Spotlight On

Arkady Volozh launched Nebius with one 25-megawatt data center and a belief that the AI era would require more infrastructure than anyone was building. Now, fresh off a round of major announcements—new company commitments, a deepening Nvidia partnership, and significant financing—Arkady joins us to look back on how far Nebius has come and where they’re headed next. In this episode of Spotlight On,...

When Armadin co-founder and CEO Kevin Mandia started his career, hacking was an under-the-radar nuisance. As our lives and financial systems moved online, everything changed. Mandiant, his first company, became the team that CEOs called during their worst breaches. Now, he believes cybersecurity is entering its biggest shift yet, and he’s founded Armadin to put the defenders back on offense. In th...

For our final episode of VBSR this season, Sara phones a friend. Accel’s Zhenya Loginov joins from London to talk about what defines the 2025 IPO, common PLG-to-enterprise pitfalls, and why today’s European founders look different. Plus: Zhenya’s startup green flags. This Week’s Takeaways IPOs are back. But they’ve changed. Not long ago, companies were going public before becoming profitable. Afte...

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...

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 Takeaways 1. 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 wo...

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 Takeaways The 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...

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 Takeaways Return 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-acquisiti...

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 Takeaways 1. Tools that amplify self-expression are seeing explosive growth. Lovable r...

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 missio...

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 Takeaways 1. Most pe...

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 re...

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 shap...

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 Takeaways Where 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...

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....

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...

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, ultim...

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...

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...

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 cust...

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....

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...

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 success...

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 rou...

Corelight’s story is unlike that of any other successful growth-stage network detection company. Founded by academics, it now counts all six branches of the U.S. military, and some of the world’s largest banks and utilities companies as customers. And then there’s the fact that it started off as an open-source tool, a rarity in cybersecurity.  All of this could have made stepping in as CEO a diffi...

In this episode of Spotlight On, Accel’s Christine Esserman sits down with Merrill Lutsky, co-founder and CEO of Graphite, to discuss how his company is redefining code review for the AI era. Merrill shares how he and his co-founders have fostered an unconventional yet deeply effective approach to building trust through weekly Monday dinners and co-founder “therapy” sessions. They discuss the uniq...