Village Global Podcast

Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga and a Village Global Luminary LP. He took Zynga public after starting it as a social poker game for Facebook, and it was his fourth company, after earlier ventures that included Tribe.net , one of the first social networks. Ben Casnocha, co-founder of Village Global, sits down with Mark at a Village Global Luminary Gathering to dig into the core ideas of Mark&#3...

Mehul Trivedi is co-founder and CEO of Legato, a company building glasses that double as prescription-grade hearing aids. Before Legato, he was one of the first audio engineers on the original iPhone, led Bose's wearables and headphone group, and helped build out Luxottica's smart eyewear division, including collaboration on Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. Amrit Rao sits down with Mehul...

Andre Charoo is Founding Partner of Maple VC, a first-check venture firm, and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Before venture, he was employee number 25 at Uber and an early employee at Hired.com , and built or joined four seed-stage startups between 2009 and 2016. Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Andre to unpack the framework he's developed for evalu...

Tanay Kothari is co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice AI company he started with co-founder Sahaj Garg in 2021, building toward a Jarvis-like assistant that lets people interact with computers through natural speech instead of keyboards and screens. His younger brother, Jaisal Kothari, is co-founder and CEO of Gallium and was Wispr's first software engineer, joining as a Stanford freshman to...

Jade Q. Wang is an artist, investor, scientist, and founder. A Stanford grad with a PhD in neuroscience, she retired roughly a year ago from a career in tech to pursue art and angel investing full time. Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Jade to trace her path from a childhood spent training to be a concert pianist in Shanghai, through a hard pivot into computer science a...

Michael Hochberg is a semiconductor entrepreneur, Caltech-trained physicist, and network investor with Village Global. He's founder and president of Periplous LLC, and has built and scaled hardware and deep tech companies through multiple market cycles, giving him a front-row seat to both the chip industry and the venture capital that funds it. Max Kilberg, Investment Partner at Village Global, si...

Aizada Marat is co-founder and CEO of Alma, an immigration law firm that combines the expertise of seasoned attorneys with AI to streamline the immigration process for individuals and businesses. Alma has achieved a 98% approval rate on its cases and can prosecute in half the time of a traditional firm. Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Aizada to trace her journey from a...

JakeCooper is co-founder and CEO of Grow Therapy, a technology platform that helps mental health providers launch and scale independent, insurance-accepted practices. Since starting the company in the middle of COVID, Jake and his co-founders have scaled Grow Therapy to around a million patient visits a month across 26,000 providers, surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue while operating profitab...

Paul Eremenko is co-founder and CEO of P-1 AI, the company building Archie, an AI mechanical and electrical engineer that works alongside human engineering teams. Jeff Immelt is a Venture Partner at NEA and former Chairman and CEO of GE, and he's joining P-1 AI's board after leading the firm's investment in the company's $50 million Series A. Anne Dwane sits down with Paul and Jeff to unpack why e...

Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and CEO of Socket, which he started in 2021 to help companies detect and defend against software supply chain attacks. A prolific open source maintainer whose packages are downloaded a billion times a month, Feross recently closed a Series C at a billion-dollar valuation, and Socket now protects nearly 30,000 organizations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Vercel...

Jeff Cobourn leads finance, business operations, and strategy at Gusto, where he's spent nearly nine years building out the company's financial infrastructure. Rohit Divate recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto. Somrat Niyogi, General Partner at Recall Capital and Village Global Network Investor, sits down with Jeff and Rohit to...

Sherwood Callaway is the founder and CEO of Sazabi, an AI-native observability platform, and a repeat YC founder. He previously worked as an early infrastructure engineer at Brex, where he built the systems that kept one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the world running. Village Global Luminary LP Lindsay Pettingill sits down with Sherwood for a conversation that moves from his unconventional p...

Moe Katib is the founder and CEO of One (withone.ai), an enterprise-level infrastructure platform that gives AI agents authenticated, reliable access to hundreds of software applications and verified actions. Before One, he spent 12 years solving enterprise integration problems, building the knowledge base that became the foundation for what he's building today. Village Global GP Anne Dwane si...

