The Peel with Turner Novak

01:40:13

From Nearly Bankrupt to $5B+ Revenue, with Ring...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/10/01

Jamie Siminoff built the first WiFi video doorbell in his garage, got rejected on Shark Tank, and nearly went bankrupt "at least four times" while growing Ring into one of the largest consumer hardware businesses in the world.We talk about the $1.15B sale to Amazon, coming back to lead Ring after leaving post-exit, and what he learned having a fresh set of eyes on the business.We also get into the near death stories, like Christmas the company almost died from $1M of bricked doorbells, the

en

01:25:16

How Gusto Built a $9.5B Company with Co-founder Tomer...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/09/24

Tomer London is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto.We go deep on how Gusto builds product, from obsessing over customers to shipping Gusto Cofounder with AI in eight weeks. We also get into what AI is doing to small businesses, surviving COVID, the manual world of payroll before software, what his dad's 40-year clothing store taught him, starting Gusto out of YC, and how Gusto thinks about making acquisitions now that it’s crossed $1B ARR.Thanks to this episode's

en

01:36:53

Building a Venture Firm Like a Product | Jeff Morris...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/09/17

Jeff Morris Jr is the founder and Managing Partner of Chapter One. Previously, he was employee 50 at Tinder and started Chapter One from his desk before quitting to go full-time on investing.We talk about running a venture firm more like a product team, running 50 experiments every fund cycle, why Sequoia doing $60 million Seeds has killed round labels, why the best firms only pick right 4-7% percent of the time, running the world's smallest accelerator, branding a venture firm, when to pivot,

en

01:42:09

How Databricks Went $1M to $7B+ ARR in 10 Years | Ron...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/09/10

Ron Gabrisko might have the best sales seat in software. He joined Databricks as CRO at less than $1M in revenue, and built it into a $7B+ ARR business over the next decade.Almost no one has built a revenue engine this big this fast, so he's the right person to walk through how you actually do it, from the first 40 reps to selling AI into the enterprise today.We talk through Databricks' early decisions, like killing seat-based pricing as usage took off, using a16z to land the first big logos, the

en

01:38:40

How Athletes Get Into the Top VC Funds | Ryan Nece,...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/09/03

Ryan Nece runs Next Legacy, a $4 billion fund of funds that connects athletes and philanthropists with the top venture capital firms in the world.Ryan is the only player in NFL history to win a Super Bowl as a rookie and go 0-16 in his final season. His dad, Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott, started one of the first athlete-backed venture funds with Joe Montana in the late '90s.Ryan rebuilt that playbook a generation later, so almost nobody is better positioned to explain the similarities between pro

en

01:46:57

Leaving Sequoia to Bet on Ohio: Why America is the...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/08/27

Chris is the Co-Founder and CEO of Drive Capital. Prior to Drive, Chris was a Partner at Sequoia Capital where he helped launch the firm’s first growth fund. Chris left Sequoia in 2012 to start Drive in Ohio on a single bet: the best companies in America are getting built outside Silicon Valley (and almost nobody's funding them). Thirteen years later, Drive has handed back over $1 billion to its investors in a market where most funds can't return a dollar.We talk chasing $2B outcomes instead

en

01:27:31

Brex’s 1st Employee On Thinking Like a Founder |...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/08/24

Michael Tannenbaum is the CEO of Figure, the blockchain lending company he took public in 2025.He was employee #1 at Brex, and before that ran the mortgage business at SoFi. Mike Cagney, who founded both SoFi and Figure, pulled him back to take Figure public in 2025.This is a conversation on how to think and act like a founder, the framework he uses to run Figure, plus a look at how a lending business works under the hood, why he ran the broken mortgage business at SoFi to prove himself, the time

en

01:21:30

Re-founding a Company for the AI Era | Shensi Ding,...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/08/14

Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, the connective infrastructure that plugs into every tool.Most founders get one founding story. Merge has had three. Merge started in 2020 building boring integrations, watched its first customers die off, then rebuilt itself twice for the AI era. Not many founders talk this honestly about tearing up their company, and there’s a lot of lessons for others trying to do the same.We get into why AI is useless without integrations, the night-shift build of

en

01:43:13

The 18x Midas Lister Betting $3B on AI (and calling...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/08/07

Navin Chaddha is the Managing Partner at Mayfield. He’s made the Forbes Midas List 18 times, and thinks a lot of the AI revenue everyone's chasing right now is fake.Mayfield is a 56-year-old firm that backs founders at the paper-and-pencil stage. They’re investing $3 billion into AI, but Navin warns the market is overcapitalized by a factor of 10x.We get into what’s actually going on with the $1B+ funding rounds, the $25 trillion of value AI has to justify, the dangers of FOMO, how he separates

en

02:09:07

Healthcare Skipped The Internet And Went Straight To...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/07/30

Alamin Uddin is the co-founder and CEO of NexHealth.Today, NexHealth’s healthcare infrastructure serves 89 million patients. But at one point, the company had $4,000 in the bank and a maxed-out Amex card.We talk about why 75% of dentists still keep a server in the closet, how healthcare skipped the internet, cloud, and mobile and went straight to AI, why most healthcare systems have no API, funding the company with side hustles, the $36k customer pre-pay that saved the business, how 81% of new AI

en

01:25:44

Inside Solana's Plan to Replace Wall Street | Anatoly...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/07/23

