Paradigm Shift

Dmitry is the founder of Tortoise ($11m raised), which is building remote-controlled mobile vending machines, which are the world’s first “smart stores”. It takes less than 15 seconds to complete a transaction with frictionless tap-to-pay user experience and Tortoise is piloting these robots in at least a dozen cities around the world. In this episode we talk about how Dmitry approached building a...

Don Stalter is a Partner at Global Founders Capital (GFC) and has an incredible portfolio of investments including Brex, Deel, CultureAmp, Checkr, FamPay and many more. Before transitioning into an investment role, Don was a co-founder of CityDeal which he sold to Groupon, and subsequently led International at both Groupon and Airbnb. In this conversation we talk about Don’s learnings from working...

Qiao Wang is the co-founder of Alliance DAO, which is the leading web3 accelerator and builder community. In terms of impact, Alliance has helped accelerate 10% of the top crypto projects by market cap. Their most cohort had 30 companies building web3 products across DeFi, Social, NFTs and Gaming. Before Alliance, Qiao was the Head of Product at Messari which is a market intelligence product that...

In this wide-ranging conversation, we chat with Blake about his experiences starting out his professional career as a musician, and all the key experiences and trends that led him to founding the Goldfinch decentralized lending protocol (recent $25m Series A from a16z, and $500M DAO). This is an incredibly rich conversation where we explore so many interesting topics. Some select highlights: the s...

In this conversation we chat about Linda’s journey from a traditional consulting career to startup rocket ships (Snap and Faire), product management, and entrepreneurship. We start out talking about the early days at Faire and key growth unlocks that helped it quickly grow from $50m to $2.5b, and now a $12b valuation. Linda was an early product leader, and saw it grow from 14 to 300 employees. We...

In this conversation we chat about so many key moments in Sanders journey cofounding, building and scaling Thumbtack into a $3.2b business with 900+ employees over 13 years. We start with the founding story and weekly brainstorm calls that led to the company. We then talk about the four key phases of building a successful marketplace startup, from finding product-market fit to hyper-scaling. And f...

In this conversation with Alanna we talked about pivotal moments in Alanna’s journey from working on emerging markets research on Wall St, to founding a YC backed marketplace startup, to growth marketing leader at Afterpay. Alanna has a broad and unique perspective on startups, fintech and crypto, and in this conversation we cover a wide range of topics across all three.   Episode Highlights Start...

Summary In this conversation with Vrinda we cover a wide range of topics including how the current credit system works, why women are more likely to have negative credit experiences, and how Sequin solves that inequity gap with a new debit card for women that helps build credit. We also talk about the process of launching a new card based product at a bank vs. a startup, and both opportunities and...

Summary: Conversation with Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Sila. Prior to Sila, he was co-founder of Bank Simple, which was the first US neobank and early fintech pioneer. For many it was one of the most exciting and groundbreaking products of the last decade. We talk about the Bank Simple story, banking and fintech landscape, and his new company Sila. Sila makes it easy for any business to program m...

Summary: Conversation with Paul Sawaya, co-founder of Human Interest, $1b company that makes it easy for SMBs to provide 401k savings plans to their employees, and helps employees save for their retirement. We cover so many interesting topics in this conversation across the Human Interest story, numerous lessons learnt, and technologies he's most excited about for the future. Episode Highligh...

Conversation with Jim Brusstar, co-founder of Treasury Prime, which is building APIs to connect a network of banks to fintechs. They make it easy for fintechs to partner with the right bank, and reduce the time to market for a neo bank or embedded banking product from years to months. We cover so many interesting topics in this conversation — starting with being early at Sidecar and lessons learnt...

Conversation with Sam Corcos, CEO of Levels health, who is a prolific serial entrepreneur and building one of the most exciting companies in healthcare today. Levels is a groundbreaking product that helps people track their blood glucose in real-time to understand and improve their metabolic health. We talk about key lessons Sam learnt from his first few startups, why he took a year off before sta...

Conversation with Brian Ma - who interned at Zillow when it was 15 people, joined as employee #32, and went on to become a prolific serial entrepreneur. We talk about his entrepreneurial journey founding Decide.com , Weave, Divvy Homes ($2b unicorn), and most recently, a SE Asia focused Seed fund and accelerator. Some highlights from the conversation include how he skipped high school, why he join...

Conversation with Bo Jiang - founder and CEO of Lithic, which offers an API for card issuing. We talk about Bo's incredible journey starting out as a consumer focussed company (Privacy.com), and pivoting to Lithic, which is an easy to use API for card issuing.  Today, Lithic is one of the fastest growing company in Fintech and recently announced a Series C at an $800m valuation. In this conve...

Conversation with Prasanna Sankar - whose most recent company, Rippling, went from zero to $1.35b valuation in less than 4yrs. We talk about his experiences working on startups for over 10 years, finding and scaling success at Rippling, and why he believes crypto will be a transformative new economic engine.    Episode Highlights: Getting started as a programmer in high school Approach to building...

Interview with Jonathan Wegener -- one of the most innovative product thinkers we know. We talk about his experience founding Timehop, working on Evan Spiegel's design team at Snap, and what he's working on next ("active" audio-based products).  Episode Highlights: How Jonathan got started building products How he got into startups and started building online businesses How Tim...