In Episode 6 of Exponential, Dylan Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Pond, joins us to unpack a fast-emerging frontier: helping early-stage AI startups launch, scale, and find product-market fit through a new kind of internet-native capital platform.

At a time when AI tooling is accelerating and the barriers to launching new products are dropping, Pond is building infrastructure for what comes next — connecting early-stage founders with capital, distribution, and feedback loops in real time.

“Pond is an early-stage AI startup marketplace,” Dylan explained. “We help AI projects scale and get funded. Everything else—DevOps, infra, go-to-market—follows from that.”

As the Web3 space matures, projects are rethinking how to grow and sustain communities. In Episode 5 of Exponential, Zach Heerwagen, co-founder and CEO of Snag, joined us to explore how “questing” is emerging as a powerful mechanism for aligning users, incentives, and long-term network health.

Zach defines questing as Web3’s take on loyalty. In traditional business models, loyalty is mostly transactional — based on how much a customer spends. 

In contrast, Web3 broadens the definition of meaningful engagement.

“Questing is really Web3’s term for loyalty,” Zach explained. “There are three core contribution types: financial, social, and time-based.” 

That means rewards can be tied not just to token purchases or NFT mints, but also to social engagement or participation in network activities like compute contribution — something Nexus is actively building toward.

In the fourth episode of Exponential, Samuel Judson — head of zkVM engineering at Nexus — joins the show to unpack the science, strategy, and systems thinking behind zero-knowledge cryptography. 

Sam brings a rare combination of perspectives: part mathematician, part systems engineer, and deeply attuned to the social and regulatory dimensions of cryptographic technology. 

This primer-style episode traces the evolution of zero-knowledge proofs, the motivation for building the Nexus zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), and why ZK is becoming foundational to how trust is engineered into software systems.

In Episode 3 of Exponential, we sat down with Nexus Chief Strategy Officer Alex Fowler for a conversation about the forces shaping the next era of the internet.

With a career that spans bioethics, early cryptographic policy, and consumer technology, Alex brings a rare combination of philosophical grounding and technical experience to one of the most urgent questions of our time: as machines begin acting on our behalf, who can we trust?

The rapid expansion of AI systems has ignited a fundamental question: How do humans stay meaningfully involved as intelligent software grows more capable, autonomous, and ubiquitous?

The second episode of Exponential: A Nexus Podcast features Jordan Gray, co-founder of PublicAI, a startup working to ensure human participation remains central to the future of artificial intelligence. 

In a wide-ranging discussion, Gray outlines how PublicAI is developing infrastructure to support distributed human intelligence — a system designed to complement large-scale AI with real-time human oversight, input, and accountability.

Learn more about this episode at blog.nexus.xyz.

What if you could hear the future being built—one idea, one insight, one proof at a time?

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Exponential, a new Nexus podcast about the people, code, and capital shaping the frontier of technology. Each episode features conversations with founders, engineers, and thinkers working at the edge of what’s possible—from cryptography and AI to systems design and economic coordination.

Our mission is simple: to surface the deep motivations and bold architectures behind tomorrow’s most important systems.

To open the series, we sat down with Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin for a wide-ranging conversation on the origins of the company, the pursuit of verifiable computation, and the foundational vision driving Nexus forward.