Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

Max Shaw and Brian Distelburger on Reinventing People Management with Windmill

May 20, 2026

Windmill co-founders Max Shaw and Brian Distelburger are building the AI-powered people platform for how companies develop and manage their talent. Founded alongside Mark Tanner, Windmill replaces the broken, once-a-year performance review with something faster, smarter, and that employees actually love. Since launching in November 2025, they've reached more than 100 customers including Kalshi, The Farmer's Dog, and Rho, and Inspired is so proud to have led their recent seed round. As AI make...

Cristóbal Valenzuela on How Runway's World Models Are Changing Storytelling

May 06, 2026

Runway founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela grew up in Chile before moving to New York to study at NYU's ITP program, where the seeds of Runway were planted. Since co-founding the company in 2018, he has built it into one of the leading generative video AI companies in the world, having raised more than $500M in funding and pioneered some of the first widely used text to video and video to video models. Runway is now pushing toward what Cristóbal calls world models, systems that can understan...

Dan Lorenc on Building Chainguard into a $3.5B Open Source Security Company

April 22, 2026

Chainguard founder and CEO Dan Lorenc is building the security layer the entire software industry should run on. After nearly a decade at Google working on open source infrastructure, Dan co-founded Chainguard in 2021 to solve a problem hiding in plain sight. 90 to 95 percent of the code powering the world's software is open source, free, and largely unsecured. Now leading a $3.5B+ company with more than 600 customers, Dan shares his unfiltered take on where software security, AI, and the fut...