Real-Time World Models, Explained by a Founder Building Them

How to Spot a $25 Billion Company Before It Has Revenue

Brian Zhan doesn't want your business plan. In fact, if you hand him one at the seed stage, that might raise some red flags. In this episode, Anu Maheshwari, Head of Venture Ecosystem at Nebius, sits down with Brian Zhan, partner at Striker Venture Partners. They unpack what it actually means to back people, not products, at the frontier of AI. From reinforcement learning's generalization advantages, to recursive self-improvement loops in chip design, Brian makes the case that the VC consensus is missing the most important early bets by waiting for revenue. Brian has been on the boards of Reflection, Skilled, and Periodic Labs. With a personal history in robotics research dating back to 2014, he maps out where the next trillion-dollar companies will emerge, why most VCs are too focused on revenue timelines to see them, and how Striker approaches seed investing with 10% of fund concentration per bet. 0:00 - Intro teaser: Why the best founders don't need a business plan 0:27 - Why Striker invests before there's a business plan 5:04 - Is AI in a bubble? Separating hype from opportunity 7:45 - How Brian identifies world-changing founders 9:24 - Reinforcement learning and the path to superintelligence 14:05 - Robotics, world models, and the future of physical AI 17:55 - Why most VCs think too small 20:18 - What Brian looks for in a founder pitch 23:37 - The OpenAI playbook & why compute partnerships matter 26:05 - Outro What You'll Learn: -Why a detailed business plan at seed is unnecessary. -The precision behind frontier AI investing and why it's fundamentally different from SaaS. -Why reinforcement learning underpins recursive self-improvement and why most investors don't actually understand it. -How world models and simulation will accelerate robotics toward its ChatGPT moment. -Solving energy supply by unlocking insight for everything else. -How Striker evaluates founder-market fit in practice.

How Tavily Got to 1M Users Without Sending One Cold Email

Tavily hit one million users without a single outbound cold email. Not because of a viral moment, but because the founder understood earlier than most that the unit economics of agentic search are fundamentally different. When you’re returning context to an AI agent rather than links to a human, token waste, latency, and information density become the variables that determine whether your product survives in production. Tavily built its architecture around that constraint from day one, and developers noticed. After being mentioned in 200+ research papers and 1,000+ YouTube videos, Fortune 500 enterprises were already running Tavily internally before a sales conversation ever happened. In this episode, Markiesha Patrice (Head of Startup Platform & Community at Nebius) sits down with Rotem Weiss, Founder and CEO of Tavily, to get into the technical and strategic decisions behind building the search layer for the agentic web. Rotem breaks down why optimizing for snippet retrieval over link retrieval changes the entire architecture of a search product, how Tavily's prediction engine pre-processes likely queries to cut latency without sacrificing accuracy, and why he believes the most important GTM decision an AI infrastructure company can make in 2026 is getting integrated into the coding assistants autonomously selecting tools on behalf of engineers. 0:00 - Intro teaser: the buyer isn't a human anymore 0:25 - Guest intro & what Tavily does 0:47 - Rotem's origin story & the first check 1:40 - The real-time data gap & launching GPT Researcher 4:30 - What is agentic search? Snippets, not links 6:55 - The prediction engine that kills latency 7:55 - Why 2026 is the year of token optimization 10:05 - Inside the Nebius acquisition 11:25 - The team & the "second CEO" 12:45 - "The buyer is the AI assistant" — winning coding tools 14:30 - GPUs as rocket fuel 16:30 - One million users, zero cold emails 19:20 - "I'm the worst at everything in the company" 20:30 - Israel vs. the US founder mindset What You'll Learn -Why returning the right snippet rather than the right link changes the entire architecture of a search product. -The prediction engine Tavily uses to pre-process likely queries at the website level, reducing processing overhead without sacrificing accuracy. -Why coding assistants autonomously selecting tools in a stack are becoming the real GTM lever for AI infrastructure companies. -The open-source to enterprise conversion motion Rotem actually used. -How the migration from large closed-source models to fine-tuned open-source models changes the token economics for AI companies trying to get to production. Learn more at: https://nebius.com/startups/podcast

