Summation with Auren Hoffman

Hosted by Auren Hoffman

Technology Entrepreneurship

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Episodes

281

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Non-obvious ideas that move the world. Auren Hoffman hosts leaders across tech, business, markets, and government. Summation is the permanent home for the relentlessly curious. Auren is CEO of NQB8, GP at Flex Capital, Chairman of Dialog; former CEO of SafeGraph and LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP).

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 25, 202645 min

SecureAuth CEO Geoff Mattson on the coming fraudpocalypse and the death of the password

Geoff Mattson is the CEO of SecureAuth, an identity security company that has raised over $200M and protects more than 50 million identities for enterprises. Before SecureAuth he was CEO of Xage Security. His work now centers on how you prove an AI agent is who it says it is. In this episode of Summation, Geoff and Auren discuss: Why an AI agent is like an Uber driver who might randomly turn into a psycho killer The deepfake fraudpocalypse, and the simplest thing that defends against it Why your agent impersonates you instead of working for you and how to fix it Why the password is finally, actually dying You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @ auren and Geoff on Linkedin

August 18, 202653 min

Fmr. Senator Cory Gardner: why the AI race is won on boring infrastructure and how China wins by making America hate AI

Cory Gardner is a former U.S. Senator and Congressman from Colorado and was one of the Senate's leading Taiwan and China experts, chairing the Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia and authoring the Taipei Act. He is now president and CEO of NCTA, the Internet & Television Association, whose members built the nation's largest broadband platform. In this episode of Summation, Cory and Auren discuss: Why the AI race gets won on spectrum, fiber, and memory chips The bottleneck raising the price of your iPhone, PlayStation, and router Why an open society is vulnerable to a campaign to turn Americans against AI What a China expert thinks about our dependence on chips made off China's coast You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Cory Gardner on X at @CoryGardner

August 11, 202655 min

CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill on software's new bottleneck and zero to $50m ARR in 2 years

Harjot Gill is the co-founder and CEO of CodeRabbit, the AI code review company that became the most installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab. Over about two years, CodeRabbit went from zero to over $50M in ARR and a $1B+ valuation. It is his third startup. In this episode of Summation, Harjot and Auren discuss: Why the bottleneck in software just moved from writing code to reviewing it Why mature companies now adopt AI first Why you should never let a coding agent review its own work The playbook that took CodeRabbit from zero to $50M+ in two years You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Harjot Gill on X at @harjotsgill

August 4, 20261 hr 5 min

Moritz Baier-Lentz on why the future of AI runs on video games

Moritz Baier-Lentz is one of the foremost investors in gaming, AI, and frontier technologies—including companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir, Etched, Decart, and Recursive. He founded Goldman Sachs's global gaming practice and was previously a partner, IC member, and head of gaming at Lightspeed. Moritz is part of the founding team of General Intuition, an AI research lab training agents on video game data, which has raised a $133M Seed round and a $320M Series A. He is also a senior advisor to OpenAI, McKinsey & Co., and TPG Capital. In this episode of Summation, Moritz and Auren discuss: Why video games are the best data set for the next phase of AI The idea that humans only truly learn during play Why Germany's fear of risk is cultural Getting into Stanford with an essay about Diablo II You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Moritz Baier-Lentz on LinkedIn or his website .

July 28, 202656 min

OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji: measuring the greatest technology of our time

Ronnie Chatterji is the Chief Economist at OpenAI, where he leads research on how AI reshapes growth, jobs, and the economy. He is also an economics professor at Duke. He was previously the White House CHIPS coordinator implementing the $52B CHIPS Act, and before that the chief economist at the US Department of Commerce. In this episode of Summation, Ronnie and Auren discuss: The three things people actually do with ChatGPT The 10x jump in people handing their work to AI Why the next big leap in AI is adoption and not capability The case that AI could cause a population boom You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ronnie Chatterji on X at @RonnieChatterji

July 21, 20261 hr 6 min

Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg: why AI wins a Nobel before a Pulitzer

Felix Rieseberg leads engineering for Claude Cowork and Claude Code Desktop at Anthropic. Before that he led desktop and web infrastructure at Notion and built software at Stripe, Slack, and Microsoft. In this episode of Summation, Felix and Auren discuss: The next AI step function: going from solving a problem to owning a responsibility Why AI will win many Nobel prizes before it wins a single Pulitzer Bringing AI into the physical world, from a $30 coffee-machine display to a Wi-Fi garage opener Why "here's what your team can learn from the Navy SEALs" is bad management advice You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Felix Rieseberg on X at @felixrieseberg

July 14, 202653 min

Fifth Wall CEO Brendan Wallace: the data center land grab and the most stable asset on earth you still can't buy

Brendan Wallace is the Founder, CEO & CIO of Fifth Wall , the largest investment firm focused on technology for the built environment, with ~$3B in capital, the firm is driving the growth of nearly 170 companies, backing category-defining PropTech leaders such as Opendoor, Procore, Blend, Hippo, and Bilt Rewards. It's supported by ~115 of the world's largest real estate owner-operators including CBRE, Hilton, Hines, Marriott, Public Storage, Related, and Starwood. Before Fifth Wall, Brendan was at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, and he co-founded Identified (sold to Workday) and Cabify. In this episode of Summation, Brendan and Auren discuss: How remote work protected mediocrity for years The data center land grab: powered land, 2037 grid connections, and bring-your-own-solar How land is the most stable asset on earth and there's still no way to buy an index of it Why "capital-intensive businesses are bad for venture" is no longer true You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Brendan Wallace on X at @BrendanFWallace

July 7, 20261 hr 0 min

Striveworks CEO Jim Rebesco on drone swarms, AI for warfighters, and the end of air superiority

Jim Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an AI ops company deployed across the US Army, Navy, and combatant commands. In April, Striveworks announced a $70M enterprise agreement with the Pentagon, giving nearly a million defense personnel access to its platform. Jim was previously a partner at Virtu Financial, a pioneering high-frequency trading firm. In this episode of Summation, Jim and Auren discuss: why the real question in AI warfare is who pushes the button the case that autonomy favors big nation states, not insurgents why it costs $200,000 to procure anything in the Pentagon what high-frequency trading and war have in common You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Jim Rebesco on LinkedIn

June 30, 20261 hr 10 min

Short-seller Carson Block: a fugitive CEO, Libyan spies, and $50B fraud

Carson Block is the founder of Muddy Waters Research, one of the defining activist short-selling firms of the last decade and a half. Since 2010, Muddy Waters has published forensic research exposing accounting fraud at publicly traded companies across China, Europe, and the US and has been right enough times that 11 companies have been delisted as a result. In this episode of Summation, Carson and Auren discuss: why outright fraud is only 20-25% of Muddy Waters' focus the Wirecard saga why high-trust countries like Germany are a paradise for criminals how the thing that killed Enron is still completely legal You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @ auren and Carson Block on LinkedIn and on X @muddywatersre

June 23, 202649 min

Facet CEO Anders Jones on the biggest heist in finance, how advisors really sell permission, and the great boomer wealth transfer

Anders Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Facet, a fintech company built to bring high-quality, flat-fee financial advice to an underserved market: the mass affluent. Facet has raised over $250M and manages more than $7B. Anders has seen the real finances of tens of thousands of households. In this episode of Summation, Anders and Auren discuss: why the percentage-of-assets fee is the greatest heist in finance the retention data showing people stick 3x longer when you help them act, not just advise the horizontal wealth transfer to spouses that nobody is planning for why most companies should never raise venture capital You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Anders Jones on LinkedIn