StrictlyVC SF

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s high-stakes test amid tariff turmoil: ‘You can’t be freaking out’

At 11 a.m. in California last Thursday, the day after President Donald Trump declared sweeping new tariffs under what he dubbed “Liberation Day,” Ryan Petersen was live on camera, fielding questions from a virtual room packed with more than 2,300 anxious customers. The founder and CEO of Flexport, a now 12-year-old global logistics and customs […]

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How Kalshi helped prediction markets go mainstream

Kalshi is the largest prediction market in America, creating an entire trading economy around political, sports, and cultural events. To some, including several states, it’s an illegal effort that requires gambling licenses. To others, including some courts and members of the Trump administration, it’s just a new financial opportunity. In a conversation with TechCrunch’s Maxwell

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AI has opened a new era in venture capital according to Forerunner founder Kirsten Green

Forerunner has seen a number of high-profile successes, showing an ability to get ahead of consumer trends with investments in Oura, Chime, the Farmer’s Dog, and beyond in non-B2C companies. To get a sense of how that happened, and what’s next for Forerunner in the AI era, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos spoke with

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Mach CEO on building defense tech company in your 20s

Mach CEO Ethan Thornton has been building weapons systems of varying shapes and sizes since high school, but his ambitions have turned into a company that recently landed a contract with the U.S. military and a plan to develop cross-functional factories. TechCrunch’s Charles Rollet interviewed Thornton during the StrictlyVC 2025 event in San Francisco, exploring

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Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen still sees opportunity in global trade despite Trump’s tariffs

Flexport’s business is built on supply chains, and the new tariffs the U.S. is placing upon its trading partners have plunged international trade into chaos. Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen joined TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos for a StrictlyVC conversation on the ins and outs of the tariffs’ impact, the industry’s reaction, and

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Scale Ventures Partners on the real risks of AI to workers, and the opportunity in vertical investments

Scale Ventures Partners’ Jeremy Kaufmann and Alex Niehenke joined us for a StrictlyVC discussion in San Francisco, and they had a more candid take on the impact of AI on the workforce than many within the tech community. Instead of obscuring the impacts to avoid the risk “people in the Midwest say nasty things about

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GV CEO David Krane on what it takes to manage 800 investments in five years at StrictlyVC SF

GV, Google’s venture capital spinoff that started in 2009, has invested billions of dollars in companies from Uber and Nothing to scent digitizing startup Osmo. Their CEO David Krane joined our December StrictlyVC event in San Francisco to discuss his approach to identifying potential investments, what it’s like to work so closely with Google while

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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the need for social to recapture the open web’s spirit at StrictlyVC SF

Bluesky’s rapid growth in the past few weeks has put a ton of eyeballs on the social platform, but as its CEO Jay Graber told us at the most recent StrictlyVC event, their goal is not just to recreate Twitter. Throughout her conversation with TechCrunch reporter Maxwell Zeff, Graber highlighted her belief that “people need

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