"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 bounced 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."
"Our favorite moment? 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 shouldn't be possible. Now he's tackling semiconductor manufacturing's biggest problem: every advanced chip depends on $400 million machines that use lasers only one Dutch company knows how to make."
An end-of-year StrictlyVC gathering at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto assembles entrepreneurs advancing next-generation technologies. The series has travelled globally with TechCrunch, including stops in Washington D.C., Athens, and San Francisco. The mission is to surface genuinely important developments before mainstream adoption. Memorable moments include Sam Altman's 2019 line about building AGI first, then finding monetization. Nicholas Kelez applies particle-accelerator techniques to remake U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment and reduce dependence on expensive foreign laser machines. Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong developed the Stream Ring, a whispered-thought-to-text wearable born from their Meta work and now commercialized via Sandbar.
#semiconductor-manufacturing #particle-accelerator-technology #brain-computer-interface #startup-venture-events
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