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PODCAST

Fund/Build/Scale

Walter Thompson

After working for years in early-stage startups and as a journalist, here are three hard truths I’ve learned: 1. Success in Silicon Valley hinges on connections, hard work and luck. 2. Startups often fail because founders lack fundamental business knowledge. 3. Real, actionable advice comes from those who’ve actually done it. There’s no such thing as “founder DNA.” If you’re willing to take on risk and invest years of your life in something that has maybe a 10% chance of paying off — less if

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All Episodes

53:40

From Engineer to CEO: Ryan Wang on Building Assembled...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/10/27

I interviewed Ryan Wang, co-founder and CEO of Assembled, in his San Francisco office to unpack how he turned lessons from Stripe into a fast-growing startup that powers customer support teams at Robinhood, Canva, and Notion.We talk about: Finding the right co-founders and surviving a CEO hand-off Discovering product-market fit by asking one powerful question Turning a “sleepy” support category into a $200 billion opportunity Launching a second product with a startup-within-a-startup

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35:14

The Starting Five: How to Build a Leadership Team...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/10/09

When startups fail to scale, it’s rarely because of bad code or bad luck. More likely, it's because they didn’t hire the right people at the right time.Chris Barbin, founder and CEO of Tercera, shares a playbook for assembling your “Starting Five” — the essential leadership roles every professional services startup needs to grow from $10M to $100M and beyond. Drawing from decades as an operator and investor, he explains how to spot founder-market fit, when to swap out co-founders, and why hiring

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31:16

From Code to Customer: The Strategic Power of a Field...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/10/07

I’ve explored different aspects of product-market fit on the podcast, but when you’re scaling an open-source business with enterprise customers and a global developer community, you also need customer–engineering fit — the ability to translate between what’s being built and what the market actually needs. At Astronomer, Viraj Parekh is that bridge. He is part engineer, part strategist, and part customer advocate, working across product, sales, and engineering. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale,

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47:35

Dead Weight on the Cap Table: Inside the Ugly World...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/09/20

More startups die from co-founder breakups than from running out of money. Attorney David Siegel, a partner at Grellas Shah LLP, has spent years inside these conflicts, helping founders navigate everything from equity disputes to emotional meltdowns. In this conversation, he explains: Why greed and mismatched expectations trigger so many founder breakups How minority founders can protect themselves before they’re pushed out What departing founders can realistically expect to walk away with Why VCs

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46:20

An Operator’s Playbook for Monetizing Product-Led Growth

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/09/18

What do you do when everyone loves your product but no one’s paying for it? That was the challenge facing Beautiful.ai. Founder Mitch Grasso nailed the product, but to build a sustainable business, he brought in operator Jason Lapp as CEO. In this conversation, Jason shares how Beautiful.ai killed its freemium tier, introduced a credit-card-gated trial without losing momentum, and learned to serve both self-serve and enterprise customers at the same time. He also explains how to listen to customer

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41:11

Building a Bridge Across the Valley of Death

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/09/07

Frontier tech startups don’t fail because the science is bad — they fail because no one needs what they’re building.In this episode, Roadrunner Venture Studios CEO/co-founder Adam Hammer explains how to avoid that fate. We talk about why the U.S. struggles to turn research into startups, why being right isn’t enough, and what it really takes to cross the Valley of Death between lab science and real-world demand. Along the way, Adam shares practical insights for first-time founders, including: How

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58:08

Are You *Really* Ready to Raise a Round? Here’s How...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/09/06

You don’t need a Stanford degree or a flashy deck to raise a pre-seed, seed or Series A, but you do need to show investors that you’ve put in the work. 645 Ventures co-founder Nnamdi Okike shares practical advice for founders who are prepping to raise capital, including what he looks for in pitch meetings, how to uncover “earned secrets,” and why chasing hot categories can backfire. We also dig into how 645 uses outbound sourcing and proprietary software to spot overlooked talent — and what it

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36:32

From Side Project to Series B: How Learning Led to...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/09/04

Dan Lee co-founded what would become Nooks while on leave from Stanford. He wasn’t solving sales. He was exploring remote collaboration during the pandemic. But when they noticed that some of his most active users were in sales development — and that investors were starting to reach out — he followed the signal. Today, Nooks is a sales AI platform used by teams at Seismic, Fivetran, and Modern Health, with $70 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Lachy Groom, and others. In this episode, we talk

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51:52

Building Hard Tech: Lessons on Funding, Teams, and...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/09/01

UPDATE: On 9/8/2025, ZEI announced "the conclusion of its operations." https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zeroei_zero-emission-industries-zei-announces-activity-7371012829409177601-yQph? ******* Transforming breakthrough research into a sustainable company is never simple — especially in hard tech. In this episode recorded in December 2024, Zero Emission Industries CEO/founder Dr. Joseph Pratt and Chief Strategy Officer John Motlow share what it takes to move hydrogen power systems from the lab to the

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43:43

Forget the Spin: Startup Myths That Hold Founders Back

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/08/25

Rob Biederman has sat on both sides of the table — first as co-founder and CEO of Catalant Technologies, and now as managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners. In this candid conversation, he explains why so much of the conventional wisdom around startups is actually counterproductive.He breaks down why design partners don’t equal traction, why headcount growth is a vanity metric, and why Silicon Valley should stop romanticizing failure. He also shares how Asymmetric evaluates founders, what

