Summation with Auren Hoffman

Jake Stauch is the co-founder and CEO of Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform. Serval was founded in 2024 and has already raised over $125M across rounds led by Redpoint and Sequoia at a $1B+ valuation. Before Serval, Jake spent five years on the product team at Verkada and earlier founded NeuroPlus, a brain-sensing hardware company that made video games for kids with ADHD.
In this episode of Summation, Jake and Auren discuss:
Why Anthropic has added more ARR in the past few months than ServiceNow has in the past 20 years
The "forward deployed engineer" hire and why he recruits future founders instead of solutions engineers
Why talent density is the only remaining moat in the age of AI
The Silicon Valley collusion around not poaching each other's employees
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Jake Stauch on X at @jakeserval

Dmitry Shevelenko is Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. He previously co-founded Tortoise, a robotics and commerce automation startup and held business development roles at Uber, LinkedIn, and Meta. He also serves on the board of Lazard. 
In this episode of Summation, Dmitry and Auren discuss:
Why CEOs and executives are Perplexity Computer’s biggest power users and what that says about who wins the AI era
Scaling Perplexity past $500M ARR with only 34% headcount growth
The $34.5B Chrome bid and the TikTok bid before it
Why AI's biggest constraint right now is adoption and not capability
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Dmitry Shevelenko on X at @dmitry140

Ben Miller is the co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, an alternative asset management platform that gives individual investors access to private real estate, private credit, and venture capital. In March 2026, he listed the Fundrise Innovation Fund on the NYSE under the ticker VCX, one of the first publicly traded venture capital funds. VCX gives retail investors direct exposure to private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and SpaceX. The fund manages over $650 million and has over 100,000 individual investors. Ben is a returning Summation guest.
In this episode of Summation, Ben and Auren discuss:
Why VCX traded up 700% on day one while Bill Ackman's fund traded down the next week
Why ETFs fall apart for private markets and closed-end funds are the right structure
How AI will reshape real estate by 2031 and which markets get hit hardest
The hidden truth that SoHo, Wynwood, and Miami Beach were all built by the same person
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ben Miller on X at @benmillerise

Ralph Goff is a 35-year veteran of the CIA, having served as a six-time Chief of Station across Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia. During his career, he also held the roles of Chief of Operations for Europe and Eurasia and Chief of the CIA's National Resources Division. Since leaving government, he advises on national security issues and speaks publicly on intelligence, geopolitics, and great power competition.
In this episode of Summation, Ralph and Auren discuss:
Why blackmail almost never works in espionage and ideology still does
Who is actually dying for Putin
Why China is the biggest winner of the Ukraine war
How technological surveillance transformed CIA tradecraft 
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ralph Goff on Linkedin

Glenn Youngkin was the 74th Governor of Virginia. Before politics, he spent nearly 25 years at The Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, where he rose to co-CEO. During his four-year term, Virginia generated $10B in surplus revenue, delivered $9B in tax relief, attracted $156B in capital investment, and became one of the first states in the country to mandate cell-phone-free classrooms.
In this episode of Summation, Glenn and Auren discuss:
Why every Virginia state agency got OKRs and how it transformed a 110,000-person government
Why decommissioning baseload power was one of the dumbest decisions ever made 
How Loudoun County gets more than 25% of its tax base from data centers
How a startup used AI to cut more Virginia regulations in 7 months than 3 years of manual work
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Glenn Youngkin on X at @GlennYoungkin