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PODCAST

Spotlight On

Spotlight On is a podcast about how companies are built, from the people doing the building. We take you behind the scenes to hear from founders and builders about what they did, what they learned… and what they’ll never do again. This series is produced by Accel, a global venture capital firm. Learn more at Accel.com/SpotlightOn.

business

All Episodes

00:45:37

Corelight’s Brian Dye on What He’s Learned About Scaling

Spotlight On ·

2025/04/08

Corelight’s story is unlike that of any other successful growth-stage network detection company. Founded by academics, it now counts all six branches of the U.S. military, and some of the world’s largest banks and utilities companies as customers. And then there’s the fact that it started off as an open-source tool, a rarity in cybersecurity. All of this could have made stepping in as CEO a difficult job. But CEO Brian Dye has evolved and successfully scaled Corelight while thoughtfully maintaining

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00:46:49

Graphite’s Merrill Lutsky on Revolutionizing Code...

Spotlight On ·

2025/04/01

In this episode of Spotlight On, Accel’s Christine Esserman sits down with Merrill Lutsky, co-founder and CEO of Graphite, to discuss how his company is redefining code review for the AI era. Merrill shares how he and his co-founders have fostered an unconventional yet deeply effective approach to building trust through weekly Monday dinners and co-founder “therapy” sessions. They discuss the unique challenges of building a developer tools platform inspired by Meta’s engineering culture and how

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00:34:27

G2’s Godard Abel on How the “Yelp for Software” is...

Spotlight On ·

2025/03/25

In the past two decades, the number of software tools the B2B buyer can shop between has exploded. While that abundance has made it more likely that a buyer can find a tool that solves their problem, it also complicates the buying journey. Discovering and vetting the right tools is a job in and of itself. Godard Abel founded G2 to simplify that process. He knew firsthand from his experience founding five previous startups that a “Yelp for software” was desperately needed. Building a company and

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00:46:49

Speak CEO Connor Zwick on Building the Next Great...

Spotlight On ·

2025/03/18

Think about how you learned your native language: trying out words, listening to your parents, speaking small fragments, until one day you were talking. Now, think about how you were taught languages in school – the grammar, the emphasis on writing and reading first – and it becomes clear why so few students achieve fluency in a second language. Enter Speak. The language learning app uses conversational AI to replicate the experience of practicing a new language with a native speaker. It’s an

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00:32:01

Nebius’s Arkady Volozh on What it Takes to Build...

Spotlight On ·

2025/03/11

Nebius is unique among companies that call themselves startups. As it currently exists, is less than a year old; it’s also listed on NASDAQ as a publicly traded company with billions in cash on the balance sheet. Its hundreds of engineers have worked together for years building out digital infrastructure, but have been rapidly redeployed to focus on what founder Arkady Volozh has determined is the next generational opportunity: the cloud infrastructure needed to drive the AI transformation. Accel’s

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00:37:16

It’s Time to Build a Better Internet, with Tailscale...

Spotlight On ·

2025/03/04

One thing we like about working with repeat founders is that they’re decisive about how they do and do not want to build their company. Take Avery Pennarun, CEO of Tailscale. Even before he knew what Tailscale would be, he knew he wanted to: build products as simply as possible, avoid selling software only at the enterprise level, focus on winning small segments before expanding, and not waste time “innovating” executive team structure. Clearly, it’s working: the company is redefining the network

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00:36:41

How Decagon Dominated the B2B Agentic AI Market in...

Spotlight On ·

2025/02/25

How do you win in a market where everyone’s building at the same time? According to Decagon Co-founder and CEO Jesse Zhang, it’s all about focus and pace. We’re willing to take his word for it: in just two years, he and his team have built a leader in the enterprise agentic AI market, with a valuation of $650 million and already trusted by customers like Notion, Webflow, Substack, and Duolingo. In this conversation with Accel partner (and Jesse’s former Niantic colleague) Ivan Zhou, Jesse shares how

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00:35:20

How Laravel’s Taylor Otwell Builds Products and...

Spotlight On ·

2025/02/18

If you’ve ever been to a Laracon, you’d be mistaken for thinking you’d just walked into a music festival, not a PHP framework conference. Taylor Otwell founded Laravel in his native Little Rock, Arkansas, and has spent most of the past 14 years bootstrapping a company known for building exceptional product experiences alongside a community of over 1 million people. On this episode of Spotlight On, Taylor joins Accel’s Miles Clements to discuss building outside of Silicon Valley, why software is an

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00:51:00

What VSCO’s Joel Flory Has Learned About Leadership,...

Spotlight On ·

2025/02/11

Welcome back to Season 3 of Spotlight On! This season, we’re digging into the parts of founding and building companies that people don’t often see: the firsts, the crucible moments, and the key decision points that come after that initial founding phase. Great companies are built one decision at a time, so we’re asking the people doing the building: How do you make the decisions that matter? What are the tradeoffs? And would you do it the same way again? We start this season with Joel Flory, the

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00:00:48

Spotlight On Season 3 Trailer

Spotlight On ·

2025/02/07

Welcome to Season 3 of Spotlight On: a podcast about how companies are built, from the people doing the building.When we talk about startups, we talk a lot about the big milestones: founding, funding, and going public. We talk less about what happens in between: the firsts, the mistakes, and the messy, exhilarating decisions the people building these companies have to make every day. This is a podcast that takes you behind the scenes to hear from founders and builders about what they did, what they

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00:42:37

How Sentry's David Cramer Turned an Open Source Side...