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42:38

Avoiding Founder Burnout and other Early-Stage...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/08/23

Pro tip: If you can’t see yourself getting up every morning for the next ten years and being excited about going to work, don’t launch a startup.Ajay Prakash co-founded Rinse in 2013 to take the friction out of laundry and dry cleaning — for consumers, and for the small, family-owned businesses behind the counter. Since then, Rinse has scaled into a national brand, and Ajay has become a lecturer at Stanford Graduate Business School’s Startup Garage, where he teaches frameworks for validating ideas,

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41:03

De-Risking Deep Tech: How to Land Seed Capital for...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/08/21

Karthee Madasamy is the founder of VC firm MFV Partners and the founding managing partner of Harper Court Ventures, both of which focus on early-stage deep tech startups. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, he explains what early-stage founders get wrong about TAM, why technical validation isn’t enough, and how to de-risk your company when the market barely exists. We also talk about: What MFV looks for when evaluating scientific founders The importance of “market inevitability” and strategic

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44:24

Execution Ideas: What Engineers Need to Know Before...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/08/18

Jyoti Bansal sold his first company, AppDynamics, to Cisco for $3.7 billion. Harness, his next company, reached a similar valuation a few years later. As an entrepreneur — and as a VC at Unusual Ventures — Jyoti has built and backed multiple billion-dollar startups. But despite his track record, he says technical founders often overlook the same hard truth: good ideas don’t build great companies. It’s all about execution. In this conversation, Jyoti explains how he helps engineers become CEOs, the

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34:28

How to Think Like a VC When You’re Building (or...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/08/17

Brian Rothenberg, partner at Defy and former VP of Growth at Eventbrite, joins Fund/Build/Scale to share what really matters when evaluating early-stage startups. From spotting false signals of traction to building defensible business models, Brian offers practical advice for both founders and operators.He also explains why job seekers should “think like a VC” before joining a startup, how he prefers to be pitched, and what signals he looks for in AI and emerging tech companies. Whether you’re

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38:44

Cap Table Strategy: A Playbook for Early-Stage Founders

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/08/12

When you’re raising your first rounds, every cap table decision can echo for years. Give away too much equity early, lock yourself into restrictive pro rata rights, or over-optimize for valuation — and you may find yourself boxed in just when your company starts to grow.Pulley co-founder and CEO Yin Wu has seen these mistakes firsthand. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, she offers practical, founder-first strategies for structuring and managing your cap table so you can attract top talent, keep

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51:58

From D2C to B2B: How to Pivot Without Losing Your...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/08/08

A turbulent flight sparked Wayne Slavin’s idea for Sure: let consumers buy insurance in real time. But after launching as a D2C app, he realized the bigger opportunity was powering insurance sales for others. Sure’s pivot to B2B turned it into a vertical SaaS platform that lets enterprise companies embed insurance at the point of transaction. In this episode, Wayne explains how to pivot without losing your mission, why founders should lead early enterprise sales, and why he refuses to run

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46:38

How to Sell Your World-Changing Idea to a...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/08/01

James Joaquin is co-founder and managing partner at Obvious Ventures, a VC firm that backs startups tackling intractable problems like climate change, chronic disease, and income inequality. Their portfolio includes businesses that once sounded like science fiction but are reshaping billion-dollar industries. He says he's looking for technology that will “move humanity forward." But this episode isn’t just about mission-driven investing. James gets extremely tactical: he breaks down how Obvious

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40:46

Why Conviction Matters More Than TAM: The Seed-Stage...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/06/23

Uncork Capital Partner Amy Saper shares practical advice for early-stage founders building AI-enabled tools for engineering, product, and design teams, or as she describes them, "products that make you not want to quit your job."Drawing on her experience in product marketing at Twitter, Uber, and Stripe, she explains why storytelling is an underrated founder skill, how to refine your ideal customer profile, and why it’s good to reverse-engineer a roadmap from your Series A goals. She also shares

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38:06

How (and How Not) to Pitch a Cybersecurity VC

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/06/22

Ten Eleven Ventures CTO and Operating Partner Scott Lundgren shares practical advice for early-stage cybersecurity founders. He explains why founder-market fit matters more than product polish, how teams should think about TAM in fragmented markets, and the signals he looks for in technical pitches. He also breaks down how Ten Eleven’s network helps with diligence and customer development — and why “cool tech” often misses the mark. Plus: his take on the AI hype cycle, and why building credibility

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43:10

Deep Tech Without Stealth: Inside Dusty Robotics’...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2025/06/19

Construction workers spend hours on their hands and knees snapping chalk lines to mark where walls, plumbing and utilities should go. It’s painstaking, back-breaking labor. And that’s how it’s been done for centuries.Tessa Lau saw an opportunity — and built a robot that does it faster, safer, and with surgical precision. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, the Dusty Robotics founder and CEO shares some of what she's learned about transitioning from a researcher to a deep tech founder,

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94 results

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