On Wednesday afternoon at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who build things you don’t understand yet will explain what’s coming. This is the last StrictlyVC event of 2025, and really, the lineup is ridiculous.
The series has bounced around the world under the auspices by TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in DC. we spoke with the Prime Minister of Greece in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. However, the idea is always the same: get people working on really important developments in a room before everyone knows they’re important.
Our favorite moment? In 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI’s monetization strategy was basically “build the AGI, then ask it how to monetize.” Everyone laughed. He wasn’t kidding.
This time we have Nicholas Kelez, a particle accelerator physicist who spent 20 years at the Department of Energy building things that shouldn’t be possible. Now it faces semiconductor manufacturing’s biggest problem: every advanced chip depends on $400 million machines that use lasers only one Dutch company knows how to build. (More sad for some: The Americans invented the technology and then sold it to Europe.) Kelez is building the next generation in America using particle accelerator technology. It’s as jarring as it sounds, but more important than you might think.
Then there’s Mina Fahmi, who made a ring that captures your whispered thoughts and turns them into text. Before you turn a blind eye, know that he and co-founder Kirak Hong spent years at Meta working on these things after their company was acquired. Stream Ring isn’t trying to be your friend, by the way—it’s trying to expand your brain. Backed by Toni Schneider, an operator who reduced WordPress to a billion visitors, Sandbar has just come out of stealth and may well be on to something. (Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, whose other hardware bets include Peloton, Ring and Fitbit. He’s also coming to Palo Alto next week.)
We have Max Hodak — founder of Science Corp, Time magazine theme coverand, earlier, the co-founder of Neuralink — who has already restored sight to dozens of blind people with retinal implants. Now he’s working on “biohybrid” brain-computer interfaces, where chips with stem cells are grown in your brain tissue so that paralyzed people can control devices with their thoughts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as Hodak sees it. In fact, he thinks 2035 will be very different from today, and he’s happy to share how.
Finally, we’re excited to welcome Chi-Hua Chien and Elizabeth Weil, two VCs who have backed Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, and Coinbase before they were household names. Chien runs Goodwater Capital and believes that Silicon Valley is completely misreading the AI moment while everyone is piling into business AI. Weil founded Scribble Ventures after stints at Andreessen Horowitz and Twitter, has made 100+ angel investments and has a 4x seed capital. Her network is so good it’s annoying. Both believe the best consumer tech opportunities are the ones everyone is ignoring, and they’ll explain why.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
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13-15 October 2026
PlayGround Global hosts, along with general partner Pat Gelsinger, the former CEO of Intel. There will be drinks, delicious food and fun; Places are limited, so if you want to come, act fast.
If you would like to work with the series in 2026, please get in touch.
