Index Audio

The past couple of years have shown both tremendous growth and highlighted tailwinds for blockchain gaming. Ryan Wyatt (CEO, Polygon Studios) and Jeff "Jiho" Zirlin (Co-Founder, Sky Mavis) join Dean Takahashi (Lead Writer, GamesBeat) to discuss the merits of blockchain gaming, how to operate in today's dynamic market, and their predictions for the future of this segment.

Fortnite isn’t available on the App Store… but you can still play it on your phone today? With new services from Xbox, PlayStation, Amazon, and NVIDIA, as well as an M&A race to own the best gaming content, it’s clear that cloud gaming has finally arrived. Maneet Khaira (Co-Founder & CEO, Backbone) shares his perspective on how gameplay is evolving and why the next decade of gaming will be defined by the cloud.

'Ready Player One' set the stage for the Metaverse in 2011 and we're now on the cusp of realizing that future… or has it already arrived? Daniel Sturman (CTO, Roblox) joins Caroline Hyde (Co-Host, Bloomberg TV) to discuss all things Metaverse; whether it already exists through Roblox today, what challenges lie ahead as it becomes more prevalent, and how it will augment future interactions.

At their best, games become a home for players to experience and express themselves for years on end. But what makes a great game great? Soner Aydemir (Co-Founder & CEO, Dream Games) and Jenova Chen (CEO, ThatGameCompany) discuss how to approach game design, find your target audience, and create memorable and enduring game experiences.

Games are the new shopping mall. It's where friends interact with one another, discussing all sorts of topics regardless of whether or not they relate to the game itself. Elizabeth Hamren (COO, Discord) and Nick Fajt (Co-Founder & CEO, Rec Room) discuss how games have evolved to fit this need, the differences between social gaming platforms and incumbent social media platforms, and what problems need to be addressed as gaming emerges as the future forum for socialization.

After dominating mobile app charts for the past 10 years, Ilkka Paananen (Co-Founder & CEO, Supercell) and Sebastian Knutsson (Co-founder & former CCO, King) reflect on their learnings and share perspectives on operating in today's environment of remote work, Web3, and new form factors.

Index Partner Mike Volpi and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman talk robots and the apocalypse.

Index Partner Nina Achadijan interviews Ameet Bendov, the Co-Founder & CEO of Gong about his journey building the company and his advice for future entrepreneurs.

What are the practical aspects of AI? Index’s Erin Price-Wright speaks with Alexandr Wang, Founder of Scale AI, Anima Anandkumar, Director of ML Research, NVIDIA and Martin Chavez, Sixth Street Partners.

Today, we are privileged to have Cade Metz join us. Cade is a reporter at the New York Times, and covers artificial intelligence and machine learning, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging areas. Before the New York Times, he was a reporter at Wired. Cade has written what we think is one of the seminal books in AI called The Genius Makers, which is the story of the emergence of AI, from the 1950s to today. In the process of writing this book, he had conversations with some of the brightest and most capable people in the world of AI. He's joining us to share some of the narrative and what he’s learned through the process of writing.

Mehran Sahami is a professor in the computer science department at Stanford University, and the Associate chair for education. Prior to this, he was a senior research scientist at Google. Adam Wenchel is the CEO at Arthur. He started his career at Darpa and worked at a number of tech companies. His last startup was acquired by Capital One where he built and led the AI team. This put him on a path to founding Arthur, which is a company that is a platform for monitoring AI performance. Forbes Technology writer Jonathan Vanian leads Mehran & Adam through a fascinating discussion about AI & Ethics.

