No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

In a world of infinite gaming and entertainment possibilities, how does a centuries-old game stay so popular? Chess.com co-founder and CEO Erik Allebest joins Sarah Guo to explain how the evolution of technology has kept people coming back to chess, even when machines can beat us at the game. Erik talks about how the desire to build a MySpace-like community for chess led to the purchase of a domain name from a bankruptcy sale back in 2005, and scaled into a community with 10 million daily active users and 250 million total registered members. He also discusses the growth of the cultural relevance of chess, how investments from private equity firms General Atlantic and CVC helped grow and strengthen their platform, and how Chess.com is leveraging AI both within the business itself and to make a better product for its community.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open Trailer

01:05 – Erik Allebest Introduction

01:48 – Chess.com Today

02:57 – Buying and Scaling Chess.com

06:29 – Competition and Growth

11:52 – Chess and Cultural Relevance

14:32 – Private Equity Investment

19:31 – Playing Games Amid Evolving Tech

25:09 – Tech, Skill Distribution, and Expertise

28:40 – Chess and Cheating

31:20 – What Makes Chess Special

33:17 – Chess.com Future Vision

34:54 – Founder Advice

36:48 – AGI/ASI Predictions

40:02 – AI Investments at Chess.com

42:13 – How AI May Change Product at Chess.com

43:27 – Poker Rating Algorithms

46:07 – Conclusion

Is the tech industry moving too quickly, or are founders letting fear of AI labs stunt their ambitions? Sarah and Elad explore the current landscape of artificial intelligence, venture capital, and startup dynamics. They discuss the realities of building multi-trillion-dollar companies, shifting market sizes and outcome-based pricing models, and how founders are reacting to the rise of major AI labs. They also talk about what the framework for startup exits should look like, the potential for researcher burnouts in the next eighteen months as ASI looms on the horizon, bottlenecks for compute, and the impact of regulatory capture and shifting ecosystems from California to Texas.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open Trailer

00:31 – Episode Introduction

01:44 – The Next Trillion-Dollar Company

03:12 – Tech Waves as Punctuated Equilibria

04:42 – TAM vs. Revenue Reality

07:14 – Market Size vs. Speed

10:32 – When Founders Should Sell

14:04 – Financing and Time Cost

17:57 – RSI and the Looming Promise of ASI

21:49 – Compute Power Laws

28:12 – Regulations and Disruption

33:06 – Beyond Transformers

34:26 – Tradeoffs - Safety vs. Progress

39:11 – Conclusion

When your AC fails in a heatwave, you don’t want a busy signal; you need a solution. Netic founder and CEO Melisa Tokmak joins host Elad Gil to explain how Netic’s autonomous AI platform acts as an intermediary between companies and customers, deploying agents to instantly handle essential services, from emergency home repairs to hospitality to pet care. Melisa describes the complexity of these real-world workloads, which have traditionally relied on large human support teams, and how over 70% of Netic’s customers interact first with AI. She also talks about the reasoning behind building a scalable product company rather than an AI roll-up, why she believes robotics will not catch up in these industries in the near future, why she doesn’t view large frontier labs as competitive threats, and how private equity’s playbook has shifted toward measurable ROI in the AI-era. Plus, why Melisa is optimistic about the impact AI will have on education.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Melisa Tokmak Introduction

00:32 – What Netic Builds

03:53 – Automating Workflows for Essential Services

06:26 – Building a Service vs. AI Roll-Up

10:38 – AI for the Real World Timeline

12:56 – Can Big Labs Compete?

15:35 – Modern Founder Mindset

19:09 – Screening for Agency

22:25 – Five Year Vision

23:53 – Selling to Slow Industries

27:23 – How Private Equity Approached AI

31:14 – What Excites Melisa About the Future of AI

34:27 – Conclusion

DoorDash is not just a delivery company. From its inception, co-founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang operated it as a robotics and autonomy company. Andy and Stanley join Sarah Guo to explain how autonomous tech and AI are reshaping consumer habits, commerce, and delivery. Andy and Stanley talk about the rollout of Ask DoorDash, a natural-language interface that’s driving both restaurant discovery and larger grocery orders. They also discuss Dot, their in-house autonomous delivery robot that has operated in Phoenix for over two years, and how it highlights the operational and hardware challenges they have faced and solved in autonomous tech. Andy and Stanley also speak about the “first and last 100 feet problem” in autonomous delivery, why multimodal strategies are the key to success, scaling autonomy and operations, and why they believe that more Dashers, not fewer, are the future of DoorDash.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Andy Fang and Stanley Tang Introduction

00:34 – Agentic Commerce and Behavioral Changes

03:52 – Next Steps for Ask DoorDash

06:54 – Investing in Robotics and Autonomy

16:31 – Building Autonomous Tech in the Physical World

21:20 – Dot: DoorDash’s Autonomous Delivery Robot

22:08 – Collecting Realistic Data

25:48 – Why Work at DoorDash

28:04 – Challenges in Scaling Up Autonomy

39:30 – Productivity Benchmarks

44:56 – Future of Agentic Commerce

49:10 – Conclusion

When Glenn Fogel joined Priceline in 2000, the business was worth a few hundred million dollars. One week later, the Nasdaq peaked, eventually sending its stock down to a dollar a share. But over 25 years later, Booking Holdings has scaled over 1000x into an over $100 billion dollar global travel behemoth. Elad Gil is joined by Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel to discuss his career, from law school and Wall Street to working at Priceline through the dot-com crash, and to helping grow the business into a multifaceted, dynamic travel marketplace in the AI era. Glenn explains how leveraging AI and agents such as Priceline’s ‘Penny’ makes travel planning and customer service better, while emphasizing the importance of preserving some human support for some users. He also talks about Booking’s strategy of reinvesting over $700 million into AI and other technologies while still offering stock buybacks and dividends, the durability of their scale and complexities of dealing with a large portfolio physical properties across the world, and why upskilling is so important for employees amid concerns about AI-driven job displacement.

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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @bookingcom | @priceline

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open

00:05 – Glenn Fogel Introduction

00:41 – Glenn’s Early Career

06:49 – Lessons from the Early Internet

09:24 – Deciding Factors for Exiting

10:56 – Travel Through the Lens of AI

13:30 – Agentic Travel Planning

18:59 – Agents, Token Economics, and ROI

22:46 – Booking’s Capital Investment Philosophy

25:23 – Scale as Durable Asset

29:40 – Purpose and Choosing Wisely

33:18 – AI’s Impact on Jobs

36:38 – Upskilling in the AI Era

38:36 – Public Perception of AI

40:24 – Conclusion