at Step Summit yesterday!

STEP came out of Dubai and built itself into one of the biggest tech conferences in the region, the kind of stage that pulls an entire ecosystem into one room. Seeing that energy show up in San Francisco was something else.

My panel was on the thing nobody wants to say out loud: anyone can ship an agent demo in a weekend, almost nobody can ship one that still works on Monday.

Joined by:
- Dan Klein, Co-Founder & CTO at Scaled Cognition
- Sachin Kale, Rivian
- Matt Carbonara, VC at Mayfield

What we dug into:

- Is reliability a model problem or a harness problem? Every team building agents has already picked a side, whether they realize it or not.
- What actually happens between a customer signing the deal and the agent doing real work?
- How do you stack evals and guardrails without latency killing the product?
- Where is the line between human-in-the-loop and full autonomy today, and what moves it?
- Once you have more than one agent doing real work, orchestration stops being plumbing and becomes the product.
- Where the moat is for startups when the model companies keep absorbing features every six months.

Number four landed hardest. Every team in the room had drawn that line somewhere different, and none of them could fully defend where.

The demo is the easy part. The harness is the company.

What's breaking in your agent deployments that never showed up in testing?

Huge thank you to Ray, Azza, Ash and the STEP team for having me at this iconic event. To the next one!

08/24/2026

Boris Sofman is the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics, an SF-based company building fully self-operating heavy machinery to improve the cost, schedule, safety, and predictability of construction projects.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This episode is brought to you by Nebius — the ultimate cloud for AI innovators.
Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support unmatched by hyperscalers.
AI leaders like Meta, Shopify, and Higgsfield already partner with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus, venture-backed startups can save up to $150,000 on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startups to learn more
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Before Bedrock, Boris spent five years as an engineering executive at Waymo, where he led the company’s autonomous trucking efforts and technology teams that helped launch and scale the Waymo One autonomous network. Earlier, he spent a decade as co-founder and CEO of Anki, a consumer robotics company that shipped more than 3.7 million devices and robots across entertainment and smart-home categories and reached as much as $100 million in annual global revenue. His experience spans taking robotics from consumer products to large-scale autonomous systems operating in the real world.

Topics
How autonomous heavy machinery can transform construction by improving project cost, schedule, safety, and predictability
What it takes to move autonomous robotics from controlled environments into real-world commercial operations, and the lessons Boris brought from Waymo to Bedrock
The path toward fleets of autonomous machines that can coordinate, plan, and execute complex construction projects with less human intervention

08/21/2026

Slack team invited me to a private launch of Slack Code, which went live this morning. A few of us in the room on the 61st floor of Salesforce Tower, which is a very different experience from a launch keynote. You can actually ask the real question and get an answer.

The short version: coding agents move out of private tabs and into a channel. You tag an agent, it opens a channel for the task, and the plan, the code changes, and a live preview all sit there where the team can watch, steer, or stop it. Claude, Devin, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Vercel's agents are all in it on day one.

Always good to catch up with Rob Seaman, EVP and GM of Slack at Salesforce, who opened the session, and with Jeff Wang, President of New Enterprise at Cognition, on where Devin fits in a shared channel.

Two things landed for me.

As a founder, building alone is lonelier than anyone admits. You make ten decisions before noon and nobody sees nine of them. Watching agent work happen in a channel where a teammate can just walk in and redirect it felt like the first time this stuff stopped being single player.

As a vibe coder, the win is context. Every version of this I've tried lives in a tab that forgets what my team already decided. Here the conversation, the code, and the history sit in the same place, so the next person picks up where you left off instead of starting over.

What I'm watching now is who ends up using it. If the people steering these channels aren't only engineers, the interesting question stops being how fast teams ship and starts being what a team even looks like.

Also spent time with the Salesforce Ventures team and their port cos, a good number of Salesforce and Slack execs, and ran into a few amazing tech creator friends. Slack picked the one room in San Francisco where you can see the whole ecosystem out the window and half of it standing next to you.

Huge thanks to Slack and Salesforce for having me. See you at Dreamforce.

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