Directed energy weapons, autonomous drones, and combat AI agents are not just real. They are deployed.

Jim Rebesco, cofounder and CEO of Striveworks, breaks down what's driving this moment, and the second and third-order effects most people aren't tracking yet. AI can't be bolted onto legacy systems and expected to perform.

It demands a blank sheet of paper. New design philosophy, new economics, new operational infrastructure.

The old model of pitching a PowerPoint and billing for development is already crumbling. What replaces it is being built right now.

Agenda

• 0:00 We're already living in the cyberpunk era of war
• 5:34 When do you trust an agent with your credit card
• 14:04 The blank sheet of paper and the F-16
• 19:34 From Wall Street algorithms to battlefield AI
• 24:34 What Gen Alpha already takes for granted
• 32:34 When science fiction becomes reality
• 38:34 The $500 drone and the new economics of defense
• 45:34 The trust stack and the agentic AI revolution

Guest Links & Bio
Jim Rebesco: LinkedIn
Striveworks: Website
Striveworks Raises Growth Capital Led By Washington Harbour Partners

Dr. Jim Rebesco is CEO and a co-founder of Striveworks, an artificial intelligence company focused on the deployment of AI/ML models at scale. He is a board member for Sayari Labs, a leading financial intelligence company, and has served as a consulting member of the Army Science Board.

Prior to founding Striveworks, Dr. Rebesco worked at Virtu Financial, a leading electronic market-making firm, where he led trading and data science teams as a partner in the firm. He was instrumental in building Virtu's capabilities from the beginning in data science and analytics and played a critical role in the firm's IPO in 2015.

Dr. Rebesco has been engaged with the Federal Reserve Board, elements within the Department of Defense, the United States Military Academy, and others as a recognized subject matter expert in both Al and its applications to various industries, including finance and national defense. Dr. Rebesco earned his B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology and his PhD in computational neuroscience from Northwestern University.

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

The hype that landed on Austin in 2021 was correct and at the same time ahead of the curve. Nait Jones, serial founder and former a16z partner who arrived in Silicon Valley in 2011 at the Web 2 moment and moved to Austin during the pandemic, argues that the fundamentals have now caught up

Jones traces what he calls a spiritual succession. A direct genealogy from Arthur Rock's invention of venture capital through Fairchild, Intel, Dell, and UT research into the current generation of robotics, defense, and energy infrastructure concentrated within a 200-mile radius. The city's defensible moat is where intelligence meets the physical world, the hardware and the software built as one.

The result will look nothing like what came before it.

Agenda

• 0:00 Intro + Silicon Valley 2011 and the Web 2 Gold Rush
• 9:17 How The Social Network Changed the Talent Pipeline
• 11:16 Inside the a16z Partner Meeting
• 14:48 Spiritual Succession from Arthur Rock to Austin
• 18:06 The 2021 Hype Was Real, Just Early
• 20:26 California and Delaware's Self-Inflicted Wounds
• 23:43 The 200-Mile Radius
• 26:26 Permission to Build and the Sunlight Metaphor
• 30:20 Foundational Models Belong to SF
• 34:48 Third Places and Connective Tissue
• 42:29 The Storytelling Gap
• 45:44 Six-Month Vesting in the AI Era
• 49:04 Seedance, Suno, and the Creation-Consumption Collapse
• 54:59 The Barbell of Synthetic Media and Analog Craft
• 59:27 Copyright, IP, and the Entertainment Layer Cake

Guest Links
Nait Jones: X, LinkedIn
Adtwin: Website, LinkedIn

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

American universities stopped optimizing for students a long time ago. The University of Austin was built as a direct counter to that failure. Carlos Carvalho, its president, brings a statistician's precision to the diagnosis, tracing the causal chain from dropped standards to credential collapse while building an institution with no tuition and no government money, staking its survival entirely on student outcomes 20 years out. The conversation moves from the financial architecture of a university, through a curriculum that starts with Plato before it touches Python, to the deeper question of what a university owes a civilization in the age of AI and whether Austin is the right place to answer it.

Agenda
0:00 Intro + Three Years In
9:42 The $300M Bet
15:42 The Conglomerate Problem
21:42 Western Canon First
28:42 What AI Changes About Teaching
34:42 The Bastrop Lab
41:42 UATX in the Austin Ecosystem
48:42 Atoms vs Bits in Texas
53:42 American Exceptionalism as Mission
59:42 The Hit Pieces
1:06:42 The UCSD Math Collapse
1:11:42 Grade Inflation as Decay
1:14:42 AI and the Soul Problem

Guest Bio
Carlos Carvalho is the President of the University of Austin. Prior to taking on this role, he spent 15 years as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, where he held the La Quinta Centennial Professorship and founded the Salem Center for Policy. A native of Brazil, Dr. Carvalho earned his doctorate in statistics from Duke University and has also taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research focuses on Bayesian statistics in complex, high-dimensional problems with applications ranging from economics to genetics to public policy. At UATX, he is leading a bold effort to build a new university that stands for American principles and academic excellence.

Guest Links
University of Austin: Website, Substack, Instagram, X, LinkedIn

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack