Summation with Auren Hoffman

Marco 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 online
How AI collapsed Thumbtack's product pod sizes
Why Silicon Valley underrates leadership and overrates management 
The single trait to screen every executive hire for
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Marco Zappacosta on X at @mlz

Eric 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 2008
financial gravity - the invisible force that bends companies away from their mission
the foundation-controlled blueprint behind Novo Nordisk, IKEA, and Zeiss
why vibe coding is headed for its Chernobyl moment
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Eric Ries on X at @ericries

Karl-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 change
The nuclear exit decision that was driven by a single state election and backfired spectacularly
How Rheinmetall surpassed Volkswagen in market cap and what it signals about Europe's industrial reorientation
Why Germany's total stock market cap is less than a single US company like Nvidia
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg on Linkedin.

Pat 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 security
The case for a U.S. sovereign wealth fund to counter China’s tech investments in semiconductors, energy, and rare earth minerals
What happened when Intel gave $70B back to shareholders instead of building fabs, and why tech companies need technologist CEOs
Andy Grove's 35-year mentoring relationship with Pat, starting with a cold call that changed his career
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Pat Gelsinger on X at @PGelsinger

Vlad 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 safer
How the first Millennium Prize problem will be solved by 2027-2028
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren, Vlad Tenev on X at @vladtenev, and Tudor Achim on X at @tachim