The future will be explained to you in Palo Alto

on Wednesday evening At PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who build things you don’t understand yet will show you what’s to come. This is the final StrictlyVC event of 2025, and the line-up is truly ridiculous.

The series has been bounced around the themed world nursing From TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in DC. We spoke to the Prime Minister of Greece in Athens; Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio Hotel in San Francisco. The concept is always the same: get people working on really important developments in the room before everyone else realizes they’re important.

Our favorite moment? In 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI’s monetization strategy was essentially “building AGI, then asking it how to make money.” Everyone laughed. He wasn’t kidding.

This time we have Nicholas Kelles, a particle accelerator physicist who spent 20 years at the Department of Energy building things that shouldn’t be possible. Now he’s tackling the biggest problem facing semiconductor manufacturing: Every advanced chip relies on $400 million worth of laser-powered machines that only one Dutch company knows how to make. (More infuriating to some is that the Americans invented this technology and then sold it to Europe.) Kelley’s is building America’s next generation using particle accelerator technology. It’s as strange as it sounds but it’s more important than you might imagine.

Then there is Mina Fahmy who created a ring that captures your whispered thoughts and… Converts them to text. Before you roll your eyes, know that he and his co-founder Kirak Hong spent years at Meta working on these things after their company was acquired. By the way, Stream Ring isn’t trying to be your friend, it’s trying to expand your mind. Backed by Tony Schneider, the operator who scaled WordPress to 1 billion visitors, Sandbar has just come out of stealth and may be on to something. (Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, whose other bets on devices include Peloton, Ring, and Fitbit; he’s also coming to Palo Alto next week.)

We have Max Hudak – founder of Science Corp., Time magazine Cover subjectand earlier, one of the founders of Neuralink – which has already restored vision to dozens of blind people who had retinal implants. He is now working on “biohybrid” brain-computer interfaces where chips grown with stem cells grow into your brain tissue so that paralyzed people can control devices with their thoughts. This is just the tip of the iceberg, says Hudak. In fact, he thinks 2035 will look very different than it does today, and he’s happy to share that.

Finally, we’re excited to welcome Chi-Hua Chien and Elizabeth Weil, two venture capitalists who backed Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, and Coinbase before they became household names. Chien runs Goodwater Capital and believes Silicon Valley is completely misreading the AI ​​moment while everyone else is piling into enterprise AI. Will founded Scribble Ventures after stints at Andreessen Horowitz and Twitter, has made over 100 angel investments, and has the first fund to achieve 4x returns. Its network is so good it’s annoying. They both believe that the best consumer technology opportunities are the ones that everyone ignores, and they’ll explain why.

Hosted by PlayGround Global, along with General Partner Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel. There will be drinks, delicious food and merriment; Seating is limited, so if you would like to attend, Act quickly.

If you are interested in partnering with the chain in 2026, get in touch.