Startups Decoded

Vanessa Larco went from shipping product at Microsoft, Twilio and Box to most of a decade as a partner at NEA, and now runs Premise VC. She assumed moving into venture meant shelving her product brain. It turned out to be her edge. Founders and investors stare at the same signals of product market fit, and they often read them in opposite directions. Her sharpest idea is product curiosity fit. AI...

Carina Cunha is an investment banker, founder, and advisor who's worked with over 100 companies from pre-seed to IPO. She helped build Crimson Education into a unicorn, then landed two offers on Dragons' Den UK for her own startup, Nosy, and pulled a billion views out of less than $5,000 in ad spend. Favikon now ranks her a Top 3 LinkedIn voice for sales. Here's the tension. Founders treat a raise...

Founders treat early decisions like they're reversible.  A board seat, a deal term, who gets hired first. None of it is as flexible as it looks. By the time a bad call costs you something, it's already baked in, and nobody tells you that on day one. Andy hosted a live panel in front of 60 plus founders for Startups Decoded Live, presented by J.P. Morgan. On stage: Elizabeth Vincent (J.P. Morg...

Brett Turner has built four companies and sold three of them for a combined $500 million plus. His sharpest insight has nothing to do with pitch decks or growth hacks, it comes down to cash. Most founders treat treasury as a back office problem, something you hand off the moment you can afford a CFO. Brett spent over a decade as a CPA at Deloitte, ran corporate finance inside Amazon, then worked C...

Vadim Gordin has looked at more early cap tables than most of us have had coffees.  He built a data set most founders never see: hundreds of first-person fundraising accounts, cross-referenced against years running accelerators at NYU. His numbers say the friends and family round is not a formality. It is where the mistakes that surface at Series A actually start. We walk through what a healt...

Most founders can describe their customer. Age, income, job title, maybe a lifestyle detail. What they can't describe is why that person buys, what they almost bought instead, or what finally tipped them over. That gap is where growth lives, and most companies never go looking. Bryan Alston has spent 15 years finding the customers and growth opportunities brands overlook, driving breakthrough grow...

Clara Ma was chief of staff to the CEO of Hugging Face back when it was a Series A company, years before most founders could spell LLM.  She watched the role from the sharpest seat in the building, then built Ask a Chief of Staff, a 500-person community that has helped match CEOs with their right hand ever since. AI was supposed to make executive support obsolete. Instead, chief of staff post...

John Frankel has been funding this stuff since before it was fundable.  He founded ffVC in 2008 after 21 years at Goldman, has backed more than 200 seed companies, and sits on over sixty boards. This year robotics pulled in $18.8 billion globally, already ahead of the $15 billion invested across all of 2025, and Frankel has a clear map of where that money actually landed, and where it hasn't....

Owen Fitzpatrick has interviewed people in North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan, trying to answer one question. Why do we believe what we believe? Ten books and thirty years later, his answer is uncomfortable for founders. The story running your business decisions was never fact checked. It was just repeated enough times that it started to feel true. His framework is simple and brutal. A belief has...

Andy Walsh sits down with Ella Molony Cook, exited founder turned investor and Founder of Time Rich, a community of ambitious women thriving in the new world of AI. One exit. Seven figures raised. Three companies she still holds equity in. Multiple failures, which she talks about more freely than the wins. She dropped out of high school, built a retreat business in Australia before she knew the wo...

Most founders obsess over the first million. The real fight starts after it. Jordan DiPietro has scaled from every seat. Growth at The Motley Fool through several hundred million in revenue, The Hustle through its HubSpot acquisition, and Hampton from zero to $10M as CEO. Now he coaches founders and CEOs building from $5M to $50M. Through his career he observed a genuine disconnect in how Founders...

Chris Lee joined Deel when it was doing $1M ARR. Today it's past $1B+.  He didn't just watch that happen, he made hiring, firing, and org design decisions that either cleared the path or slowed everything down. That's what this conversation is really about. Most founders build their sales team reactively. They wait until it hurts, then hire fast and hope for the best. Chris runs a 600-person...

