Episode Details

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Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, joins us to explain why “a lot of companies will build AI into bankruptcy” this year. She previously led PyTorch at Meta, and her company now powers every major coding company, including Cursor, which it began working with at $2M ARR and has watched grow a thousandfold.

Lin also shares why the frontier labs’ bet on general intelligence leaves most companies without a moat, how customizing models on private data can make AI five to 10 times cheaper, and why Fireworks expects to process 100x its current 40 trillion tokens a day within a year.

In our in-depth episode, we discuss:

* Why product-market fit no longer means a durable business in the AI era, and how companies can scale straight into bankruptcy

* The framework for owning your own intelligence: put 10–20% of AI spend into training and cut total cost of ownership by four to eight times

* Why the product itself is no longer the moat when coding agents make anything easy to copy, and why your private data is

* How Lin runs a company with six additional co-founders, doubling headcount every quarter, on a culture of “extreme ownership”

* What Lin learned from Jensen Huang about leadership, and why she believes the future belongs to millions of specialized models rather than a few general ones

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Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Lin Qiao(2:17) Why Jensen Loves Fireworks(4:15) Jensen's Unique Philosophy(7:33) What "Human Judgement" Really Means(11:06) When Founders Should Stop Interviewing(13:10) Why Join Meta Just to Leave and Build(17:06) Building With 6 Co-Founders(22:00) Managing Co-Founder Conflict(24:47) Why Firms Build on Fireworks(37:21) The Framework for Owning Intelligence(38:40) How Long It Takes to Build an Open Model(43:42) Respecting Privacy in Training(45:57) The Next Moat(48:53) Are Data Centers & GPUs an Opportunity?(

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