StrictlyVC Download

This week on StrictlyVC Download, Connie Loizos and Alex Gove talk with Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable. On Tuesday, Liu announced the launch of Superagent, Airtable’s first standalone product outside of its core platform—and this isn’t just another AI feature bolted onto an existing product. Superagent represents a bit bet on autonomous agents that handle tasks end-to-end, rather than chatbots that provide text-based answers.

In this conversation, Liu walks us through why he decided to build Superagent as a separate product rather than just another Airtable feature, how it actually works under the hood—from native integrations to browser automation—and the early signals that suggest he might be onto something big.
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In this episode, Connie Loizos speaks with Mary Jane Rubenstein, a professor of religion and science and technology studies at Wesleyan University and author of "Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse"—a book that served as research material for the Oscar-winning film "Everything Everywhere All at Once."

As the space economy heats up and venture capital pours into startups promising everything from asteroid mining to lunar gas stations, Dr. Rubenstein offers a critical perspective on the ethics and values shaping humanity's expansion beyond Earth. Dr. Rubenstein discusses how religious stories have shaped space exploration from the Apollo missions to today's commercial ventures, examines how science fiction has influenced the industry (sometimes as cautionary tales that get misread as instruction manuals), and makes the case for why space debris might be the issue that brings nations together—ultimately challenging listeners to consider whether we're truly imagining new possibilities in space or simply extending the worst of what we have here on Earth.
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This week on StrictlyVC Download, we're sharing a conversation with Goodwater Capital founder Chi-Hua Chien and Scribble Ventures founder Elizabeth Weil. They discuss why consumer AI hasn't lived up to the hype yet and what's coming next. Beyond ChatGPT and Gemini, the consumer AI landscape feels sparse. In this conversation, they explore why we're still in the "command line era" of AI, how form factors will unlock new use cases, and what it means to build AI-native products versus retrofitting existing platforms. They also dive into trust barriers, changing user behaviors, and why the next generation of founders needs to rethink everything from social networks to home maintenance.
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This week on StrictlyVC Download, Connie Loizos and Alex Gove talk with Jon Callaghan, managing partner at True Ventures. Callaghan has spent two decades building True Ventures into one of Silicon Valley's most successful seed-stage firms, managing nearly $4 billion across 12 funds while staying deliberately quiet in an increasingly loud venture landscape. In this conversation, Callaghan unpacks why True prioritizes founders over headlines, how the firm maintains remarkably high ownership in portfolio companies despite the bubbly market, and why duration is a feature, not a bug, of early-stage investing. Jon also shares his contrarian views on the AI wave, explains why mega-rounds and consensus capital often miss the real outliers, and reveals where he sees the biggest opportunities in consumer applications, personal software, and AI-powered biology. 
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This week on StrictlyVC Download, we’re sharing a conversation from our event in Palo Alto, where TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin spoke with Mina Fahmi, the founder and CEO of Sandbar, and Toni Schneider of True Ventures.  

Mina Fahmi is the CEO and co-founder of Sandbar, a startup building the Stream ring—an AI wearable designed to capture your whispered thoughts. Toni Schneider is a partner at True Ventures who backed Fitbit, Peloton, and Ring, and was initially skeptical of AI wearables until he saw Sandbar's demo – and to be clear, Schneider says he’d seen a whole lot of demos. In this conversation, they unpack what it takes to build hardware that people actually want to wear, why "self-extension" beats AI companions, and how privacy through whispering changes everything. They also discuss competing with OpenAI's rumored device with Jony Ive, why devices must do one thing brilliantly before doing ten things adequately, and what Sandbar learned from two years of prototyping to get the interaction model right. 
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