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  • In Person

Hard Fork Live

2025 HFL LP Post Hero
  • June 24, 2025
  • San Francisco
The future is already here.

A.I. labs are racing to create superhuman intelligence. In San Francisco, cars, code and cults all drive themselves. Every day, technology is rewriting ancient narratives about work, creativity and what it means to be human. So, where does that leave us? 

This June, co-hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton took the stage to make sense of it all, with a live recording of their acclaimed podcast “Hard Fork.”

The episode will be available soon, on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Buckle up, it might get weird.

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Interviewees

HFL Sam Altman

Sam Altman

Co-Founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI

HFL Patrick Collison

Patrick Collison

Co-Founder and C.E.O. of Stripe

HFL Brad Lightcap

Brad Lightcap

Chief Operating Officer of OpenAI

HFL Kathryn Zealand

Kathryn Zealand

Founder and C.E.O. of Skip

Hosted By

HFL Host Casey Newton

Casey Newton

Technology Journalist, Co-Host of the “Hard Fork” Podcast

HFL Host Kevin Roose

Kevin Roose

Technology Columnist for The New York Times, Co-Host of the “Hard Fork” Podcast

Location

Sponsors

Premier Sponsor
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Associate Sponsor
HFL Website Sponsor InvescoQQQ
Supporting Sponsor
HFL Website Sponsor IntuitQB

Speakers

Sam Altman

Co-Founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI

Sam Altman is the co-founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI, the A.I. research and deployment company behind ChatGPT and DALL·E. Altman was president of the early-stage start-up accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. In 2015, Altman co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab with the mission to build general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits all humanity.

Patrick Collison

Co-Founder and C.E.O. of Stripe

Patrick Collison is co-founder and chief executive officer of Stripe, a programmable financial services company. Collison and his brother, John, started Stripe in 2010 with the goal of making it simpler to accept payments on the internet. Today, millions of businesses from start-ups to global enterprises use Stripe to accept payments and manage complex businesses online.

Collison is also a co-founder of the Arc Institute, a biomedical research institute, with the mission of pioneering a new model for basic research.



Brad Lightcap

Chief Operating Officer of OpenAI

Brad Lightcap serves as chief operating officer of OpenAI, overseeing its business, operations and strategic partnerships across research, applied A.I. and go-to-market. Previously, Lightcap was part of Y Combinator Continuity and led finance and operations initiatives at Dropbox. He holds degrees in economics and history from Duke University.

Kathryn Zealand

Founder and C.E.O. of Skip

Kathryn Zealand is the founder and C.E.O. of Skip, the first “e-bike for walking”: an ultralight exoskeleton that the company hopes will be a beautiful, intuitive and transformative product to help a billion people be more active and healthy. Zealand has a background in theoretical physics, holds numerous patents and previously led early-stage projects at Google X, before developing the underlying tech for what eventually spun out into the start-up Skip.

Zealand's entrepreneurial spirit started with selling pet fish at age 12, in between studying for the Science Olympiads. She describes her career in the decades since as “small teams of smart people tackling huge problems.” Highlights included: applying methods from quantum mechanics to model climate change; helping run the largest R.C.T. for diabetes care while at McKinsey; founding several agribusinesses in East Africa to reduce rural poverty; and starting several (still confidential) high-tech projects within Google X that improve climate resilience.

In 2019, inspired by wanting to help her grandmother, Zealand started a wearable robotics project aiming to help a billion people move. After a few years of developing the underlying tech and narrowing in product-market-fit, this has become Skip. In addition to her qualifications in theoretical physics, Zealand also holds an M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.P.A from Harvard. To offset being a chocoholic, Zealand runs long distances very slowly.

Speakers

Casey Newton

Technology Journalist, Co-Host of the “Hard Fork” Podcast

Kevin Roose

Technology Columnist for The New York Times, Co-Host of the “Hard Fork” Podcast

Sponsors

IBM logo® pos blue60 RGB
Premier Sponsor

To learn more about IBM, click on the logo.

HFL Website Sponsor InvescoQQQ
Associate Sponsor

To learn more about Invesco QQQ, click the logo.

HFL Website Sponsor IntuitQB
Supporting Sponsor

To learn more about Intuit Quickbooks, click on the logo.