“We're building robots that swim like fish and move like turtles. Robots that brush your hair, robots that pack your groceries, and can reason that you shouldn't put milk on top of lettuce. Robots that can recycle, robotic pills that enable incision free surgeries. In each of these examples, we have to think about the body of the robot, we have to think about the brain of the robot, and what is the interaction between the robot and the users.” - Daniela Rus Hear about the latest advances in robotics from those working in the forefront of the field. Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her research spans across all of robotics, everything from soft surface robotics, to human robot interactions, to autonomous driving. Pieter Abeel is the Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and Co-director of the Berkeley AI Research Lab at the University of California. Pieter is also the co-founder of Covariant.ai, which looks to bring some of the research that he's been doing with his group at Berkeley to real world applications in fulfillment centers and beyond. He's also the host of the Robot Brains podcast. Daniela & Pieter are interviewed by Index’s Bryan Offutt. “In academia, robotics is about emphasizing novelty. It’s about going places we’ve never been before….. But for companies that bring robotics into the real world, the real challenge is about achieving really high reliability.” - Pieter Abeel

“This is a really powerful conceptual shift from how we have been using computing technology for the past many decades.” - Kevin Scott, CTO, Microsoft “I’m excited to see 2022 become the year where NLP goes from being this incredibly promising glimpse of the future to a technology which we depend on for lots of things.” - Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI Learn about current advances and limitations of natural language processing from those working at the edge of the field today. Bryan Walsh, The editor of Future Perfect at Vox.com interviews Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which brought the world the GPT-3 Model and Kevin Scott, the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. 1:30 - What are Sam & Kevin expecting in NLP from 2022? 4:00 - In which areas will AI tooling become an integral part of workflows? How are people using it today for search, copy generation, automated A/B testing, classification and more. 7:00 - Why coding was a great place to start with NLP and which areas it will go to next including graphic design & historical research. 9:30 - How do we go beyond text towards multi-modal models? 12:00 - How much specialisation is needed? 16:00 - Democratising AI technology and why OpenAI partnered with Microsoft. 18:50 - Preventing technology from being misused. 23:00 - What will change as we move closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)? 26:00 - How do we get stakeholders across the board to participate in the conversation? 29:00 - What will it be like to interact with these models in a decade's time? “In 2032 It will feel not that you are talking to your smartest friend- but rather that you are talking to thousands of smart friends that are domain experts, working at superhuman speed.” - Sam Altman “People want some version of the Star Trek computer.” - Sam Altman

Guests: *Jason Citron*, Co-Founder & CEO, Discord *Danny Rimer*, Partner, Index Ventures With over 4 billion people on the internet, you can take just about any niche – weird black-and-white artwork, crochet cat dolls, candy commercials from the noughties – and it will be huge. In this conversation between Danny Rimer, senior partner at Index Ventures, and Jason Citron, co-founder and CEO of Discord, the pair discuss how the company became the ‘town square’ for creators and their fans to come together, and what Discord has done to avoid the division and polarisation that plagues much of the internet. Jason starts by talking about the unexpected path Discord took from a platform primarily about friends meeting before and after games, to a place where people could join communication channels known as ‘servers’ to explore their shared interest in everything from TV shows to music. Over 150 million people use Discord every month, with millions of servers made by creators and their audiences. Jason goes on to talk about the surprising importance of voice chat as something that strikes a balance between rich emotional texture and high attentional demands. Danny moves the conversation onto Discord’s unusually exacting – and refreshing – approach to community moderation, and Jason admits his lack of premonition in the early days about the success of the business. He goes on to note the convergence between fans’ desire to support and be closer to creators on the one hand, and on the other, the move away from advertising and towards direct payments for creators. Jason concludes with how Kanye West has used Discord to give fans a greater say over his creative process, and offers some remarks about the truly global spread of Discord’s users.

Guests: *Sima Gandhi*, Co-Founder & CEO, Creative Juice *James Berdigans*, Co-Founder & CEO, Printify *Andrew Lipp*, Co-Founder & CEO, EQL *Harry Stebbings*, Founder, 20VC *Mark Goldberg*, Index Ventures (Moderator) While the tools for making and distributing media across the internet have been around for a while, the financial and digital infrastructure required to make money from online creativity is only just emerging. As the ‘creator-as-business’ model gains momentum, hear from some of the most thoughtful and engaged voices now pushing for the maturation of the creator economy.

Guests: *Alex Zaccaria*, Co-Founder and CEO, Linktree *Jim Shepherd*, Head of Talent Partnerships, Snap *Alex Masmej*, Co-Founder & CEO, Showtime *Kudzi Chikumbu*, Director of Creator Community, TikTok *Georgia Stevenson*, Index Ventures (Moderator) The world is more connected than ever, enabling us to express ourselves in new and different ways. On the internet, we find belonging and we build communities. Here, we discuss how online identity has evolved over time, how different platforms work to shape digital identity, and what we can observe from salient Gen Z behaviors across platforms.

Guests: *Phillip Wang*, Co-Founder & CEO of Gather,*Devin Finzer* Co-Founder & CEO of OpenSea, *Nick Fajt* Co-Founder & CEO of Rec Room and Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures. We're spending more time than ever interacting and transacting online. And in the future, we'll spend much of our lives—for work and for play—in immersive virtual environments and robust digital economies. This is the future of work and the future of entertainment, combining key gaming, crypto, and media. Sarah Cannon, partner at Index Ventures, raises the question of what the metaverse should look like from a first-principles perspective. Phillip Wang, co-founder and CEO of Gather, which allows communities to come together online, observes the prospects for a metaverse that doesn’t merely mimic ‘real life’ experiences, but in some cases can go beyond them, with new kinds of social encounters and forms of belonging. Nick Fajt, the co-founder and CEO of RecRoom, where players can build and play games together, talks about his company’s desire to cater to people’s creative need to ‘affect’ the world around them – something that’s been lacking in many virtual environments up to now. Devin Finzer, the co-founder and CEO of NFT marketplace OpenSea, notes that the frontier technologies driving the metaverse – AI, VR and crypto – all have early adopter traction but are only just on the cusp of an exponential growth curve. The group turns to the question of what will ‘mainstream’ the metaverse in order to move it from novelty to necessity; what new jobs it will create; how it could hypercharge digital network effects; and what we can do to ensure the ‘dystopian’ representations of the metaverse in literature aren’t born out in reality.

In the realm of modern technology, it doesn’t get more exciting than self-driving vehicles. Aurora is the only successful independent company in this business. The team has remained focused on building the Aurora Driver, partnering with existing leaders (Toyota, Uber, Volvo, Paccar, and more) for the other pieces of the puzzle. Chris shares the advantages of relying on partners to bring that technology to market, noting “we’ll actually be able to build a better product and we’ll end up actually having a better business and have a bigger impact on the world because of that.” What Aurora has been able to achieve in the self-driving space is remarkable. Index partner Mike Volpi sits down with Chris to discuss Aurora’s unique approach to self-driving, the outlook on the industry, and how the company keeps people focused when solving such a complex, long-term problem. In Chris’s words, “it's been an incredible adventure and we're only just at the beginning.”

Guests: The Chainsmokers’ *Alex Pall*, TikTok Creator, *Josh Richards*, YouTuber, *Shelby Church*, Twitch Streamer, *Youna aka Codemiko* and Index's *Rex Woodbury*. How can you ‘make it’ as a creator? In this conversation, hear from some of the pioneering artists in today’s digital economy about how they built up their audience from scratch, the roadblocks they encountered along the way, and the strategies they used to overcome them. Principal at Index Ventures Rex Woodbury begins by asking about Gen Z’s shifting expectations about work and why life as a creator appeals to them. Josh Richards, a creator and entrepreneur who’s amassed 24 million followers on TikTok, talks about the role of the pandemic and the rejection of the ‘9-to-5’ desk job. Youna (otherwise known by her ‘virtual avatar’ name, CodeMiko) moves on to ‘Vtubing’, self-expression and the relationship between monetisation and community engagement, before Shelby Church discusses why it’s easier than ever before to make money on YouTube. The conversation progresses to how creators can build a massive audience on one platform and then re-direct it to another – something that both Josh and Alex Pall, the entrepreneur and member of the DJ duo The Chainsmokers, have considerable experience in. Finally the group considers the tailwinds that are reorienting artists towards maintaining greater control and ownership over their creativity, and they discuss the new tools and businesses yet to be built that will help reduce the pain-points for the next generation of creators.

The Renaissance was humanity's zenith of creativity, art, and expression. Today, we're entering a second Renaissance—a digital Renaissance. Paula Findlen is the world's preeminent expert on the Renaissance. She speaks with Index partner Sarah Cannon on parallels between the Renaissance and our modern, technology-driven creator economy.