On Wednesday evening at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who are building things you do not yet understand will explain what is coming. This is the final StrictlyVC event of 2025, and the lineup is truly impressive.
The event series has traveled the globe under the direction of TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in Washington D.C.; we spoke with the Prime Minister of Greece in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. The concept remains the same: to gather people who are working on genuinely important developments in a room before the rest of the world realizes they are important.
One of our favorite moments was in 2019, when Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI’s monetization strategy was essentially to build AGI and then ask it how to make money. Everyone laughed, but he was not joking.
This time we have Nicholas Kelez, a particle accelerator physicist who spent twenty years at the Department of Energy building things that should not be possible. He is now tackling the biggest problem in semiconductor manufacturing. Every advanced chip depends on four hundred million dollar machines that use lasers only one Dutch company knows how to make. It is more galling to some that Americans invented this technology and then sold it to Europe. Kelez is building the next generation of this technology in America using particle accelerator tech. It is as nerdy as it sounds, but more important than you might imagine.
Then there is Mina Fahmi, who created a ring that captures your whispered thoughts and turns them into text. Before you dismiss the idea, know that he and his cofounder Kirak Hong spent years at Meta working on this technology after their company was acquired. The Stream Ring is not trying to be your friend; it is trying to extend your brain. Their company, Sandbar, is backed by Toni Schneider, an operator who scaled WordPress to a billion visitors. Sandbar just emerged from stealth and might be onto something. Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, whose other hardware investments have included Peloton, Ring, and Fitbit, and he is also coming to Palo Alto next week.
We also have Max Hodak, the founder of Science Corp, a Time magazine cover subject, and an early cofounder of Neuralink. He has already restored vision to dozens of blind people with retinal implants. Now he is working on biohybrid brain-computer interfaces where chips seeded with stem cells grow into your brain tissue, allowing paralyzed people to control devices with their thoughts. He views this as just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, he believes the year 2035 will look wildly different from today, and he is happy to share how.
Finally, we are thrilled to welcome Chi-Hua Chien and Elizabeth Weil, two venture capitalists who backed companies like Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, and Coinbase before they were household names. Chien runs Goodwater Capital and believes Silicon Valley is completely misreading the AI moment as everyone piles into enterprise AI. Weil founded Scribble Ventures after stints at Andreessen Horowitz and Twitter, made over one hundred angel investments, and her first fund is showing four times returns. Her network is so good it is almost annoying. Both investors think the best consumer tech opportunities are the ones everyone is ignoring, and they will explain why.
PlayGround Global is hosting the event, along with general partner Pat Gelsinger, the former CEO of Intel. There will be drinks, delicious food, and merriment. Seating is limited, so if you want to come, you should act fast.
If you want to partner with the event series in 2026, please get in touch.