The Luba Show

71:52

How a16z's Most Connected VC Picks Founders

The Luba Show ·

2026/10/05

Today I walk with David Haber, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. David co-founded Bond Street and sold it to Goldman Sachs, started his career working for the founder of Royalty Pharma and investing at Spark Capital, and helped open a16z's New York office. Now he's building Vantage, an internal AI tool built on transcripts from the 750 meetings he took last year. He gets into why he'd rather back the missionary than the mercenary, and why he believes opportunity lives between fields

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75:47

$13 Billion CEO Thinks Most People Shouldn't Start A...

The Luba Show ·

2026/10/01

Today I walk with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman, the company formerly known as Grammarly. Shishir co-founded Coda and sold it to Grammarly, built skippable ads at YouTube into a product that went from $0 to $1 billion in 18 months, and sits on the boards of Spotify and Walmart, and now he runs a company with over $700 million in revenue. He talks about why most people should not start a company, and why he gave up ownership of Coda without any startup pride.We get into:- Why the right

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82:39

Silicon Valley Funded Her $16.5M+ to Build Upgraded...

The Luba Show ·

2026/09/29

Today I walk with Noor Siddiqui, founder and CEO of Orchid. Noor was a Thiel Fellow at 17, studied CS at Stanford, and has raised $16.5M for Orchid from Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elad Gil, and now she's out to end what she calls the genetic lottery. She gets into why she thinks people won't have sex for babies anymore, and what she'd pick for her own kid if the tech existed today.We get into:- Why she calls the genetic lottery "super evil and unfair"- The

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51:58

He Co-founded $2B Udemy. Now a16z Gave Him $42M To...

The Luba Show ·

2026/09/24

Today I walk with Gagan Biyani, founder and CEO of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy. Gagan co-founded Udemy, which grew into a multibillion-dollar public company, built Sprig, co-founded Maven, and started his first profitable business at 13, and now he's building a16z's new school for young builders, backed by $42 million. He gets into the $60M company he had to shut down, why his investors backed him again anyway, and why a Harvard dropout means nothing to him.We get into:-Starting a

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75:25

$9.5B Gusto Founder Went Back to Being an Engineer to...

The Luba Show ·

2026/09/23

Today I walk with Edward Kim, co-founder and CTO of Gusto. Edward built Gusto with two Stanford classmates into a $9.5B payroll platform running 300,000 small businesses, made over $1M selling Android apps on the side, and after a decade managing engineers, he's writing code again to ship an AI co-founder for the back office his mom used to run when he was a kid. He gets into why his doctor dad handed him a Paul Graham essay in the car, and the unfairness technical co-founders feel while

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76:44

He Helped Founders Raise $2 Billion. Now He's Sold on...

The Luba Show ·

2026/09/17

Today I walk with Julian Weisser, founder of Solo Founders and co-founder of On Deck. Julian has run 27 ODF cohorts, helped more than 1,000 founders collectively raise over $2 billion, and spent eight years matching people with co-founders, and now he believes AI has made the co-founder optional. He gets into the $400,000 payout demand from a co-founder who did two months of work, and why he compares co-founders to car phones now that solo founders have the cell phone.We get into:- Calling

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63:06

Amplitude went public at a $5.6 billion valuation....

The Luba Show ·

2026/09/14

Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/lubaToday I walk with Spenser Skates, co-founder and CEO of Amplitude. Spenser shut down his first startup, a voice-to-text texting app called Sonalight, a year after it got into Y Combinator, spent years going through what he calls an identity crisis moving from founder to CEO, and has grown Amplitude into a public company of roughly 800 people, and now he's rebuilding it around Wave, an AI engine that rewrites products using

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51:24

From $10M to $70M ARR in 12 Months, The Story of...

The Luba Show ·

2026/09/10

Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/lubaToday I walk with Coco Mao, CEO and co-founder of OpenArt, an AI visual storytelling platform. Coco spent years as an engineer at Google, ran her own startup inside Google's internal startup incubator, and built OpenArt through six months of weekly pivots until a prototype built in under three days went viral on Hacker News, and now she's betting the entire company on a new category she calls vibe directing.We get into:Why

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68:26

He Turned A Newsletter Into A Venture Fund - Packy...

The Luba Show ·

2026/09/07

Today I walk with Packy McCormick, founder of Not Boring and Not Boring Capital. Packy built Not Boring into a top newsletter on Substack, spent years in finance before leaving to write full time, and now invests in the same kinds of companies he writes about through Not Boring Capital. He gets into the moment his growth flatlined during the 2022 market crash and what it freed him to do, and why he considers Not Boring's founding mission basically complete.We get into:Why he passed on

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76:59

He Put AI Inside The Terminal Before Codex Existed-...

The Luba Show ·

2026/09/03

Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/lubaToday I walk with Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp. Zach is a former Principal Engineer at Google, where he led the Google Sheets team. Zach scaled his first startup, SelfMade, to 150 employees before it fell apart, and now he’s raised over $73 million for Warp from Sequoia and Google Ventures. He's betting the whole company on AI. He talks about the AI feature Warp built before Claude Code and ChatGPT existed, why not

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75:38

She Wants To Disrupt A $100 Billion Space With AI -...

The Luba Show ·

2026/08/31

Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/lubaToday I walk with Michelle Lim, CEO of Flint, an autonomous web and ads building platform. Michelle interned at Meta, Slack, and Robinhood, grew Warp from employee number two to 500,000 developers over four years across engineering, marketing, and sales, and now she's building Flint to charge by outcome instead of software. She gets into her origin story that pushed her to fix marketing after four years at Warp, and why she

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44:46

He's Bringing Supersonic Flight BACK - Blake Scholl

The Luba Show ·

2026/08/25

Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/lubaToday I walk with Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake was roughly Amazon's 200th engineer, spent more than a decade building XB-1 into the first supersonic jet made outside a government or military, and got the US ban on supersonic flight repealed after breaking the sound barrier, and now he's scaling Boom toward carrying passengers in 2030. He gets into the six years Boom spent waiting on Rolls-Royce for

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86:43

She Backed Twitter. Now She's Betting on Founders Who...

The Luba Show ·

2026/08/17

Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/lubaToday I walk with Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner of Floodgate. Ann has spent almost 18 years building Floodgate around a deliberately small, non-consensus fund model, made early bets on companies like Lyft and TaskRabbit, and teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, and now she's watching AI rewrite the lean startup playbook in real time. She gets into the AI agent inside one portfolio company that quietly caught millions of

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97:57

He Scaled Plaid to $300M ARR. Now a16z Just Bet $55M...

The Luba Show ·

2026/08/05

Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/lubaToday I walk with Jean-Denis Greze, co-founder and CEO of Town, an AI on-ramp platform for individuals and businesses. Jean-Denis is the former CTO of Plaid, led engineering through a blocked $5.3B Visa acquisition, and walked away from the C-suite at 45 to start over from zero, and now he's turned a scrapped AI tax-prep startup into a $55M Series A company backed by Andreessen Horowitz. He gets into the week he decided to

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61:55

She Raised $100M+ to Reversibly Cryopreserve Humans —...

The Luba Show ·

2026/07/30

Today I walk with Laura Deming, co-founder of Until, a reverse cryopreservation company in San Francisco. Laura got interested in longevity at eight, started working in Cynthia Kenyon's lab at UCSF at 12, and spent years backing the field as an investor through the Longevity Fund. She now builds technology to pause biological time, starting with donor organs and building toward whole-body medical hibernation. We get into:-The conference talk she was not supposed to give, and how it ended

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121:54

The Investor Who Backed 10 Unicorns Explains the AI...

The Luba Show ·

2026/07/23

Today I sit down with Avichal Garg, co-founder and General Partner at Electric Capital. Avichal has built and sold companies, worked inside early Google and Facebook, served as a visiting partner at Y Combinator, and now backs founders across crypto and frontier tech.We get into:-Why founders are more like artists than operators-What actually compounds a person's trajectory-His "software eating money" thesis behind Electric Capital-Why honesty ends up being the real edge in ventureso much

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57:02

$6.8B GovTech Founder On Why Most Startups Fail...

The Luba Show ·

2026/07/16

Today I'm talking to Ben Rudolph, co-founder and CTO of Peregrine Technologies, to trace his path from Stanford gymnastics to building one of the fastest-growing companies in government technology. They discuss his time at the UN working with refugees, the 18 months he and co-founder Nick Noone spent embedded inside a police department, surviving the early "wilderness" of company building, and how Peregrine grew into a multi-billion dollar business. The conversation also covers leadership

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68:28

$47 Billion Crypto Founder Shares His Story - Anatoly...

The Luba Show ·

2026/07/09

Today I’m speaking with Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana, to trace his journey from a childhood in the Soviet Union to building one of the largest blockchain networks in the world. They discuss his years at Qualcomm, the eureka moment that led to Solana, surviving the FTX collapse, and how he uses AI to run multiple side projects. The conversation closes with reflections on stress, risk, parenting, and his definition of success.Timestamps:00:00:00 Trailer00:01:06

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72:48

From Being Rejected by Every VC to Starting Her Own...

The Luba Show ·

2026/07/02

I got to walk with Leah Solivan, founder of TaskRabbit and now Managing Director of Precedent VC, through her journey from IBM engineer to startup founder to venture capitalist. We got into the early days of building TaskRabbit, the decision to sell the company to IKEA, and her transition into investing. Leah also shared her philosophy on evaluating founders, the AI-powered deal scoring tool she built, and the story behind her upcoming book, Breaking Precedent Timestamps:00:00:00

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45:41

Joe Cohen: 2 Electric Vehicles in 2 Years With Just...

The Luba Show ·

2026/06/11

Today I’m talking to Joe Cohen, founder and CEO of Infinite Machine, a company building electric vehicles. But this conversation is really about something bigger: what it means to live freely and build things that matter.Joe has built companies across education, fashion, software, and now vehicles — and what ties them together is his obsession with freedom, accessibility, and enabling people to do life on their own terms. He calls it the “infinite game” — a framework that shapes how he

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