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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

00:29:38

Bonus Episode: n8n’s Jan Oberhauser on building the...

Spotlight On ·

2025/10/09

Jan Oberhauser was spending too much time on tasks that weren’t joyful. A former visual effects artist turned programmer, he lost hours each day rebuilding the same code instead of solving new problems. In 2019, Jan founded the German workflow automation startup n8n to end the drudgery. Now, hundreds of thousands of developers and thousands of enterprises use n8n’s automation platform to make work more efficient, more productive, and yes, more joyful. Today, we announced that Accel is leading n8n’s

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00:27:34

VBSR 1.07: Education's Big Transformation

Spotlight On ·

2025/10/06

Sara and Vas discuss what AI means for teachers, new graduates, and the broader education system– and whether it’s changing the investment landscape for edtech.This Week’s Takeaways1. Forward-thinking educators won’t play the AI “cat and mouse” game. They’ll put automation to work instead, tailoring lessons and giving students more hands-on reps.2. Developing the next generation of knowledge workers will mean getting creative. As the entry-level job market tightens, companies should invest in

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00:24:00

VBSR 1.06: AI Leaves the Chatbox

Spotlight On ·

2025/09/09

This week, Vas and Sara talk about why the browser is suddenly the hottest space on the internet, how security will adapt to AI agents, and what makes software defensible.This Week’s TakeawaysThe browser isn’t dead; it’s changing. AI agents are taking over to-dos like booking Vas’s pickleball court, but comfort, preference, and technical limitations have kept us from outsourcing everything – for now. Now, products like Perplexity’s Comet, with a user experience built for tandem browsing mode, hint

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00:26:12

Figma IPO, GPT-5, and a Q+A with Kerry Wang

Spotlight On ·

2025/08/20

This week, we’re talking to Accel’s newest partner, Kerry Wang, about her journey from founder to investor, advice for finding the right early-stage partners, and what we can learn from Figma’s “12-year overnight success.”This Week’s TakeawaysReturn to first principles during uncertainty. Figma’s journey to IPO was anything but linear, with a bumpy road to product-market fit and a near-acquisition by Adobe halted by regulators. But instead of letting the blocked deal become a “switch flip” that

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00:13:17

VBSR 1.04: Lovable, talent wars, and the changing...

Spotlight On ·

2025/08/05

Sara and Vas talk about Lovable’s record-breaking sprint to $100 million ARR and the growth of startups that boost human creativity. They also explore how the AI talent wars are reshaping industry narratives and why early-stage founders shouldn’t lose sleep over nine-figure compensation offers.This Week’s Three Takeaways1. Tools that amplify self-expression are seeing explosive growth. Lovable reached $100 million ARR in just eight months, while Gamma recently topped 50 million users with a team

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00:26:25

Bonus: Anton Osika on how Lovable’s creating a world...

Spotlight On ·

2025/07/17

Accel just led Lovable’s Series A, the largest in Stockholm's history. On the eve of the announcement, Lovable CEO and Co-Founder Anton Osika sat down with Accel’s Ben Fletcher and Zhenya Loginov to talk about the startup’s remarkable growth, building from Stockholm, and what’s next for the small but mighty team.They also revisit Anton’s origins and how they shaped Lovable’s remarkable mission to unlock creativity for 99% of the world's population that doesn't code. Anton’s always been a

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00:29:18

VBSR 1.03: Scale, Circle, and Exits 101

Spotlight On ·

2025/07/10

Sara and Vas talk about Scale’s partnership with Meta, Circle’s IPO, and what founders can learn from the companies' early journeys. They also answer common questions they get from founders about exits: the different options, how to build partnerships that can lead to an acquisition, and why a founder’s job doesn’t end at the closing table or opening bell.This Week’s Five Takeaways1. Most people don’t actually want fully automated AI products right now. Technological capability is one thing, but

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00:41:46

Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside on translating bold...

Spotlight On ·

2025/07/01

Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside’s career reads like a tour through the world’s most complex operational challenges: opening new markets at pre-IPO Google, wrangling billion-dollar losses at Motorola, guiding Impossible Foods from scrappy upstart to mainstream staple. At every turn, he’s proven himself as a singular operator, able to translate bold visions into strong teams, scaled business, and real results, no matter the industry or product. In this episode of Spotlight On, Accel’s Sameer Gandhi

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00:30:06

Veza’s Tarun Thakur on excelling at go-to-market at...

Spotlight On ·

2025/06/24

According to Veza co-founder and CEO Tarun Thakur, you don’t just found a startup once. Instead, you found and refound it many times over: as you achieve product-market fit, as you land your first investment, as you scale from a team of three to 200 and beyond. In this episode of Spotlight On, Tarun sits down with Accel’s Eric Wolford to discuss how this theory of continuous reinvention has shaped the identity security company’s growth—and his own. He explores how working with a coach has

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00:29:28

VBSR 1.02: The geography advantage + customer...

Spotlight On ·

2025/06/19

Sara and Vas debrief on Vas’s recent trip to India, how founders use geography to their advantage, and what tech can learn from LVMH about taste. They also share some advice for founders on pitching their stories to investors. This Week’s Five TakeawaysWhere you build can shape how you win. On his recent visit to India, Vas noticed a verve for the messy work of systems integration and solutions engineering he hadn’t seen elsewhere. Different geographies impart strategic advantages, whether it’s

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00:35:00

True Anomaly’s Even Rogers on failing forward to...

