TechSurge: Deep Tech Podcast
Exploring topics at the intersection of emerging technology, geopolitics, and business.
Hosted by Celesta Capital.
The TechSurge: Deep Tech VC Podcast shares the latest insights directly from legendary Silicon Valley leaders, daring new founders, and visionary technologists.
Join us as we examine the factors shaping the next major technology cycle shift of AI, examine emerging global tech hubs, and analyze where investment dollars are flowing next.
Each discussion delves into the intersection of technology advancement, market dynamics, and the founder journey, offering insights into the vast opportunities and complex challenges ahead.
For entrepreneurs, investors, or anyone interested in where we're headed next, this is your guide to understanding the technologies and companies poised to transform the future.
Battle for the AI Data Center: Deep Dive on the Semiconductor Supercycle with Stacy Rasgon
Semiconductors have moved from the background of the technology stack to the center of the AI economy. What used to be a specialized industry discussed mostly by engineers and investors is now shaping the speed, cost, and strategic direction of modern computing.
In this episode of TechSurge, host Michael Marks speaks with Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst covering U.S. semiconductors and semiconductor capital equipment at Bernstein Research. Stacy has spent years analyzing the chip industry across cycles, but argues that the current moment feels different in scale: AI demand has created an unprecedented scramble for compute, memory pricing has surged, and companies across the stack are being forced to rethink capacity, architecture, and capital allocation.
The conversation explains the 4 different kinds of semiconductor cycles—supply, inventory, product, and demand — and why Stacy believes the industry is currently in a demand cycle of unusual magnitude. The discussion also unpacks the distinction between DRAM and NAND, why high-bandwidth memory is becoming strategically central to AI systems, and how the physical realities of wafer capacity and silicon area are constraining supply in ways the broader market often misses.
Stacy and Michael also discuss the hardware economics behind the current boom, with Michael pressing Stacy on why compute remains so scarce and how companies are improving performance through packaging and system design. Michael then moves the conversation beyond market headlines to the core business questions: who is actually paying for this compute, which use cases are generating real revenue, and whether AI spending is creating durable economic value or simply shifting costs elsewhere. Together, these questions highlight two of the episode's clearest insights: coding may be one of the earliest AI applications with meaningful willingness to pay, and inference, not training, is the real test of whether the current buildout becomes a lasting business or just another expensive wave of infrastructure.
Stacy explains the concentration of power among the major wafer fabrication equipment players, the rise of ASICs as a meaningful share of AI silicon, Broadcom's rapidly expanding AI opportunity, and the growing role of Chinese companies as new entrants, especially in memory and semiconductor equipment. Along the way, the conversation asks the defining question facing the sector: is this just another semiconductor upswing, or the first true supercycle the industry has seen? Stacy believes that this might be the biggest supercycle he has seen in his career.
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Competition, growth, tariffs, hacks, AI – what does it take to be an effective leader today? John Chambers, former CEO and Executive Chairman of Cisco and founder of JC2 Ventures, joins TechSurge host Sriram Viswanathan to share valuable wisdom on leading and growing businesses through times of significant change. As a leader who has transitioned from the c-suite to venture capital and now mentoring founders in emerging technology sectors, John has seen it all.
He shares lessons from his time leading one of the world’s most influential networking companies at Cisco (the most valuable company in the world at the time), revealing what he learned while growing it from a challenger networking company into a $50 billion tech powerhouse, sharing how Cisco achieved and maintained its market leadership, particularly his bold M&A strategies.
John offers hard‑won insights on navigating major technology shifts in AI, cloud, security, and more. Today’s founders and executives will find practical frameworks, real‑world war stories, and counterintuitive advice to help survive and thrive in an era of continual disruption.
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for exclusive insights and updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits.
