Sep 22, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min · 10 segments
Today's guest is Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI. Naveen has built two startups before Unconventional AI, both at critical inflection points in the AI market, often early to…
Naveen RaoGuest
Brian SchechterHostGaby LorenziHost
I mean, I'd love to get your, cause you know, we're, we're thinking a lot about where to invest at seed in the context of compute, um, with, uh, with an overarching thesis that the compute industry or semiconductor industry is undergoing this massive transformation because of the need that the AI revolution is putting on for more hardware, more efficient hardware, new types of hardware, and that incumbents have gotten incredible at hyper optimization and working within the context of an extremely sophisticated but fragmented supply chain.
And then another thing that we think about a lot is there's sort of a rising generation of people that want to get into building hard things and want to be in a compute.
You know, we're investors in Etched where that's like an incredible example of that.
There's another angle, which is like the availability of capital, which you're now speaking to, where it used to be like, well, you just can't go compete because you can't get the money to.
But now it may not, you know, There are some people who can go out and raise something in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars because of who they are.
There's also just some teams that can raise 10, 20, $30 billion, make some really compelling proof points, prove that they can hire and then raise hundreds of millions of dollars, prove that they can simulate and then raise ultimately billions of dollars.
But in quick succession to be able to actually go compete against the incumbents.
How do you see this playing out over the next decade in terms of like it's, you know, let's assume that Unconventional is a big winner.
What else do you think will happen in the semiconductor industry because of this new demand?
There's going to be some pretty big shifts in who those suppliers are and what the supply chain looks like.
It's fragmented in a way that almost assumes a staticness to the way you build a system.
It's like, OK, well, I build a big die that is a certain size and that die has certain power characteristics.
And this is the kind of packaging that works for that and is the kind of memory that works for that.
And all of these things are cookie cutter and they're fragmented, but they assume that there's basically one way to put it together.
And I think what's going to happen is we're going to see people going you know, it's a different levels of depth to change this, like, I invested in a company called autumn works, that's, it's actually changing how we can even do like lithography effectively, like, you do 3d printing at the like, you know, nanometer scale.
So I'm super bullish on things like this, because we could change, there could all of a sudden be this new invention that just move, boom, completely change with what changes the need to have lithography.
I think lithography as it is today is commoditized, like, I understand why we're trying to go after it as a country and bring it back on shore and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, I'd love to get your, cause you know, we're, we're thinking a lot about where to invest at seed in the context of compute, um, with, uh, with an overarching thesis that the compute industry or semiconductor industry is undergoing this massive transformation because of the need that the AI revolution is putting on for more hardware, more efficient hardware, new types of hardware, and that incumbents have gotten incredible at hyper optimization and working within the context of an extremely sophisticated but fragmented supply chain.
And then another thing that we think about a lot is there's sort of a rising generation of people that want to get into building hard things and want to be in a compute.
You know, we're investors in Etched where that's like an incredible example of that.
There's another angle, which is like the availability of capital, which you're now speaking to, where it used to be like, well, you just can't go compete because you can't get the money to.
But now it may not, you know, There are some people who can go out and raise something in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars because of who they are.
There's also just some teams that can raise 10, 20, $30 billion, make some really compelling proof points, prove that they can hire and then raise hundreds of millions of dollars, prove that they can simulate and then raise ultimately billions of dollars.
But in quick succession to be able to actually go compete against the incumbents.
How do you see this playing out over the next decade in terms of like it's, you know, let's assume that Unconventional is a big winner.
What else do you think will happen in the semiconductor industry because of this new demand?
There's going to be some pretty big shifts in who those suppliers are and what the supply chain looks like.
It's fragmented in a way that almost assumes a staticness to the way you build a system.
It's like, OK, well, I build a big die that is a certain size and that die has certain power characteristics.
And this is the kind of packaging that works for that and is the kind of memory that works for that.
And all of these things are cookie cutter and they're fragmented, but they assume that there's basically one way to put it together.
And I think what's going to happen is we're going to see people going you know, it's a different levels of depth to change this, like, I invested in a company called autumn works, that's, it's actually changing how we can even do like lithography effectively, like, you do 3d printing at the like, you know, nanometer scale.
So I'm super bullish on things like this, because we could change, there could all of a sudden be this new invention that just move, boom, completely change with what changes the need to have lithography.
I think lithography as it is today is commoditized, like, I understand why we're trying to go after it as a country and bring it back on shore and all that kind of stuff.
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