Real-Time World Models, Explained by a Founder Building Them

In October 2024, Alberto Taiuti was trying to solve a 3D asset problem and ran into a wall. The labeled data didn't exist. What he realized next reshaped the trajectory of his company. In this episode, Josh Liss (Head of Media & Entertainment at Nebius) sits down with Alberto Taiuti, CEO and Co-founder of Reactor, the developer platform for world models. They unpack what real-time world models actually are, why they're fundamentally different from the AI video tools most people have encountered, and why he believes the era of prompting is already winding down. Drawing on his background at Apple, where he worked on the Vision Pro, Alberto makes the case that interactive video changes what a developer platform has to be, why video models already understand 3D space (even though no one trained them to), and how shows, ads, and even software interfaces could be generated live, per user, in real time. 0:00 - Intro teaser: writing code, not prompts 0:25 - Guest intro & Reactor overview 0:47 - What is a world model? 2:19 - World models are regressive like LLMs 5:21 - Alberto's background & origin story 8:08 - The "aha" moment that changed everything 9:58 - How world models will impact media & entertainment 12:48 - "We only hire unreasonable people" — hiring philosophy 13:54 - Building in stealth: lessons from Apple 17:48 - GTA San Andreas shaped his entire career What You'll Learn What a world model is, in plain language, and how it differs from standard AI video generation. Alberto's philosophy for building in stealth mode and how that impacts his team Why Alberto believes interactive, real-time video brings code back to the center of AI development. The insight about video models and 3D that became the foundation of Reactor. Reactor's hiring philosophy and why "unreasonable" is the highest compliment at the company. Alberto's three-year prediction for how applications themselves get built.

Building Across Internet Eras with Scott Kveton, Serial Entrepreneur, CEO & Co-founder of CaseMark

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups [https://www.nebius.com/startups] 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast [https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast] In this episode, we sit down with Scott Kveton—serial entrepreneur, Co-founder and CEO of CaseMark, and Co-founder of the Association for AI in Legal (A4L)—to explore what it means to build across multiple generations of the internet. With over 20 years of experience spanning Web1, Web2, Web3, and now AI, Scott has built and scaled companies at internet scale, with three successful exits and just as many hard-earned failures. From an early career at Amazon to co-founding Urban Airship and contributing to foundational technologies like OpenID and OAuth, his journey offers a front-row seat to the evolution of modern software. Now, with CaseMark, Scott is focused on transforming the legal industry through AI—building a “litigation lifecycle” platform designed to help attorneys make sense of complex cases from intake to resolution. We dive into Scott’s philosophy on building high-performance teams, why he believes companies should operate like clockwork—not culture—and how founders can stay focused on execution and stakeholder value. Along the way, we explore lessons from decades of building, scaling, and adapting through every major wave of the internet. 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kveton/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kveton/] Twitter/X: https://x.com/kveton Company website: https://casemark.com/ 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups [https://www.nebius.com/startups] 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com [https://www.nebius.com] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius [https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius] X: https://x.com/nebiusai [https://x.com/nebiusai]

Making and Breaking Things: The Founder Mentality and Building in Emerging Markets with Nova and Postpay’s Tariq Sheikh

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups [https://www.nebius.com/startups] 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast [https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast] In this episode we sit down with Tariq Sheikh, Co-founder and CEO of Nova, a contract intelligence platform transforming how teams manage and analyze business documents. A self-described “third culture kid,” Tariq’s journey spans numerous countries across both Africa and Europe, stints in consulting, gold trading, and defense, and finally a series of successes scaling tech startups. He previously founded Postpay, the leading buy now, pay later provider in the Middle East, scaling the company from a handful of employees to over 100 in just six months and raising over $65M along the way. Tariq shares how a constant lack of stability shaped his founder mentality—driving him to keep building, breaking, and pushing forward without getting too comfortable. We dive into what it takes to build in emerging markets, the realities of hypergrowth, and the nonstop firefighting that defines the founder journey. Tariq also reflects on how having had little time to pause and celebrate the wins is shaping how he’s building today. 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shkhtar/ Company website: https://nova-doc.com/ 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups [https://www.nebius.com/startups] 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com [https://www.nebius.com] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius [https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius] X: https://x.com/nebiusai [https://x.com/nebiusai]