Future Nexus

San Francisco has never been particularly shy about declaring itself the center of the future and at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, held at Moscone West, ambitious founders, venture capitalists, and even robots gathered around the ever-present question of whether AI is a revolution, a bubble (or… both). But between the main-stage interviews and startup pitches, the conversations were getting surprisingly personal.

After two decades building consumer products at Google, YouTube and Meta, Circle’s product and technology chief argues the winning stablecoin will simply be the one easiest one to use. Nikhil Chandhok built AR glasses at Meta, launched YouTube on the first iPhone, and co-founded Google Blog Search. Now he’s at Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin (the second largest globally by market capitalization).

While artificial intelligence has hit financial services like a freight train, American Express VP of Agentic Partnerships and Strategy Hannah Bozian said that by working with key industry stakeholders and learning from past technology waves, financial services firms can be well-prepared for what comes next.

QED’s Victoria Zuo on underwriting agentic payments, building financial services for AI, and why she still hasn’t connected her own bank account to ChatGPT. QED Investors partner Victoria Zuo is, without doubt, an artificial intelligence enthusiast. But for now at least, the San Francisco-based fintech and e-commerce investor has reservations about sharing personal financial information with generic horizontal AI agents. “It comes down to trust.

When the subject is machine autonomy, the first thing that most people picture is a Waymo threading through downtown San Francisco traffic. But if you put that same stack in a remote California almond orchard, it stops working almost immediately. Dense tree canopies block the GPS signal, harvest throws dust thick enough to coat a camera lens within minutes, and the ground is rutted and strewn with branches and irrigation lines, shaking hard enough to work electronics loose.

Koah Labs co-founder and CEO Nic Baird shares what he’s learned building the “AdSense for AI” Back in the day, the virality of a new app called for a celebration. In the age of AI, it is becoming a nightmare. The reason? The brute economics of AI. Unlike traditional apps that largely involved hosting and infrastructure costs —  translating to a mere few cents per new user —  AI services also carry inference bills, or the cost of running the models that serve answers to the users.

Wing VC’s Zach DeWitt has been investing in AI since before ChatGPT. Now he’s watching for the companies that can endure when today’s euphoria fades. Artificial intelligence is seemingly omnipresent in 2026. But for Wing Venture Capital partner Zach DeWitt, it’s actually been a key focus for the better part of a decade. Since joining the venture firm in 2017, DeWitt has backed startups including Dust, 1mind, AirOps and Standard Practice.

Lessons from 14 years in venture on how personal connections can become enduring founder–investor partnerships. A couple of years ago, Anders Ranum was navigating through the north island of New Zealand on Google Street View in a race against the clock. The Sapphire Ventures partner wasn’t scouting out his next vacation. Rather, he was playing a virtual geography game against Igor Marinelli, the founder and CEO of Tractian, an industrial AI platform.

In a world racing to frontier intelligence, there remains value in building for highly specialized tasks. For over thirty years, using the web has meant the same ritual: open a site, click through it, and leave with an answer. And while everything else on the internet has changed, this core ritual hasn’t. Now, Dr. Devi Parikh wants an AI to do it for you.

Allium co-founder and CEO Ethan Chan envisions his company becoming the Bloomberg of cryptocurrency. And with a deep background in artificial intelligence and machine learning, he’s well on his way to making that vision a reality. Chan studied AI and Computer Science at Stanford before serving as director of engineering at Primer AI, a provider of real-time machine learning and data infrastructure systems for enterprise and government clients. In 2021, Chan and Cheng Han Lee co-founded Allium.