%20-%20Podcast%20Cover.png)
The Flywheel by M13
The Flywheel is a podcast for founders, operators and investors building through structural change. M13 partners sit down with the founders reshaping AI, enterprise software, healthcare, commerce, and consumer technology to unpack the hard calls and inflection points as they build category-defining companies. Each conversation is designed to help listeners better understand where the world is changing, what great founders see before others do, and how enduring companies are built.
The Flywheel by M13
What Comes After LLMs? Sam Pasupalak, Skyfall AI
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What comes after large language models? Skyfall AI founder Sam Pasupalak thinks the next breakthrough is AI that can run a business autonomously.
On this episode of The Flywheel, M13 Partner Morgan Blumberg sits down with Sam Pasupalak, co-founder and CEO of Skyfall AI. Before Skyfall, Sam co-founded Maluuba, one of the first deep-learning labs for natural language understanding, acquired by Microsoft in 2017. He's spent 15+ years at the frontier of AI and he has a clear, differentiated view of where it goes next.
If you're a founder, operator, or engineer trying to understand the future of AI after the LLM era, this is your map. Sam breaks down why the next wave isn't smarter co-pilots, but autonomous businesses—and what that means for anyone building right now.
In this episode:
- What "world models" and continual learning are, and why Sam thinks they are the real breakthrough
- Sam’s hot take on why so many AI "wrapper" companies will struggle to survive
- How early we actually are in the AI cycle (think Yahoo and AOL, before Google and Amazon)
- Why 20 million software engineers and a billion white-collar workers signal a shift bigger than the Industrial Revolution
- The founder traits it takes to build through a platform shift—and the sacrifice Sam says it demands
Chapters:
00:00 — The future isn't AI co-pilots
00:40 — From Maluuba to Skyfall: who is Sam Pasupalak?
07:45 — Why Skyfall takes a different path than the LLM wrappers
09:50 — World models and continual learning, explained
19:17 — The coffee-shop test: why an LLM can't run a business
22:47 — The hot take: why AI wrapper companies will struggle
24:21 — How early we are: the Yahoos and AOLs vs. the Googles and Amazons
38:13 — Founder traits for this era: build a research-first company
39:46 — Hot takes on OpenAI, Anthropic, Altman and Amodei
48:43 — Being both a warrior and a monk
Follow The Flywheel on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for more conversations with the founders building at AI's frontier. Learn more about Skyfall AI at skyfall.ai and M13 at m13.co.