Anatoly Yakovenko is the co-founder of Solana, the fastest scaled blockchain in the world.We start by talking about how non-US residents were trading SpaceX on Solana pre-IPO, and which parlayed into the last 130 years of US financial markets.We then get into how Solana is removing eight layers of middlemen that make-up the legacy financial system, whether you actually need to use blockchain to do this, the 4am inspiration to start Solana, how Solana was 10,000x faster than Bitcoin, why a16z passed

en

01:28:55

The Hidden Layer Every AI Agent Runs On | Tony...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/07/17

Tony Holdstock-Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Inngest, the durable execution platform that quietly powers your favorite AI agents.We get into why agents work in a demo and die in production, building their own cloud to get 20x lower cost, growing 35x after AWS and Cloudflare copied them, growing a dev tools company without a personal brand or Twitter account, why he thinks evals today are like “asking the criminal if they committed the crime”, and the thing they built to score 100% of your

en

01:28:06

Rebuilding a $600M Company From Scratch | Peter...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/07/10

Peter Rahal is the Founder and CEO of David. Before David, he built RXBAR in his parents' basement with $10k and sold it to Kellogg for $600M.We get into why he basically rebuilt the same company again, how buying his own ingredient supplier made a food business venture-backable, why RXBAR's paleo positioning was a trap, the EPG fat technology behind David, how GLP-1’s have changed diet trends forever, selling cans of fish as a marketing weapon, the lawsuit that got him 120M impressions in a

en

01:45:13

Inside Goldman’s $22B Bet on Venture Capital | Hans...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/07/03

Hans Swildens started Industry Ventures in 2000, and this is his first podcast since selling it to Goldman Sachs in 2026.Hans has been buying venture secondaries longer than almost anyone, and the combined business is one of the largest VC portfolios in the world: 525 firms, 1,600 funds, and over $22B in capital commitments.We get into why he sold to Goldman, the barbell market quietly killing middle-stage venture, how VC's are manufacturing their own exits, why most seed funds without a real angle

en

01:42:07

The Past, Present, and Future of Pre-Seed | Charles...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/06/25

Charles Hudson started Precursor Ventures in 2015, and helped create pre-seed as a category.Ten years and hundreds of Day 0 checks later, few investors have backed as many first-time founders, making him the perfect person to talk through the state of the category today.We talk about why this is the hardest moment for pre-seed/seed investing he can remember, why sitting out of bubbles can be more dangerous than joining, how he hands his junior team real money to make their own bets, and urgency and

en

01:48:24

Inside Elbow Grease, NYC's Hands-On Accelerator | Dan...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/06/18

Dan Teran is the co-founder Gutter Capital, a concentrated seed fund in NYC, and Elbow Grease, the accelerator that puts 15 startups in one building and helps build their teams for them.Gutter just announced a $75M Fund III and opened applications for the second Elbow Grease batch (apply below by July 31st)We get into starting an accelerator when there’s already a hundred of them, why Gutter prefers very concentrated portfolios, what it was actually like selling Managed by Q to WeWork, why raising a

en

01:56:48

How AI Actually Changed Sales | Sam Blond, Monaco

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/06/11

Sam Blond is the Co-founder and CEO of Monaco, the revenue engine for startups.Sam is one of the best sales operators in tech. He spent four years as CRO at Brex, where he helped scale it to a ~$12B valuation, ran sales at Zenefits before that, and got his start at EchoSign.If there’s a modern GTM playbook, Sam helped write it. Our conversation walks through how AI has rewritten a big chunk of it. But most importantly, we talk about what hasn’t changed.We get into the sales work AI is now better at

en

02:01:20

Inside the First Quant-Driven VC Fund | Nuno...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/06/05

Nuno Goncalves Pedro is the Founder and Managing Partner at Chamaeleon. He won't describe it this way, but I'd call Chamaeleon something like "The RenTech of VC."Chamaeleon is built around its proprietary data platform, Mantis, which borrows tools like factor analysis from public-market investors and operates more like a quant hedge fund than a traditional venture firm.We talk through a bunch of data that cuts against the common narrative in venture, including why repeat founders

en

01:36:35

15 Hot Takes on VC and AI from the 2026 Allocate...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/05/29

I just attended Allocate’s Beyond Summit in Deer Valley Utah. It was a peek into what the top VC's and LP’s are thinking about right now.Allocate asked me to record an episode of the show, live from the conference.So I asked everyone “What’s your hottest take on the VC market today?”Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episodeNumeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.comFlex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0%

en

01:13:32

Building Got Easy. This Startup Solves What to Build...

The Peel with Turner Novak ·

2026/05/24

Alfred Wallforss is the Co-founder of Listen Labs, the AI customer research company.Companies like Microsoft use Listen to run AI-powered customer interviews, and Alfred talks about how they first landed them as a customer at a pitch competition.We talk why startups should pursue enterprise customers early on, why 85% of survey answers are random clicks, how AI is changing the $140B market research industry, leveraging VC’s for customer intros, how to stand out when recruiting as a startup, and

en

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

The Automated Daily

TrendTeller

My Weird Prompts

Daniel Rosehill

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

LessWrong

脈報

思思主播