10 Minutes or Less, with Ali Rohde

CEO Hassaan Raza doesn't want you to call Tavus an avatar company. He co-founded it in 2020 and just raised a $40M Series B led by CRV — with Salesforce, Amazon, and Alibaba already building on it — to chase something bigger than talking heads: "human computing," AI humans that can see you, hear you, remember you, and read your expressions in real time. In about 10 minutes, Hassaan e...

Ivan Burazin is the co-founder and CEO of Daytona, which builds sandboxes — composable computers that AI agents can spin up on demand.   Daytona raised a $24M Series A led by FirstMark and hit $1M ARR about 50 days after launch, then $3M ARR 45 days later. To get there, Ivan killed a product that already had customers and revenue — and sent those customers to his competitors. In under 10 minutes,...

Failed once, funded twice. Dakotah Rice on Harper's $47M Series A, the brokers who said no, and why the next great startup won't be SaaS. Harper is an AI-native commercial brokerage that's served 5,000+ businesses across 35 states in just 13 months. Earlier this year, Dakotah raised $47M led by Emergence Capital: the largest publicly disclosed Series A ever by a Black founder. In just...

Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and CEO of Socket, a software supply chain defense company whose customers include Anthropic, Figma, and Vercel. Last month his team flagged the Axios backdoor six minutes after it hit npm. He was also personally targeted by the same North Korean group behind the attack. In just 15 minutes, Feross walks through the Axios backdoor and the social engineering that m...

Guillermo Rauch has been building @VercelHQ for more than 10 years. But talk to him and you'd never know it. He seems to have the energy of a 19-year-old Stanford dropout who just went through YC.In just 8 minutes, Guillermo shares his frameworks for leading Vercel, why he's anti 1-on-1s, the need to be "terminally online," and how he creates unstructured blocks in his day to be...