The future is explained to you in Palo Alto | TechCrunch

Wednesday evening at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who build things you don’t understand yet will explain what’s going to happen. This is the last StrictlyVC event of 2025, and the line-up is absolutely ridiculous.

The series has traveled around the world under the name auspices from TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in DC; we spoke to the Greek Prime Minister in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. However, the concept is always the same: get people working on really important developments into a room before everyone else realizes they are important.

Our favorite moment? In 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC audience that OpenAI’s monetization strategy was essentially to “build AGI and then ask it how to make money.” 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 he’s tackling semiconductor manufacturing’s biggest problem: Every advanced chip depends on $400 million machines that use lasers that only one Dutch company can make. (Even worse 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 nerdy as it sounds, but more important than you might think.

Then there’s Mina Fahmi, who created a ring that captures your whispered thoughts and converts them into text. Before you roll your eyes, know that he and co-founder Kirak Hong worked on this stuff at Meta for years after their company was acquired. The Stream Ring isn’t trying to be your friend, by the way; he’s trying to expand your brain. Backed by Toni Schneider, an operator who scaled WordPress to a billion visitors, Sandbar has just emerged from stealth and could 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 cover subjectand previously co-founder of Neuralink – which has already restored sight to dozens of blind people with retinal implants. Now he is working on ‘biohybrid’ brain-computer interfaces in which chips studded with stem cells grow into 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 look very different from today, and he’s happy to explain how.

Finally, we’re happy to welcome Chi-Hua Chien and Elizabeth Weil, two venture capitalists who backed Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, and Coinbase before they were household names. Chien runs Goodwater Capital and thinks Silicon Valley is completely misreading the AI ​​moment as everyone jumps into business AI. Weil founded Scribble Ventures after stints at Andreessen Horowitz and Twitter, made over 100 angel investments and has an initial fund with 4x returns. Her network is so good it’s annoying. Both think the best opportunities in consumer technology are the ones everyone else is ignoring, and they’ll explain why.

PlayGround Global hosts, along with general partner Pat Gelsinger, the former CEO of Intel. There will be drinks, delicious food and merriment; The number of seats is limited, so if you want to come, be quick.

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