The future will be explained to you in Palo Alto

On Wednesday night at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart individuals who build things you don’t yet understand will explain what’s coming. This is the last StrictlyVC event of 2025 and the lineup is truly absurd.

The series went around the world under the slogan auspices from TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in DC; we talked to the Prime Minister of Greece in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. But the concept is all the time the same: get people together in a room who are working on really essential projects before everyone else realizes they are essential.

Our favorite moment? In 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC audience that OpenAI’s monetization strategy is simply to “build AGI and then ask how to make money.” Everyone laughed. He wasn’t joking.

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 the biggest problem in semiconductor production: Each advanced chip depends on $400 million value of machinery that uses lasers that only one Dutch company can produce. (More annoying for some: 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 weird because it sounds, but more essential than you can imagine.

There’s also Mina Fahmi, who created a ring that records your whispered thoughts and turns them into text. Before you roll your eyes, know that he and co-founder Kirak Hong spent years at Meta working on these things after their company was acquired. By the way, Stream Ring is not trying to be your friend – it’s trying to expand your brain. Backed by Toni Schneider, the operator who scaled WordPress to a billion visitors, Sandbar has just come out of hiding and may be onto something. (Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, whose other hardware bets include Peloton, Ring and Fitbit; he will also come to Palo Alto next week.)

We have Max Hodak – founding father of Science Corp, Time magazine cover storyand previously co-founder of Neuralink, who has already restored the sight of dozens of blind people using retinal implants. Now he’s working on “biohybrid” brain-computer interfaces, in which chips containing stem cells grow into brain tissue so that paralyzed people can control devices with their thoughts. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, as Hodak sees it. He believes that the yr 2035 will look completely different than today and is completely satisfied to share how to make it occur.

Finally, we’re completely satisfied to welcome Chi-Hua Chien and Elizabeth Weil, two VCs who backed Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, and Coinbase before they became household names. Chien runs Goodwater Capital and believes that Silicon Valley is completely misreading the AI ​​moment while everyone is adopting enterprise AI. Weil founded Scribble Ventures after working at Andreessen Horowitz and Twitter, has raised greater than 100 angel investors and has the first fund to generate a 4x return. Her network is so good it’s annoying. They each imagine that the best opportunities in consumer technology are the ones that everybody is ignoring, and they’ll explain why.

PlayGround Global is co-hosting with general partner Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel. There will be drinks, delicious food and good fun; Space is limited, so if you want to come, act quickly.

If you would love to collaborate with the series in 2026, please contact us.