Spotlight On ·

2024/11/11

David Cramer, co-founder and CPO of Sentry, joins host Dan Levine to share the unconventional journey of turning an Open Source side project into a $100 million ARR business now valued at over $3 billion. From his early days as a teenage gamer to becoming a key player in the Django community, David recounts how a simple error-logging tool evolved into an essential platform used by over 100,000 organizations worldwide. In this conversation, David also discusses the Open Source Pledge. Recognizing

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00:45:22

How Linear’s Karri Saarinen is Redefining What Scale...

Spotlight On ·

2024/11/04

Most Y Combinator graduates and Forbes’ Top 50 AI companies use Linear’s project management suite to build their software. It's no accident that this purpose-built tool is beloved by engineers for its quality and ease of use. But, the company’s path to success hasn’t followed the same hyper-growth playbook its founders experienced in their previous roles at Airbnb, Uber, and Coinbase—and that’s entirely by design. In this bonus episode of Spotlight On Season 2, Karri Saarinen, CEO and Co-founder of

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00:40:44

1Password’s Jeff Shiner on balancing B2B and B2C...

Spotlight On ·

2024/06/27

1Password has been cash flow positive since day one, bootstrapping for 14 years before securing the largest Series A round in Accel’s history. What started as a personal project developed by two couples has grown into an identity security solution used by millions of individual consumers and their families and more than 150,000 businesses worldwide. In this episode of Spotlight On, CEO Jeff Shiner joins Accel’s Arun Mathew to discuss the company’s patient growth journey and how they balance the

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00:50:01

Wonder’s Marc Lore on blending vision and execution |...

Spotlight On ·

2024/06/20

Today, Marc Lore is synonymous with eCommerce. He is known for translating his bold visions into trailblazing companies like Diapers.com and Jet.com. As a serial entrepreneur, there are consistencies in Marc’s companies: they were born out of his own needs and focused on how we consume goods. But perhaps most notably – they are ideas so daring that some would call him crazy. His latest endeavor, Wonder, is no different. In this episode of Spotlight On, Marc joins Accel’s Sameer Gandhi to reflect

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00:36:27

Chainalysis’ Jackie Burns Koven on building trust in...

Spotlight On ·

2024/06/13

With any new technology, malicious actors exploit vulnerabilities and create uncertainty. But there are tools investigators, regulators, and cybersecurity professionals can use to fight back. In this episode, Chainalysis’ Jackie Burns Koven, Head of Cyber Threat Intelligence, shares how to mitigate risks and build trust in emerging spaces, drawing from her work across the cryptocurrency and blockchain landscape.Since Chainalysis launched in 2014, the platform has been used to solve some of the

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00:40:29

Netskope’s Sanjay Beri on aspiring to be an iconic...

Spotlight On ·

2024/06/06

In 2012, Netskope CEO and Founder Sanjay Beri was convinced that the security industry was on the brink of a massive transformation. Through countless conversations with CEOs, CIOs, and CISOs, he identified a significant shift towards the cloud, presenting a unique opportunity to redefine data network security for this new era. Thus, Netskope was born, starting small but with grand ambitions.Netskope’s early days exemplify the power of a clear vision and controlled growth. They began with specific

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00:35:05

ConductorOne’s Alex Bovee on the critical ingredients...

Spotlight On ·

2024/05/30

Alex Bovee sees three critical ingredients to building a high-growth startup: a founding team with innate grit for entrepreneurship, a good idea, and great timing. ConductorOne has all three. In this episode of Spotlight On, Alex shares his founding journey and encourages entrepreneurs to focus on building unique solutions that address unmet market needs.ConductorOne is an access control solution that helps companies secure identity across their cloud and on-premises apps and infrastructure. In

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00:33:52

Monte Carlo’s Barr Moses on creating a playbook for a...

Spotlight On ·

2024/05/23

In 2018, Barr Moses was looking to start a company but wasn't sure which idea to pursue. She decided to work on three different startup ideas in parallel to see which one gained the most traction with customers.One of those ideas was Monte Carlo, a solution to address the challenges around data reliability that Barr had experienced throughout her career— dealing with broken data products, wasted time, lost trust, and firefighting data quality issues. As Barr met with potential customers, it

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00:34:20

Gamma’s Jon Noronha on how early-stage startups can...

Spotlight On ·

2024/05/16

In a landscape dominated by incumbent players, Gamma takes a bold approach: instead of trying to be better than the existing players, they aim to be an entirely different tech company. They've reimagined the very essence of presentation tools and the creative possibilities they offer. In this episode of Spotlight On, Gamma’s Co-Founder, Jon Noronha, delves into the team’s journey, from an early acquisition at a former startup to somewhat coincidentally building a product that dovetails perfectly

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00:28:13

Remote’s Marcelo Lebre on the future of the global...

Spotlight On ·

2024/05/09

Since joining forces in 2019 to tackle the complexities of global employment, founders Marcelo Lebre and Job van der Voort navigated their startup, Remote, and its customers through a series of challenges: a global pandemic, the rapid emergence of distributed workforces, and subsequent economic volatility. In this episode of Spotlight On, Marcelo and Accel’s Miles Clements discuss the effectiveness of global remote team structures despite obstacles. Marcelo has taken no shortcuts in understanding

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61 results

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