Is AI venture capital in a bubble, or are we just in the steepest growth curve anyone’s ever seen?

At StrictlyVC Los Angeles 2026, TechCrunch’s Editor-in-Chief Connie Loizos sat down with Chung Xu, Partner at Basis Set, and Carter Reum, co-founder of M13, to cut through the noise. They cover…

– Why this cycle is different from cloud and mobile, and why it isn’t
– The ARR inflation problem VCs helped create
– How to find defensible companies when OpenAI and Anthropic are coming for every vertical
– What the SpaceX liquidity wave means for LA’s tech ecosystem

Ethan Thornton started Mach Industries at 16, dropped out of MIT, and is now running six simultaneous defense programs: jet engines, cruise missiles, a surface-to-air missile system, and a new 40-foot VTOL strike aircraft just contracted by the U.S. Navy.

At StrictlyVC Los Angeles 2026, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos sat down with the Mach Industries founder and CEO for a rare on-stage conversation about what it actually takes to build a serious defense hardware company from scratch — and why the U.S. has no choice but to move faster.

Much of American-caught fish is processed overseas, and often in China, before it comes back to the U.S. Shinkei wants to change that with robotics, computer vision, and a vertically integrated supply chain built from scratch.

At StrictlyVC Los Angeles 2026, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos sat down with Saif Khawaja, founder and CEO of Shinkei, and Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund to talk about one of the most unexpected bets in venture capital right now.

They cover everything from the Japanese fish-killing technique that became a startup thesis, why American fish is now being imported into Japanese fish markets for the first time ever, and how Founders Fund thinks about contrarian bets in food and agriculture.