The future will be explained to you in Palo Alto

Summary

On Wednesday evening at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who are building things you don’t understand yet will explain what’s coming. This is the final StrictlyVC event of 2025, and truly, the lineup is ridiculous. The series has bounced around the globe under the auspices of TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in D.C.; we talked to Greece’s prime minister in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. The concept is always the same, though: get people who are working on genuinely important developments in a room before everyone else figures out they’re important. Our favorite moment? In 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI’s monetization strategy was basically “build AGI, then ask it how to make money.” Everyone laughed. He wasn’t joking. This time we’ve got Nicholas Kelez, a particle accelerator physicist who spent 20 years at the Department of Energy building things that shouldn’t be possible. Now he’s tackling semiconductor manufacturing’s biggest problem: every advanced chip depends on $400 million machines that use lasers only one Dutch company knows how to make. (More galling to some: Americans invented the technology, then sold it to Europe.) Kelez is building the next generation in America using particle accelerator tech. It’s as nerdy as it sounds but more important than you might imagine. Then there’s Mina Fahmi, who’s made a ring that captures your whispered thoughts and turns them into text. Before you roll your eyes, know that he and cofounder Kirak Hong spent years at Meta working on this stuff after their company was acquired. The Stream Ring isn’t trying to be your friend, by the way — it’s trying to extend your brain. Backed by Toni Schneider, an operator who scaled WordPress to a billion visitors, Sandbar just emerged from stealth and might well be onto something. (Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, whose other hardware bets have included Peloton, Ring, and Fitbit; he’s also...