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 Tw…

By Ashish Kundra and Zane Salim

By Ashish Kundra and Zane Salim

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 revenue Advice on managing cash flow and how Michael approached forecasting Michael's vision and SwagUp's unique position to reimagine…

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 …

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: buildin…

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 compan…

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 …

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 shift…

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 $…

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 Seq…

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…

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 conversat…

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…

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 o…

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 …

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 wh…

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…

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 episo…

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 appro…

Nolan is one of the best HR leaders in the world for high growth startups. He’s currently the Founder/CEO at Continuum, which is a talent marketplace that helps startups hire the best people for key functional needs, and helps executives work with multiple companies at once. Before that he was the Chief People Officer at Carta helping it grow to a …

Sairee is a serial entrepreneur and Founder/CEO or Sheroes. Sheroes is a social network with over 15M women. It helps empower them with a broad set of tools, community, jobs, entrepreneurial opportunities and financial services. It’s profitable and has quickly grown to several million in top line revenue. Sairee is also the founder of Mahila Money …

Kedric is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded and teaches the DeFi Masterclass, a hands-on workshop that has helped 100s onboard into the world of DeFi, learn how to research crypto opportunities, and make a passive income. Before DeFi masterclass Kedric was co-founder of Unblockable which builds crypto and NFT/sports prediction games. He also co-…

Sean is founder and CEO of HealthTap which makes primary care affordable and easy to access for all Americans. In this episode we discuss: HealthTap’s virtual primary care clinic Affordable solution for all Americans regardless of whether they have insurance How it works from user experience to business model Types of conditions and issues that can…

Mari has held a variety of incredible roles in Silicon Valley as a product veteran, company builder, and now board member. Mari started her career in startups. She was one of the first 30 people at Intuit and helped grow the company grow over 10 years into a public company with thousands of employees. At Intuit, Mari went from being a Product Manag…

Dmitry is the founder of Tortoise ($11m raised), which is building remote-controlled mobile vending machines, which are the world’s first “smart stores”. It takes less than 15 seconds to complete a transaction with frictionless tap-to-pay user experience and Tortoise is piloting these robots in at least a dozen cities around the world. In this epis…

Don Stalter is a Partner at Global Founders Capital (GFC) and has an incredible portfolio of investments including Brex, Deel, CultureAmp, Checkr, FamPay and many more. Before transitioning into an investment role, Don was a co-founder of CityDeal which he sold to Groupon, and subsequently led International at both Groupon and Airbnb. In this conve…

Qiao Wang is the co-founder of Alliance DAO, which is the leading web3 accelerator and builder community. In terms of impact, Alliance has helped accelerate 10% of the top crypto projects by market cap. Their most cohort had 30 companies building web3 products across DeFi, Social, NFTs and Gaming. Before Alliance, Qiao was the Head of Product at Me…

In this wide-ranging conversation, we chat with Blake about his experiences starting out his professional career as a musician, and all the key experiences and trends that led him to founding the Goldfinch decentralized lending protocol (recent $25m Series A from a16z, and $500M DAO). This is an incredibly rich conversation where we explore so many…

In this conversation we chat about Linda’s journey from a traditional consulting career to startup rocket ships (Snap and Faire), product management, and entrepreneurship. We start out talking about the early days at Faire and key growth unlocks that helped it quickly grow from $50m to $2.5b, and now a $12b valuation. Linda was an early product lea…

In this conversation we chat about so many key moments in Sanders journey cofounding, building and scaling Thumbtack into a $3.2b business with 900+ employees over 13 years. We start with the founding story and weekly brainstorm calls that led to the company. We then talk about the four key phases of building a successful marketplace startup, from …

In this conversation with Alanna we talked about pivotal moments in Alanna’s journey from working on emerging markets research on Wall St, to founding a YC backed marketplace startup, to growth marketing leader at Afterpay. Alanna has a broad and unique perspective on startups, fintech and crypto, and in this conversation we cover a wide range of t…

Summary In this conversation with Vrinda we cover a wide range of topics including how the current credit system works, why women are more likely to have negative credit experiences, and how Sequin solves that inequity gap with a new debit card for women that helps build credit. We also talk about the process of launching a new card based product a…

Summary: Conversation with Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Sila. Prior to Sila, he was co-founder of Bank Simple, which was the first US neobank and early fintech pioneer. For many it was one of the most exciting and groundbreaking products of the last decade. We talk about the Bank Simple story, banking and fintech landscape, and his new company Sila…

Summary: Conversation with Paul Sawaya, co-founder of Human Interest, $1b company that makes it easy for SMBs to provide 401k savings plans to their employees, and helps employees save for their retirement. We cover so many interesting topics in this conversation across the Human Interest story, numerous lessons learnt, and technologies he's most e…

Conversation with Jim Brusstar, co-founder of Treasury Prime, which is building APIs to connect a network of banks to fintechs. They make it easy for fintechs to partner with the right bank, and reduce the time to market for a neo bank or embedded banking product from years to months. We cover so many interesting topics in this conversation — start…

Conversation with Sam Corcos, CEO of Levels health, who is a prolific serial entrepreneur and building one of the most exciting companies in healthcare today. Levels is a groundbreaking product that helps people track their blood glucose in real-time to understand and improve their metabolic health. We talk about key lessons Sam learnt from his fir…

Conversation with Brian Ma - who interned at Zillow when it was 15 people, joined as employee #32, and went on to become a prolific serial entrepreneur. We talk about his entrepreneurial journey founding Decide.com, Weave, Divvy Homes ($2b unicorn), and most recently, a SE Asia focused Seed fund and accelerator. Some highlights from the conversatio…

Conversation with Bo Jiang - founder and CEO of Lithic, which offers an API for card issuing. We talk about Bo's incredible journey starting out as a consumer focussed company (Privacy.com), and pivoting to Lithic, which is an easy to use API for card issuing. Today, Lithic is one of the fastest growing company in Fintech and recently announced a S…

Conversation with Prasanna Sankar - whose most recent company, Rippling, went from zero to $1.35b valuation in less than 4yrs. We talk about his experiences working on startups for over 10 years, finding and scaling success at Rippling, and why he believes crypto will be a transformative new economic engine. Episode Highlights: Getting started as a…

Interview with Jonathan Wegener -- one of the most innovative product thinkers we know. We talk about his experience founding Timehop, working on Evan Spiegel's design team at Snap, and what he's working on next ("active" audio-based products). Episode Highlights: How Jonathan got started building products How he got into startups and started build…