Founders do not know how to convert their network. Andy Walsh sits down with Kyle Kane, co-founder of onSpark AI, the world's first AI-powered partnership engine. Kyle Kane built $2B in partnership revenue for some of the biggest names in music and brands before realizing the same broken pattern kept killing deals: founders had the right relationships and no system to turn them into money.  K...

Brad Bowery sat down with Andy Walsh to unpack what founders should be thinking about as they begin hiring, and why the global talent pool is more accessible than most realize. Brad has built local teams as a founder and global teams as an operator at Zendesk and now Deel, where he leads Global VC and PE Partnerships. In this episode we explore; The real friction of global hiring: compliance, clas...

Most founders think IP protection is something they'll sort out once the business gets traction. That's exactly backwards. By the time it feels urgent, the work already matters, and you're behind. This conversation cuts through the abstraction. Maria Sinatra is an IP attorney at Venable LLP who works with startups and nationally recognized consumer brands on exactly this problem. Allison Luvera is...

Most companies believe they run on strategy. They actually run on conversations, and those conversations vanish the moment the call ends. David Shim watched this happen from the inside while running Foursquare, sitting in meetings where half the room was camera off, on mute, essentially absent. He called it Ghost Mode. That observation became the founding insight for Read AI, and it’s a sharper di...

Every line on your cap table is a promise. Most founders don’t know what they’ve signed. Andy Walsh sat down with Joris Delanoue, founder of Fairmint, to unpack why equity, the core of startup ownership, is still managed through systems built for a different era, and why that matters more now than ever. The central tension: companies are staying private longer, secondary markets are growing fast,...

Taryn Williams started her first business at 21 with no experience and no capital. Twenty years later, she’d built four companies and exited twice. Taryn Williams doesn’t talk about the dream. She talks about what it actually costs. Andy Walsh sat down with Taryn Williams — serial founder and multi-exit operator — to trace the full arc of building from scratch. From cold emailing at midnight to na...

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup , joins Startups Decoded to discuss his new book Incorruptible and why many successful companies slowly drift away from their founding ideals. Andy Walsh sat down with Eric to explore the forces that reshape organizations as they scale — from governance and incentives to leadership dynamics and investor pressure. Drawing on examples from companies like Costco...

Rachel ten Brink spent two decades inside Fortune 500 companies — P&G, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal — before co-founding Scentbird and scaling it past $300M in revenue. She got rejected by YC three times. Today, Scentbird is in their top 2% by revenue. Now she’s a GP at Red Bike Capital, investing in vertical AI, fintech, and digital health. This conversation is about what changes when you’ve been th...

We’re more connected than ever. More lonely than ever. Along the way, something broke. Michelle Parsons left ed-tech to build Lora — a platform using astrology as a framework for genuine human connection. The twist? The tech isn’t the point. The vulnerability is. Andy Walsh sat down with Michelle Parsons, co-founder of Lora, to unpack one of the most uncomfortable truths in tech: we built tools fo...

Most founders spend years building audiences on platforms they don’t control. Nathan Gwilliam watched a guy go from $96M a year to zero — because Amazon changed its mind. The lesson wasn’t about Amazon. It was about whose land you’re building on. Andy Walsh sat down with Nathan Gwilliam — serial entrepreneur and founder of PodUp — to pull apart one of the most dangerous assumptions founders make:...

Everyone told Milly her résumé didn’t make sense. She turned that confusion into a global community of 800+ people who felt exactly the same. Turns out, being hard to define is your biggest competitive advantage. Andy Walsh sat down with Milly, founder of Generalist World — a community of 800+ operators, founders, and career-builders who’ve stopped apologising for doing too many things well. This...

Most founders think branding is about what they look like. Jill Smith says it’s about how you behave , and most brands have no idea who they actually are.  Fix that first. Everything else follows! Andy Walsh sat down with Jill Smith, CEO of Iris, one of the US’s most respected integrated brand and demand agencies, to unpack what actually makes a brand stick. This isn’t a conversation about lo...

Most founders try to build a company. Sophie de Haën built one by accident. And she did it while she was still in college. Andy Walsh sat down with Sophie de Haën , founder of SDH Paints, to unpack one of the most unconventional founder journeys we’ve seen on Startups Decoded . Sophie didn’t start with a startup idea, a pitch deck, or a plan to raise money. She started painting during COVID and sh...