United Nations Wednesday afternoon At PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who are building things you don’t yet understand will explain what’s coming. This is the last StrictlyVC event of 2025 and, truly, the programming is ridiculous.
The series has traveled around the world under the auspices or TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in DC; We spoke with the Prime Minister of Greece in Athens.; and Kirsten Green welcomed us at the San Francisco Presidio. However, the concept is always the same: bring together people who are working on really important developments in a smaller environment, before everyone else realizes they are important.
One of our favorite moments was when, in 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI’s monetization strategy was basically “build AGI and then ask it how to make money.” Everyone laughed. he wasn’t kidding.
This time we have Nicholas Kelez, a particle accelerator physicist who spent 20 years at the Department of Energy building things that shouldn’t be possible. Now it’s tackling the biggest problem in semiconductor manufacturing: Every advanced chip depends on $400 million machines that use lasers that only a Dutch company knows how to make. (More irritating to some: Americans invented the technology and then sold it to Europe.) Kelez is building the next generation in the United States using particle accelerator technology. It’s as nerdy as they come, but also extremely important right now. There is also growing competition chasing the same prize.
Then there’s Mina Fahmi, who has created a ring that captures your whispered thoughts and converts them to text. Before you roll your eyes, know that he and co-founder Kirak Hong spent years at Meta working on this stuff after they acquired their company. Stream Ring isn’t trying to be your friend, it’s trying to expand your brain. Backed by Toni Schneider, an operator who scaled WordPress in its early days, Sandbar is just coming out of stealth and might well be onto something. (Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, whose other hardware bets include Peloton, Ring and Fitbit; he’s also coming to Palo Alto next week.)
We have Max Hodak, founder of Science Corp, Time magazine. cover themeand, previously, co-founder of Neuralink, which has already restored vision to dozens of blind people with retinal implants. He is now working on “biohybrid” brain-computer interfaces in which chips seeded with stem cells grow in brain tissue so that paralyzed people can control devices with their thoughts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as Hodak sees it. In fact, he believes the year 2035 will be wildly different from today, and he’s happy to share how.
Finally, we’re thrilled to welcome Chi-Hua Chien and Elizabeth Weil, two venture capitalists who backed Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, and Coinbase before they were household names. Chien runs Goodwater Capital; Weil founded Scribble Ventures after working at Andreessen Horowitz and Twitter, has made over 100 angel investments, and has a first fund showing 4x returns. (Your network It’s so good it’s annoying.) They both think Silicon Valley is completely misjudging the moment while everyone is pouring capital into enterprise AI, and they’ll explain why.
Technology crisis event
san francisco
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October 13-15, 2026
PlayGround Global is the host, along with general partner Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel. There will be drinks, delicious food and joy.; Capacity is limited, so if you want to come, act fast.
If you would like to be associated with the series in 2026, please get in touch.
