Anthropic engineering leader Fiona Fung describes a software world where code is abundant, initiative matters more than syntax, and managers rely on AI to track quality, feedback, and the work itself. The conversation traces how engineering, product management, and team culture are being remade by agents, even as loneliness, fear, and accountability become harder problems to solve.

Tony Fadell argues that breakthrough products come from identifying real pain, pairing it with newly viable technology, and shaping the entire customer journey, from interface to marketing story. He warns that AI can accelerate prototyping but cannot replace human judgment, taste, and responsibility without leaving builders with brittle products and long-term debt.

Benedict Evans argues that AI is a platform shift on the scale of the internet or mobile: transformative, messy, and still too early for anyone to know where the real value or disruption will settle. He pushes back on jobpocalypse panic, sketching a slower, more uneven reshaping of work in which adoption, distribution, and new kinds of services matter more than apocalyptic forecasts.

Dan Shipper argues that AI is remaking work less by replacing people than by changing the interfaces around them: companywide agents in Slack, desktop copilots that become the operating system for knowledge work, and SaaS products rebuilt for humans and machines to collaborate together. He is strikingly bullish on the survival of SaaS, the rise of forward-deployed AI operators, and the prospects for product managers and full-stack designers who learn to ride the models.

Hardware veteran Caitlin Kalinowski argues that AI’s next great expansion will happen not on screens but in factories, robots and supply chains, where safety, manufacturing know-how and geopolitical risk matter as much as software. Drawing on stints at Apple, Meta and OpenAI, she sketches a future shaped by AR, drones and reindustrialization, while warning that war may change faster than consumer tech.

Eric Ries argues that good companies rarely collapse because of competition; they are more often hollowed out by governance, incentives and financial pressure that turn success into a liability. Drawing on examples from Anthropic, Novo Nordisk, Cloudflare and Philip Morris’s disastrous purchase of Vectura, he makes the case that founders must build mission protection into both culture and corporate structure before it is too late.

Max Schoening, Notion’s head of product, argues that AI is making the first draft of software nearly free while shifting the real differentiator to agency, taste and the discipline to make something obviously good. The conversation ranges from designers coding in terminals to the persistence of SaaS, all under a larger claim that the people who thrive will be the ones who act as if the world is changeable.

Evan Spiegel argues that durable consumer apps are won as much by distribution as by product-market fit, and that Snap’s survival has depended on building ecosystems and hardware that are harder to copy than software features. He describes a design culture built on relentless output, close contact with users, and a belief that AI’s future will be shaped less by technical possibility than by human acceptance.