On Wednesday evening at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who are building things you don't understand yet will explain what's coming. This is the final StrictlyVC event of 2025, and truly, the lineup is ridiculous. The series has traveled around the globe under the auspices of TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in D.C.; we talked to Greece's prime minister in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. The concept is always the same, though: bring together people who are working on genuinely important developments in a smaller setting, before everyone else figures out they're important. One of our favorite moments was when, in 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI's monetization strategy was basically 'build AGI, then ask it how to make money.' Everyone laughed. He wasn't joking. This time we've got Nicholas Kelez, a particle accelerator physicist who spent 20 years at the Department of Energy building things that...
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