18VC Podcast - Next Gen Builders

Most cold emails get a 1% reply rate and eat three hours of your day. Manuel David dropped out of Arizona State, moved to a San Francisco he'd never set foot in, and built Paradigm, an AI that runs the entire outbound cycle, from finding the lead to booking the meeting on your calendar. On this episode of 18VC, we sit down with Manuel David, founder & CEO of Paradigm Outreach, on why the w...

Most apps fight to keep you scrolling. Andy built Lullaby to do the opposite – get you off your phone and fall asleep. It started at 2 AM, after a consulting deadline, when her boyfriend made up a bedtime story and it worked better than any meditation app she'd tried. On this episode of 18VC, we sit down with Andy, founder of Lullaby, an AI sleep companion that talks you toward sleep and then...

At 15 he was buying instant noodles off Alibaba and reselling them at a 200% margin to starving boarding-school kids – until the principal shut it down. Barry didn't know it yet, but that was his first lesson in supply, demand, and distribution. Five ventures later, he's betting his career on a blunt thesis: in the AI era, either you're well-rounded enough to do anything or deep enough...

TheVentures gets up to 3,000 pitches a year and reads them with an AI agent named Vicky before a human ever steps in. Ethan Cho, their CIO, explains what survives the filter — and why he'd rather hear a grammatically broken sentence from your own mouth than a flawless one written by AI. On this episode of 18VC, we sit down with Ethan Cho — CIO of TheVentures, one of Korea's earliest accelerators-t...

From an investor's seat at Y Combinator China (Miracle Plus), Fernando watched AI startups get absorbed by the very models they were built on. Now he's building Model OS so they can own their intelligence instead of renting it. On Episode 9 of 18VC, we sit down with Fernando, founder & CEO of Model OS (Intelligence Cubed) — the "survival infrastructure" that turns AI apps fro...

He grew up in Artsakh — an unrecognized state he calls a real-world Neverland — fought in the 2020 war, then pulled off a "physically impossible" transfer to the US without losing a single semester. Now Tigran Ghukasyan is building CyNet at USC — and fresh off an exchange semester in Tokyo with Plug and Play Japan, he makes the case for why this could be the age of Japan. On Episode 8 of...

Tony Xiong has been building since he was 15 — first a portable drive 10x faster than anything on the market, then a camera he launched into the stratosphere for Sony. Now he's building Bubbl: an AI assistant that lives in your texts and pulls what actually matters out of your message chaos. No app to install — you just text it. On Episode 7 of 18VC, we sit down with Tony Xiong, founder &...

70% of US apparel manufacturers still collect production data manually. Only 16% have real-time visibility across the floor. Most shops still run on WhatsApp threads, Gmail, and the foreman’s memory. Rylan Jimenez and Diora Juraboeva, the co-founders of ThreadLabs, are building the AI intelligence layer for the apparel production industry — not another ERP, but a layer that sits on top of whatever...

"You can't AI your way out of bad taste." Diana Melencio is the General Partner of XRC Ventures' Brand Capital Fund — a NYC-based seed-to-Series A consumer fund whose LPs include some of the largest public retailers, CPG companies, and global mall operators in the world. Before becoming a GP, Diana was a two-time consumer-tech founder (OK My Outfit and Quinn) and spent a decade i...

What does it actually take to break into venture capital as a new grad — and stay sharp once you're in? In Episode 4 of the 18VC Podcast, we sit down with Sabrina Li, an investor at Sunstone Management, an early-stage VC firm in Southern California writing pre-seed and seed checks across the U.S. As one of Sunstone's earliest new-grad hires, Sabrina shares what it's like to build a ven...

Michael Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Yondu AI (YC W24), building the robotic workforce of the future starting with warehouse logistics. In this episode of the 18VC Podcast, Michael traces his path from building a robot waitress in his parents' Chinese takeout restaurant, to MIT CSAIL and autonomous drones, to founding Yondu with his classmate Tahmid Jamal. We dig into the bets behind the...

Episode Summary   In the second episode of the 18VC Podcast , hosts Philip Zeng and Lucas He sit down with Jack Crawford , the Founding General Partner of CerraCap Impact Venture Capital (CIVC) and a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business . Jack discusses the recent December 2025 merger between Impact Venture Capital and CerraCap Ventures , which combined a unique Corporate Intelligence...

Episode Description: Welcome to the inaugural episode of the 18VC Podcast , a student-run show featuring the stories of student founders, operators, and investors. In this premiere, co-hosts Phillip and Lucas sit down with Mackenzie Dennill and Luna Li , the co-founders of Immuny , a startup born out of the USC ecosystem that is tackling the complex world of pediatric allergy management. Mackenzie...