Summation with Auren Hoffman

Aydin Senkut is the founder and managing partner of Felicis, the venture firm he started in 2006, with over $4B under management and early bets on Shopify, Notion, Canva, and Adyen. He was Google's first product manager and has been on the Forbes Midas list of top investors for 13 years running.
In this episode of Summation, Aydin and Auren discuss:
Why the best platform companies came from Ottawa, Sydney, and Amsterdam and not Silicon Valley
How capital became a commodity and people are the only real moat left
Why the trait he bets on is the willingness to reset your priors
How defense went from an optional purchase to a matter of survival
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Aydin Senkut on X at @asenkut

Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked, which became Silicon Valley's playbook for building habit-forming products, Indistractable, on taking your attention back, and the new book Beyond Belief. He taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and is one of the sharpest thinkers on what to do with technology.
In this episode of Summation, Nir and Auren discuss:
Why to-do lists set you up to feel like a failure and what to do instead
Why 90% of the time you check your phone, it's an uncomfortable emotion, not a notification
Why beliefs are tools, not truths, and how swapping one can end your suffering
Why this is the safest generation of kids in history and still gets a moral panic
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Nir Eyal on X at @nireyal

Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked, which became Silicon Valley's playbook for building habit-forming products, Indistractable, on taking your attention back, and the new book Beyond Belief. He taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and is one of the sharpest thinkers on what to do with technology.
In this episode of Summation, Nir and Auren discuss:
Why to-do lists set you up to feel like a failure and what to do instead
Why 90% of the time you check your phone, it's an uncomfortable emotion, not a notification
Why beliefs are tools, not truths, and how swapping one can end your suffering
Why this is the safest generation of kids in history and still gets a moral panic
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Nir Eyal on X at @nireyal

Geoff Mattson is the CEO of SecureAuth, an identity security company that has raised over $200M and protects more than 50 million identities for enterprises. Before SecureAuth he was CEO of Xage Security. His work now centers on how you prove an AI agent is who it says it is.
In this episode of Summation, Geoff and Auren discuss:
Why an AI agent is like an Uber driver who might randomly turn into a psycho killer
The deepfake fraudpocalypse, and the simplest thing that defends against it
Why your agent impersonates you instead of working for you and how to fix it
Why the password is finally, actually dying
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Geoff on Linkedin

Cory Gardner is a former U.S. Senator and Congressman from Colorado and was one of the Senate's leading Taiwan and China experts, chairing the Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia and authoring the Taipei Act. He is now president and CEO of NCTA, the Internet & Television Association, whose members built the nation's largest broadband platform.
In this episode of Summation, Cory and Auren discuss:
Why the AI race gets won on spectrum, fiber, and memory chips
The bottleneck raising the price of your iPhone, PlayStation, and router
Why an open society is vulnerable to a campaign to turn Americans against AI
What a China expert thinks about our dependence on chips made off China's coast
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Cory Gardner on X at @CoryGardner