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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 you’re a

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All Episodes

49:56

What You Permit Is What Gets Produced

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/10/02

Most of us learn culture by adapting to one that already exists. We join a company, figure out what gets rewarded, who has power, what people say in meetings, and what they say after the meeting ends.Founders don’t have that luxury. They’re not fitting into a culture. They’re creating one, whether they mean to or not. SnapLogic President Molly Matthews has a more practical way to think about it: culture is what gets repeated. It shows up in who you hire, what you build, and how you treat

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39:40

How VCs Judge Founders With No Track Record

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/10/01

What makes a startup worth backing if it has no product, revenue or meaningful traction to evaluate? Paige Craig, founder and managing partner of Outlander VC, invests at the idea stage, which means much of his job involves assessing founders before the usual signals exist. In this episode, Paige explains what he looks for instead: obsession with the problem, time spent with prospective customers, learning velocity, judgment, character and the ability to execute under uncertainty. We also get

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46:20

What Investors Learn When They Watch You Talk To...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/09/30

Selling your pitch to an investor is one thing. Showing that you understand how to sell your product to customers is another. Amy Cheetham, partner at Costanoa Ventures, sometimes watches founders talk to prospective customers as part of her diligence. Those conversations can reveal how well they understand the problem they’re solving, whether they can absorb feedback and how effectively they communicate with the people they hope will buy what they’re building. In this episode, Amy explains what she

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48:52

How to Get Through a Tech Layoff Without Losing Yourself

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/08/26

If you work in tech long enough, there’s a good chance you’ll go through a layoff. Either your own, or one that leaves you wondering whether you’re next.Shanon Olsen, COO of Henley Leadership, works with executives and organizations navigating growth, disruption, and change. In this episode, we talk about why layoffs should be understood as a cultural breakdown rather than a one-day event, what happens when founders build companies they aren’t prepared to lead, and why CEOs can delegate just about

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38:51

Before You Build in Senior Care, Figure Out Who Pays

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/08/21

America is getting older. Tens of millions of people are caring for parents, grandparents and other family members. The problems are everywhere, and many of them are painful, expensive and still poorly served by technology.That does not mean every care-related startup is a good business, however. Tatyana Zlotsky, CEO of A Place for Mom, joins me to talk about what founders need to understand before building for older adults and the people who care for them. We discuss why "seniors" aren't a single

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36:19

How to Know If Your Startup Idea Is Worth Pursuing

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/08/20

If you have a startup idea, how do you know whether you’re onto something—or just really good at convincing yourself?Pete Martin has spent his career finding out. He’s worked at six cybersecurity startups, most of them in the pre-product, pre-revenue days, with two IPOs along the way. Today, he’s CEO and co-founder of Realm Security. In this episode, we get tactical about finding the right early adopters, running customer discovery that produces actual signal, recognizing patterns in the feedback,

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43:00

Why Technical Founders Should Stop Answering Questions

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/08/18

Peter Wang is co-founder and Chief AI and Innovation Officer at Anaconda, a company he helped start in 2012 after years of working as a software developer and consultant.In this episode, Peter draws on Anaconda’s early days and the entrepreneurship lessons he shares with scientists and engineers at Cornell to explain what technical people need to learn when they launch a company. We talk about learning to ask better questions instead of rushing to provide answers, recognizing the limits of what you

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40:51

If It’s Not on Paper, It’s Not Real: Canvas Prime's...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/08/13

Canvas Prime Co-founder and Managing Director Rebecca Lynn has spent 25 years in venture capital, backing companies including LendingClub, Doximity and Casetext and helping founders navigate more than a dozen exits.In this conversation, we get into why taking venture capital puts founders on a path toward liquidity, and why an IPO isn't the only outcome worth building toward. Rebecca explains how founders can develop relationships with potential acquirers years before they're ready to sell, when it

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41:29

Why Technical Founders Hire Marketing Too Late

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/08/13

Head of Marketing for Observe at Snowflake Shruti Bhat has spent her career helping highly technical companies explain why their products matter, find the customers who need them most, and build go-to-market systems that can actually scale. In this episode, she talks about how founders identify their real market, recognize genuine product-market fit, hire their first product marketing and GTM leaders, and earn trust across engineering, product, sales, and marketing. Drawing on three startup exits,

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36:13

CVC Is Not Your Exit Strategy or GTM Plan

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/07/31

Tamara Steffens is managing director of Thomson Reuters Ventures, where she invests in early-stage companies building around legal, tax, accounting, and enterprise workflow.Corporate venture capital can look like a shortcut to customers, distribution, and credibility, but Steffens says founders need to understand what has to be true before strategic money can actually help. In this conversation, we get into what happens after Thomson Reuters Ventures joins your cap table, how founders can turn a

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41:43

AI Makes Building Easier. Selling Is Still Hard.