Spotlight On ·

2025/06/17

Most of us think of space as a future possibility. The reality is that space is our present: everything from our maps apps, bank transactions, and national defense depends on operations currently floating in orbit around us. That strategic importance also makes space vulnerable. Enter True Anomaly: the defense startup is dedicated to protecting the United States and its allies’ activity in space. In this episode of Spotlight On, Accel’s Jonathan Turner sat down with True Anomaly Co-Founder and CEO

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00:27:37

CrowdStrike’s George Kurtz on the security arms race

Spotlight On ·

2025/06/10

AI has made advanced cybersecurity methods more widely available—and put sophisticated cyberattack techniques into the hands of threat actors everywhere. CrowdStrike has spent the last decade and a half reshaping the security landscape, and now, the company continues to reimagine what state-of-the-art looks like when both the good guys and the bad actors are learning what these powerful tools can do for them.In this special episode of Spotlight On, recorded live at Accel during the RSA Conference,

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00:37:58

Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch on bold visions for the...

Spotlight On ·

2025/06/03

Vercel founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch still remembers the thrill of loading new software onto his family’s computer as a kid living in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This was the Windows ’95 era, when software came on CDs and floppy disks. He’d already begun to wonder: what if this whole process of distribution and deployment was much, much simpler? This question would drive his career and, ultimately, lead him to found Vercel.In this episode of Spotlight On, Guillermo Rauch joins Accel’s Dan

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00:50:16

*Live from Accel’s 2025 People Summit* Behind the...

Spotlight On ·

2025/05/27

The Netflix culture deck has been viewed over 17 million times and covered by the New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Sheryl Sandberg called it one of the most important documents to come out of Silicon Valley. Detractors called it brutal (which, Patty and Jessica reveal during our interview, was by design). Why did Netflix spend 10 years and thousands of hours creating this document? And what can founders learn about molding culture and building teams from the people behind it?In this

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00:37:06

VBSR 1.01: RTO is back (again) + data moats dry up +...

Spotlight On ·

2025/05/22

Welcome to a Very Brief Short Report: (kinda) short listens on the biggest ideas in tech right now, from Accel’s Vas Natarajan and Sara Ittelson. This week, Sara and Vas try to make sense of the “chaotic change” happening as they share observations from Accel’s latest portfolio review. They discuss why teams that collaborate in-office are thriving, how data isn’t the moat it once was, and what it means when everyone’s vibecoding (Sara and Vas’s teen nephew included).This Week’s Five TakeawaysThe

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00:43:42

Tines’s Eoin Hinchy on rejecting the playbooks

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2025/05/20

Before Eoin Hinchy founded automation platform Tines, he spent more than a decade on security teams at DocuSign, Deloitte, and eBay, where he saw firsthand the time eaten away by important but repetitive–and not-exactly-thrilling—tasks. He and Tines co-founder Thomas Kinsella decided to do something about it, launching Tines from a cramped office in Dublin. Now, Tines saves their 400+ global customers a mind-boggling amount of time, performing more than one billion automated actions each week.In

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00:46:23

Supabase’s Paul Copplestone on the difference between...

Spotlight On ·

2025/05/13

From the beginning, the backend-as-a-service platform Supabase has done things a little differently. Building on Postgres instead of a proprietary engine. Putting data portability at the core of their product. Going all-in on global hiring from day one. And yes, naming themselves after a Nicki Minaj song because they thought it would make a funny meme. The meme has stuck, but Supabase has scaled. In this episode of Spotlight On, Supabase CEO and co-founder Paul Copplestone joins Accel’s Arun Mathew

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00:40:04

*S3 Feature* Transcend’s Kate Parker on putting data...

Spotlight On ·

2025/04/29

While we take a quick mid-season break, we're re-sharing some of our favorite episodes from previous seasons. This week, we're revisiting our conversation with Transcend President Kate Parker. Recent developments in artificial intelligence have sparked an outcry for control over personal data. While regulators, politicians, and the business community have been thinking about how to improve data privacy, there is still much more work to do. Kate Parker, Transcend’s President, will discuss the

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01:03:21

CrowdStrike’s George Kurtz on building a generational...

Spotlight On ·

2025/04/22

While we take a quick mid-season break, we're re-sharing some of our favorite episodes from previous seasons. In honor of RSA later this month, we wanted to revisit some of the conversations we've had with cybersecurity leaders, starting with CrowdStrike's George Kurtz. Since its inception in 2011, CrowdStrike has had a profound impact on the security landscape. Yet, despite their wildly successful 2019 IPO, there is no finish line for CEO and Co-Founder George Kurtz. With each passing

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00:40:48

*RSA Preview* 1Password’s Jeff Shiner on balancing...

Spotlight On ·

2025/04/15

While we take a quick mid-season break, we're re-sharing some of our favorite episodes from previous seasons. In honor of RSA later this month, we wanted to revisit some of the conversations we've had with cybersecurity leaders, starting with 1Password's Jeff Shiner. 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

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61 results

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