Summation with Auren Hoffman

Chris Farmer is the founder and CEO of SignalFire, an early stage venture firm managing over $3 billion. 
In this episode of Summation, Chris and Auren discuss:
why the time to return 1x has stretched to 9+ years and funds are lasting 20 years
the engineering hiring boom hiding behind the layoff headlines
the five functions of a VC firm and the one place data helps the least
why almost all conventional career advice is now bad
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Chris Farmer on X at @chriswfarmer

This episode is a rebroadcast of Auren's appearance on the GTMnow podcast 
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Auren Hoffman (Flex Capital) joins the GTMnow podcast to share some of the most contrarian takes in tech today, from why AI moats are gone, to why your next VC meeting will be with a bot, to why AI is secretly going to trigger a baby boom.
In this episode:
Why Auren runs 500+ AI agents to source deals, and what that means for founders raising capital
The "agent-to-agent" meeting prediction: by end of 2026, first VC conversations will be fully automated
Why every software moat has been "blown up" and what Salesforce, LinkedIn & DocuSign need to do to survive
The OpenAI x The Hustle acquisition breakdown: why it's the smartest (and cheapest) distribution play in AI
Why missing a great deal is 10x more painful than making a bad one, Auren's honest VC mistake framework
The baby boom thesis: why AI, IVF, self-driving cars & cheaper energy could reverse the fertility decline
Why companies won't sign yearly SaaS contracts anymore, and what that means for every B2B founder
Auren Hoffman is the founder of NQB8, Flex Capital, SafeGraph, and LiveRamp. He's an early backer of Replit, Perplexity, Rippling, Vercel, Coinbase, Chime, and AppLovin.
Max’s socials: 
https://x.com/hackitmax
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/
Auren’s socials:
https://x.com/auren
https://www.linkedin.com/in/auren/
https://auren.substack.com/
GTMnow: https://gtmnow.com

Jake Stauch is the co-founder and CEO of Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform. Serval was founded in 2024 and has already raised over $125M across rounds led by Redpoint and Sequoia at a $1B+ valuation. Before Serval, Jake spent five years on the product team at Verkada and earlier founded NeuroPlus, a brain-sensing hardware company that made video games for kids with ADHD.
In this episode of Summation, Jake and Auren discuss:
Why Anthropic has added more ARR in the past few months than ServiceNow has in the past 20 years
The "forward deployed engineer" hire and why he recruits future founders instead of solutions engineers
Why talent density is the only remaining moat in the age of AI
The Silicon Valley collusion around not poaching each other's employees
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Jake Stauch on X at @jakeserval

Dmitry Shevelenko is Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. He previously co-founded Tortoise, a robotics and commerce automation startup and held business development roles at Uber, LinkedIn, and Meta. He also serves on the board of Lazard. 
In this episode of Summation, Dmitry and Auren discuss:
Why CEOs and executives are Perplexity Computer’s biggest power users and what that says about who wins the AI era
Scaling Perplexity past $500M ARR with only 34% headcount growth
The $34.5B Chrome bid and the TikTok bid before it
Why AI's biggest constraint right now is adoption and not capability
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Dmitry Shevelenko on X at @dmitry140

Ben Miller is the co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, an alternative asset management platform that gives individual investors access to private real estate, private credit, and venture capital. In March 2026, he listed the Fundrise Innovation Fund on the NYSE under the ticker VCX, one of the first publicly traded venture capital funds. VCX gives retail investors direct exposure to private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and SpaceX. The fund manages over $650 million and has over 100,000 individual investors. Ben is a returning Summation guest.
In this episode of Summation, Ben and Auren discuss:
Why VCX traded up 700% on day one while Bill Ackman's fund traded down the next week
Why ETFs fall apart for private markets and closed-end funds are the right structure
How AI will reshape real estate by 2031 and which markets get hit hardest
The hidden truth that SoHo, Wynwood, and Miami Beach were all built by the same person
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ben Miller on X at @benmillerise