MIT President Emeritus Dr. Rafael Reif joins host Michael Marks for a discussion about the state of U.S. competitiveness in technology, university research funding, current immigration policy, and more. Reif explains why universities remain the innovation engines of economies, educating top talent and generating the foundational research that powers emerging tech and creates new industries. He candidly assesses U.S.-China competition, warns that Chinese research output is rapidly outpacing our own, and urges renewed federal investment.
The discussion explores how restrictive immigration policies threaten the flow of global talent into the U.S and his own impression of current policies as an immigrant from Venezuela himself. As a TSMC board member, Reif also touches on the strategic need for domestic semiconductor fabs, Intel’s path forward, and TSMC’s edge in advancing cutting-edge nodes. Lastly, he addresses gaps in the venture capital funding space and why he created MIT’s The Engine incubator model to fund “tough tech” startups, which helped launch breakthroughs like Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for exclusive insights and updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits.
Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft, joins TechSurge host Sriram Viswanathan to offer a rare glimpse into the strategic playbook of one of the world’s most powerful tech companies. Bobby shares how the company navigates today’s biggest technology paradigm shifts, placing bets with trillion-dollar implications. Touching on Microsoft’s AI strategy, OpenAI partnership, quantum computing, its approach to acquisitions, and much more, this candid and wide-ranging conversation is not to be missed.
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for exclusive insights and updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits.
In this episode of TechSurge, host Sriram Viswanathan sits down with Charlie Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO of Pure Storage, to discuss the evolution and future of data storage in the digital age. Charlie shares insights from his career spanning his pivotal role in Cisco's success as a networking pioneer, to his leadership in transforming Pure Storage into a leader in innovative storage solutions.
They explore the evolution of data center infrastructure, and the critical role of storage architecture in enabling AI and cloud technologies. Charlie also explains how Pure Storage's software-driven approach is creating new efficiencies and opportunities for enterprises, offering a compelling vision for a unified "data cloud" that breaks down data silos and unlocks new insights.
This episode delves into the intersections of networking, compute, storage, and AI, providing an essential perspective for anyone interested in the future of technology infrastructure.
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for exclusive insights and updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits.
Many in venture capital and biopharma are anointing artificial intelligence the savior of drug discovery—but what can AI actually do?
In this eye-opening episode, Michael Marks sits down with Mike Nohaile, CEO of Prellis Biologics, to explore the hype versus reality in AI-enabled drug discovery. Mike details why, despite significant breakthroughs like AlphaFold and recent Nobel Prize win for computational protein design, fully AI-generated medicines still present challenges. He also discusses why we urgently need more effective medicines and details Prellis’ unique system which combines laser printed human organoids and an externalized human immune system with AI, enabling the discovery of fully human antibodies.
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for exclusive insights and updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits.
Artificial intelligence is evolving at an unprecedented pace—what does that mean for the future of technology, venture capital, business, and even our understanding of ourselves?
Award-winning journalist and writer Anil Ananthaswamy joins us for our latest episode to discuss his latest book Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI.
Anil helps us explore the journey and many breakthroughs that have propelled machine learning from simple perceptrons to the sophisticated algorithms shaping today’s AI revolution, powering GPT and other models. The discussion aims to demystify some of the underlying math that powers modern machine learning to help everyone grasp this technology impacting our lives, even if your last math class was in high school.
Anil walks us through the power of scaling laws, the shift from training to inference optimization, and the debate among AI’s pioneers about the road to AGI—should we be concerned, or are we still missing key pieces of the puzzle? The conversation also delves into AI’s philosophical implications—could understanding how machines learn help us better understand ourselves? And what challenges remain before AI systems can truly operate with agency?
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for exclusive insights and updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits.
Celesta Capital is a global deep tech venture firm enabling visionary founders at the forefront of scientific and engineering breakthroughs.
Celesta's team has spent decades founding, leading, and scaling global technology businesses, collectively founding more than 40 companies. We understand how to partner with founders to help turn prototypes into powerhouses.
From semiconductors and systems to breakthrough biology, we seek out the physics‑defying, code‑rewriting breakthroughs that will power the next decade of technology advancement.
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