Generative Now Podcast: AI Builders on Creating the Future

In this episode of Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano sits down with Tanay Kothari, the co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, an AI-powered voice dictation platform. Tanay traces his path from building dozens of apps as a teen in Delhi to now, and how those experiences inspired him to make one of the first “zero-edit” voice products. Tanay gets into training in-house models, beating sub-second latency, and explains his approach to onboarding customers with the goal of changing behavior. He also discusses what’s next for the future of voice products and why he predicts a post-keyboard future.

Recorded live at Lightspeed’s offices in San Francisco, this special episode of Generative Now dives into the urgency and promise of AI interpretability. Lightspeed partner Nnamdi Iregbulem spoke with Anthropic researcher Jack Lindsey and Goodfire co-founder and Chief Scientist Tom McGrath, who previously co-founded Google DeepMind’s interpretability team. They discuss opening the black box of modern AI models in order to understand their reliability and spot real-world safety concerns, in order to build AI systems of the future that we can trust.

In this episode of Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano sits down with Kayvon Beykpour, co-founder and CEO of Macroscope, which launches today, and the former co-founder of Periscope. They dive into how Macroscope will serve as an “understanding engine” for software companies, giving leaders real-time visibility and saving engineers time with AI-powered workflows. Kayvon reflects on his journey from building Periscope and leading product at Twitter to reimagining how teams manage both human and agentic workforces. They get into philosophies on starting companies, management styles, and how AI could be the thing that helps managers solve their biggest challenges.

In this special episode of Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano talks with Semil Shah, founder and partner of Haystack VC and partner at Lightspeed. Together, they have a wide-ranging, unfiltered conversation on the state of AI, venture capital, and the future of media. They get into everything from Meta's high-stakes AI talent spree and Apple's uncertain strategy, to the Figma IPO, to the evolution of the seed stage, and the brewing battle between AI agents and the open web. Semil also shares hard-earned insights on founder strategy, brand building, and why design still wins.

In this episode of Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano sits down with Rahul Vohra, founder of the email client Superhuman, to unpack the future of AI-powered productivity. Rahul shares the origin story of Superhuman, how game design principles shaped its blazing speed and keyboard-first UX, and why time—not email—is the real problem it solves. He dives into the thinking behind their recent acquisition by Grammarly, his vision for an AI-native productivity suite, and what it means ...

This week, Lightspeed Partner Mike Mignano sits down with his colleague Bucky Moore, a fellow partner at Lightspeed to explore the rapidly shifting landscape of AI and infrastructure. They unpack the evolution from hardware to cloud to AI-native architectures, the growing momentum behind open-source models, and the rise of AI agents and reinforcement learning environments. Bucky also shares how his early days at Cisco shaped his bottom-up view of enterprise software, and why embracing the new is...

This week, Lightspeed Partner Mike Mignano sits down with Gabriel Stengel, founder and CEO of Rogo, to explore how AI is transforming the world of finance. Gabe shares his journey from sleepless nights as a junior investment banker at Lazard to building Rogo, a cutting-edge AI platform that automates the grueling work of benchmarking, earnings analysis, and pitch deck creation in seconds. They discuss the origins of Rogo from Gabe's time at Princeton, the challenges of building AI tools for elit...

This week, we are revisiting a conversation between Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano and Anthropic's head of product, Mike Krieger. Mike is known for co-founding Instagram, one of the most beloved pieces of consumer technology, and now he has taken his talents to Anthropic. They discuss the challenges AI product builders face and the evolution of product innovation and draw parallels between two transformative eras: the social media revolution that gave birth to Instagram and today's AI renais...