In this episode we talk with Ali Partovi about lessons learned identifying, evaluating and accelerating talent across a long and storied career in Silicon Valley. We talk about his founder experience, great investments he's made, and his new accelerator Neo (which is something like YC 2.0). You can learn more about Neo here, and follow Ali to on Twitter to connect with him.

Michael Martocci is the Founder and CEO of SwagUp, a platform that makes it easy to create, automate and distribute swag globally. In this episode we talk about: Lessons learned bootstrapping SwagUp to over $100M in revenueAdvice on managing cash flow and how Michael approached forecastingMichael's vision and SwagUp's unique position to reimagine the entire end to end workflow from the customer experience to the complex supply chain. This was a really fun conversation. We hope yo...

Michael Stoppelman is the former SVP of Engineering at Yelp and profilic angel investor in 300+ startups. In early 2007, he left Google to join Yelp, and helped scale Yelp Engineering from 6 to 600 engineers. In this conversation we talked about Michael's lessons learnt building and scaling a world class engineering team- from hiring to motivating to leading world class teams. We also talk about lessons learned from early days at Google, and his approach to angel investing where he has an e...

Cameron Peake is a Partner at Restive Ventures, an early stage fintech focused VC fund. Previously Cameron was co-founder and CEO of Azlo, a company that provided online banking services for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers, and quickly grew to almost $1B in deposits. Cameron understands fintech from multiple vantage points: building for international markets, building one of the first neobanks in the US, and now funding early stage companies. In this conversation we di...

Semil is the founder and GP at Haystack, an early-stage VC firm with $450M+ AUM. He’s an investor in 200+ companies including DoorDash, Instacart, Hashicorp, Figma and more. In this conversation we discuss the current funding environment, Semil's approach to venture capital and making early investments, and his advice for founders starting a company and fundraising in today's market. This was a really fun discussion and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did! Links Follow Semil on Twitt...

Beerud Sheth in a rare founder who’s started not one, but two unicorns — UpWork and Gupshup. He’s seen a lot of pivotal moments in SV history — having started Upwork in 1998 before the dot com bubble, and Gupshup in 2005, three years before the GFC. Today, Upwork is a publicly traded company valued at $1.5B and Gupshup is a unicorn, last valued at $1.4B+ as of April 2021. In this conversation, we talk with Beerud about his experiences building UpWork and Gupshup across almost 25 yea...

Wei is the founder of Clipboard Health. Clipboard Health makes it really easy for nurses to search for jobs based on what they're qualified for and what they care about, and apply with one click. Over the last few years, Clipboard has have experienced rapid growth and become the leading marketplace for healthcare profesional to find on-demand shifts at healthcare institutions. Clipboard has raised $94M from top VCs that include YC, Initialized, Caffeinated Capaital, and Sequoia, most recently...

In this conversation, we speak with James McGillicuddy. James was previously Head of Strategy at Carta ($7.4B valuation) where he brought products like CartaX to market, and before that was the COO and early team member of SourceGraph — a universal code search tool company valued at $2.6B. He was also early at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce for $390M) and played college football for Stanford under Jim Harbaugh. Some highlights: how James approached decisions on which early stage comp...

Bryan is the founder of LayerZero Labs, which is an omnichain interoperability protocol that unites decentralized applications across disparate blockchains, enabling cross-chain applications. LayerZero Labs is building foundational crypto infrastructure. Since being founded in 2021, the company has raised over $140M from top investors including Sequoia Capital, a16z, Tiger Global, Coinbase, Cristies, Paypal, Polygon and Dapper Labs. In this conversation, we discuss the LayerZero founding st...

Kunal Shah is a serial entrepreneur and founder of two iconic Indian companies -- CRED and Freecharge. CRED is an Indian consumer fintech that is valued at over $6.4B, and Freecharge was one of the earliest Indian fintechs that sold to Snapdeal in 2015 for $450M. Kunal has an unmatched track record not just as a founder, but also as an investor and thinker. He’s a prolific angel investor in over 200+ Indian startups and shares insightful, bite-sized philosophical wisdom on Twitt...

Andrew is the founder of Skiff, which is a privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted, wallet native workspace with email, file sharing, and collaboration. Skiff has hundreds of thousands of users and is part of a broader trend towards privacy-first and decentralization. Skiff is backed by Sequoia Capital who led their seed and Series A. In this conversation we discuss Andrew’s path to building privacy-first products, approach to finding Product-Market Fit with Skiff, and the various tarde-offs and ...

Keith is a Silicon Valley legend— an accomplished operator, founder, and investor. He started his career as an early executive at PayPal, LinkedIn and Square, before going on to co-found companies like OpenDoor (which IPO’d in 2020) and OpenStore. He’s currently a General Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder/CEO of OpenStore. Along the way, he’s made incredible investments as an angel and VC in companies like DoorDash, Affirm, Stripe, YouTube, Palantir, Airbnb, Ramp, Faire, and many more. ...

Abhishek is the co-founder and CEO of AppSmith, which is a low-code tool that helps developers build dashboards and admin panels very quickly. AppSmith has raised over $50M from investors like Accel, Bessemer, Insight and Prasanna Sankar (previously on the pod!). In this conversation we primarily explore how Abhishek is building AppSmith with the open source community as a core part of the product, business model and long term strategy. We also talk about Abhishek’s incredible journey (and le...

Andy is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Eco a new kind of wallet to spend, send and save money. It combines traditional banking rails with crypto rails to deliver a new kind of experience that creates more value for customers in an easy to access way. Before Eco Andy was a co-founder at CoinList which is another very successful crypto project. In this conversation we talk about the founding stories behind both CoinList and Eco. We discuss Andy’s lessons from navigating the last crypto winter...

Adrian is a serial entrepreneur and currently Founder/CEO of Forward. Forward is a healthcare startup that provides a membership-based healthcare system. Forward is redesigning the way healthcare is delivered using cutting edge technology that has long been neglected such as sensors, mobile, and AI. Before Forward Adrian founded AI startup Wavii which was acquired by Google, where he subsequently led Special Projects for the entire company. In this episode we dive into Adrian’s entrepreneuria...

Dhruv is the Co-Founder/CEO of ShipBob, the leading global omni-fulfillment platform designed to provide small and medium-sized businesses access to best-in-class supply chain and fulfillment capabilities. Dhruv started ShipBob in his Chicago apartment in 2014, and has scaled it today to over 7,000 e-commerce brands, with fulfillment centers around the world. They’ve raised $300m+ and have achieved a $1B valuation. In this episode we discuss: Going from an Electrical Engineering PhD to build...

Nikhil is a managing director at Insight Partners, where he invests in software, fintech, and crypto companies. In this conversation we talk about the recent market corrections, investment landscape in the Indian startup ecosystem, and some of the opportunity areas Nikhil is most excited about across software/SaaS, fintech and crypto. In this episode we discuss: Market context and Insight Partners as a fund What’s your perspective on the current market backdrop?What are the areas Insigh...

Paul Yacoubian is the founder/CEO of Copy.AI. CopyAI is building AI-powered tools that help users automatically generate marketing copy in seconds, and has over 1M registered users. Paul is an extremely positive and inspiring presence on twitter and has mastered the art of building in public. In this conversation we talk about Copy.AI, Paul’s approach to building in public, and the future of AI powered tools. In this episode we discuss: Building in public How did you get started building...