Alex Jekowsky is the co-founder and CEO of Cents, the all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform for the laundry industry. A Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, he sold his first company at 23, and last month closed a $140 million Series C. Cents now powers more than 1 in 6 laundromats in the country and processes over $1 billion in payments a year. Somrat Niyogi sits down with Alex to go from...

In this episode of the Village Global Podcast, Box CEO Aaron Levie joins Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman and host Ben Casnocha live on stage at a Village Global event. They get into what agents actually do to SaaS, where startups should go on offense, and what twenty years of building Box has taught Aaron about leveling up as a founder. Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please...

Somrat Niyogi sits down with two of the most experienced comms operators in tech: Kelly Boynton, Head of Communications at Gusto, and Paul Loeffler, former SVP of Communications and Brand at BILL. Kelly spent 15 years across agency and in-house roles before Gusto, including at Facebook, Instagram, Intuit, Navan, and DocuSign. Before BILL, Paul led integrated communications at Gusto and was at Atla...

Deon is the co-founder and CEO of Espa Labs. His previous company, Forethought, was a TechCrunch Disrupt winner in 2018, scaled to roughly a billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk, where Deon now serves as advisor. Village Global GP Anne Dwane sits down with Deon to talk about the launch and the journey that brought him here. They cover what he learned scaling...

Jake Saper is General Partner at Emergence Capital, the firm that was the first institutional investor in Zoom and an early backer of Salesforce, Veeva, Bill.com, and Together.ai. Jake has been at Emergence for over a decade and has led investments in Assembled, Unify, and Ironclad. Jake has developed Emergence's thesis on AI-native services: why he believes this is the most important structural s...

Nick Mehta is the former CEO of Gainsight, the platform that helps companies drive durable growth through customer-led and product-led strategies. Vista Equity Partners acquired Gainsight for $1.1 billion. Nick ran the company as CEO for 13 years before stepping into a board role last year. Nick has also co-authored four books on customer success, was named Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern Ca...

Dara Ladjevardian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delphi, a platform that lets you create a digital version of your mind — an interactive, always-on presence that can share your knowledge, coach others, and represent you at scale. Delphi has raised $16 million in a Series A led by Sequoia, with earlier backing from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and others. Before Delphi, Dara founded Friday, a text-bas...

Doug Camplejohn is the Founder & CEO of Coffee, an AI-first CRM. Doug co-founded Fliptop (acquired by LinkedIn), led Sales Navigator at LinkedIn as VP of Product, then ran Sales Cloud at Salesforce as EVP and GM. He's also had exits with Mi5 Networks (acquired by Symantec) and MyPlay (acquired by Bertelsmann). Patrick Thompson is the Co-Founder & CEO of Clarify, an AI-native CRM built for...

Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild, lays out his investing thesis for the AI era: The Model Economy. His argument is that most AI startups being built today are fighting a losing battle against the scaling laws. The models themselves will swallow the application layer. So where does durable value actually go? Sumeet walks through the Bitter Lesson (Richard Sutton's foundati...

This is the first episode of Worldbuilders, a new series on the Village Global Podcast guest-hosted by Sumeet Singh, Founder & Managing Partner of Worldbuild. Sumeet sits down with Evan Conrad, Founder & CEO of the San Francisco Compute Company, to talk about the real economics of GPU compute, how SF Compute went from an accidental GPU cloud to building supercomputers, where the actual AI...

Bhavin Shah spent years building Moveworks into the agentic AI platform behind employee support at Toyota, Siemens, Unilever, and hundreds more. In December 2025, ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for $2.85 billion. In this episode of Recall Sessions, Somrat Niyogi goes back to the beginning. How did four co-founders find each other? Why did Bhavin and his team run 34 CIO conversations to validate the...

Parth Patil built Reid Hoffman's AI digital twin from scratch, without engineering team or a software background. Before that, he was a data scientist at Clubhouse. When GPT-4 came out, he cashed out his 401k and spent four months talking to the model every day. He came out of that running Reid's AI work. He now manages a fleet of coding agents for most of his waking hours. In this conversation wi...