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/07/23

Thanks to AI, you could have an idea for a startup on your way home from work Thursday and finish a rough prototype by Monday morning.That's great news for founders, but it also raises the bar: if everyone can build a convincing demo, what actually separates a durable company from a clever prototype? To explore that question in depth, I interviewed Alex Niehenke a partner at Scale Venture Partners since 2012. He invests in early-stage companies tackling complex industries like insurance, wealth

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35:13

The Most Expensive Money You'll Ever Raise

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/07/11

A lot of founders assume raising venture capital is just part of the process: you have an idea, build a deck, find some investors and start pitching. But what if you don't actually need the money yet? Elia Wallen is the founder and CEO of Engine, a business travel platform valued at $2 billion. He bootstrapped his first company and resisted raising outside capital for Engine until the business was growing faster than he could support on his own. In this episode, we talk about why raising too much

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45:29

Why Most Startups Shouldn't Raise Money (Even If They...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/07/06

Most startup fundraising advice focuses on how to get investors interested. Ryan Ziegler sees the process from the other side of the table. As a General Partner at Edison Partners, Ryan evaluates startups that have already survived one of the hardest phases of company building: finding customers willing to pay for what they've built. By the time founders reach him, the question is no longer whether the idea is interesting. It's whether the business is repeatable. In this episode, Ryan explains why

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49:06

Money Is the Only Customer Validation That Matters

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/06/14

Conventional wisdom says the hardest part of building a startup is building the product.Shanea Leven says the harder challenge is figuring out what customers will actually pay for. Before co-founding Empromptu.ai, Shanea spent more than 15 years building products at companies including Google, eBay, Docker, and Cloudflare. In this conversation, she explains why sales is every bit as complex as engineering, why customer interviews aren't enough to validate an idea, and why early-stage founders need

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38:35

What Hospitals Are Actually Buying in the AI Boom

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/06/13

If you're building a startup, there are easier industries to choose than healthcare. Sales cycles are long, regulations are complex, and earning the trust of providers and patients takes years. In this episode, Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate Director Jamie Sundsbak explains how healthtech founders can improve their odds of success. We discuss what Mayo looks for in founding teams, why the program focuses on product development instead of fundraising, how startups use clinical data and physician

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46:03

The 10x Rule: Turning a Research Paper into an AI...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/06/10

Most startup advice assumes the biggest challenge is finding customers. But what happens when the demand is obvious and the real question is whether the technology can actually work at scale?In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I sit down with Stanford professor and Inception Labs founder and CEO Stefano Ermon to discuss how a breakthrough research paper evolved into a venture-backed AI company serving enterprise customers. Stefano explains why his team believed they needed a 10x advantage in

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45:19

Your First Marketing Hire Is Probably Not a CMO

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/06/05

Most technical founders can explain how their product works. Far fewer can clearly explain why a customer should care. In this episode, Cribl CMO Abby Strong shares what she has learned from building go-to-market teams and helping scale one of the fastest-growing companies in data infrastructure. Drawing on her background in IT operations, product, and marketing, Abby explains why founders often struggle with messaging, how to know when you've found product-market fit, and what it takes to build

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51:33

How AI-Native Startups Actually Get Built

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/05/20

What does it actually mean to build an AI-native company?In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I talk with True Ventures Managing Partner Puneet Agarwal and Gather CEO/co-founder Mayank Mehta about how the startup evolved from an AI-powered customer feedback idea into a broader research and content platform for marketing teams. We get into founder conviction before product-market fit, what investors actually look for when there’s little external signal, how the company reshaped its go-to-market

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56:28

Why Great Founders Are “Angry at the Problem”

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/05/19

For this episode, I interviewed Eugene Malobrodsky, partner at One Way Ventures and former founder of AnchorFree, the company behind HotSpot Shield, one of the first consumer VPN products to scale globally. Before becoming a VC, Eugene spent 15 years building and scaling a startup through the 2008 financial crisis, painful layoffs, difficult fundraising environments, and the long grind from idea to acquisition. Today, he backs immigrant founders building applied AI, deep tech, fintech, healthcare,

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16:55

Before There Is Proof: Build a Startup Story That...

Fund/Build/Scale ·

2026/05/06

A lot of early-stage founders can explain their company five different ways — and all five might be technically correct. The problem is that often, those answers don’t fully line up.That gap in a startup’s narrative creates friction. Investors may understand the problem but still don’t feel like the story lands. Candidates may understand the product, but they’re not fully on board with the mission. Customers may hear the explanation but still struggle to repeat it clearly. I’ve been inside

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