Who’s that girl?
I was at HumanX in San Francisco 2 weeks ago, and I have thoughts.
Firstly - when presented with the opportunity to meet sporting icons like Nico Rosberg and Russell Westbrook like I was, be prepared. You’re welcome.
But more importantly, I moderated two panels. The first was with the teams from Tala and TOP, two companies doing serious work at the intersection of financial access and infrastructure. The second was a conversation with Olivier Pomel and Eléonore Crespo.
Eléonore is someone I want everyone to know about. She is building with a kind of intensity that does not translate in a recap.
Olivier said something I keep coming back to:
“This is an arms race. We are sitting on top, and next week we can be kicked out.”
That is not fear talking - that is someone who has earned the right to say it.
I also sat down with Xuedong Huang, CTO of Zoom. He said something that reframed the entire week for me:
“Work does not fall apart in meetings. It falls apart after them.”
That is the gap. And Zoom is betting the company on closing it.
XD has been thinking about this longer than most. He was the architect behind Bing. He worked alongside Bill Gates. He has been building speech recognition systems since before most AI founders knew what a transformer was.
Zoom is calling 2026 the Year of Completion: a deliberate shift from communication to execution. Their federated AI architecture runs proprietary models alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini simultaneously, selecting the best output for every task. Internal benchmarks show up to 20x cost savings in production. They launched an MCP integration with Anthropic's Claude the same week I was there.
The arms race framing kept coming up all week. XD is not running from it. He is building infrastructure for whoever wins.
Before I get into, I want to tell you about something I've been building quietly on the side.
I've put together a curated list of the AI companies I think are worth watching right now. Not the ones getting press. The ones I'm actually paying attention to.
It goes out exclusively to paid subscribers. If you've been thinking about upgrading, this is the week to do it.
Okay. San Francisco.
💡 5 Takeaways from HumanX
1. Trust is the product now, not the capability.
Every demo I saw was impressive. What's missing is the governance layer. The companies building explainability, audit trails, and real guardrails are going to matter more than the ones chasing benchmarks. This is where I'm looking.
2. The federated model thesis deserves more attention.
Running OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini in parallel and having them challenge each other's outputs is not a workaround. It is a real architectural bet. The cost reduction potential is significant, and data privacy as a feature rather than a footnote is the unlock that makes enterprises actually move.
3. We are earlier than people think, but not for the reason they think.
We’re at a Netscape moment, but people are still arguing about the browser.
Multiple founders said this independently of each other across two days. It felt true every time. The platforms being built right now will look as obvious in ten years as search did in 1998.
4. Wealth transfer is the most underestimated problem in fintech right now.
I had a conversation with Alexandra Mysoor, CEO of Alix, that reframed the entire estate settlement space for me. Trillions of dollars are trapped or lost in probate every year, disproportionately in communities of color. Women are the primary caregivers and executors. Alix is building the rails for what happens to wealth after death. The great wealth transfer is not coming. It is already happening.
5. The best founder story I heard had nothing to do with AI.
Russell Karim of SourceEazy grew up in Bangladesh, built adaptive denim for people with prosthetics, went on Shark Tank, and is now building physical product infrastructure for brands and creators. $4M GMV. Capital efficient. No hype. The kind of founder that gets overlooked until they can't be ignored anymore.
💼Work with me!
If you want to get in front of an engaged audience of founders, operators, and investors, I'd love to hear from you.
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📍 Where I'll be
San Francisco | 27 - 30 April | Stripe Sessions
This photo isn’t related to content - I just like it.
🎙Content Recap
✍🏽 I can’t keep up with what I’ve written on Forbes. But I’m officially in the top 1% of global contributors.
🎧Last week on Money Memories, I spoke with the founders of the New Orleans-based group mental wellness platform Cabana. This is the first in a 3-part series of conversations I recorded on-site at the 3rd Coast Venture Summit, more founder stories coming soon.
🔗 Other Interesting Reads & Listens
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Till next week,
Ilona