Founder's FAQ

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Ankit Jain. Ankit is a serial entrepreneur and Founder & CEO of Infinitus Systems. Most recently, Ankit was a Founding Partner at Gradient Ventures and a Director of Engineering at Google. Previously, he was the Vice President of Product at SimilarWeb, which he joined via the acquisit...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Cenk Sidar. Cenk is Co-founder & CEO of GlobalWonks, a technology-enabled marketplace that connects private and public enterprises with experts who understand the world. Cenk is also a global risk expert with a vast experience of assisting top financial institutions, multinational cor...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Shawn Xu. Shawn is an early-stage investor at Floodgate. Previously, he was managing partner at Dorm Room Fund and led 27 investments made across various verticals. He was also in the international expansion of Square. In this episode;1-) Why do you care about solving this problem2-)...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Hiten Shah. Hiten is co-founder & CEO of FYI and co-owner of Crazy Egg. Previously, he was the co-founder of KISSmetrics. He is also an investor and advisor to more than 100 companies. In this episode;1-) Setting up values early on2-) The ability to manage other people3-) Accountabili...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Jake Saper. Jake is a general partner at Emergence Capital, a venture capital firm, invested in companies collectively worth $100B+, including Salesforce, Veeva, Box, Yammer, and Zoom. In this episode;1-) Authentic passion for solving the problem2-) Long-run relationships with the boa...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Elad Gil. Elad is an entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor to companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Gitlab, Brex, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, Wish, and many more. He is co-founder at Color Genomics and its former CEO. Previously, he was VP of...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Cristóbal Perdomo. Cristóbal is Co-founder and General Partner at Jaguar Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Mexico City. In this episode;1-) Talking about valuation vs. talking about what to do2-) Founder’s obsession with the problem 3-) Unit economics factor outside of US4-) R...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Sargun Kaur. Sargun is Co-founder and CEO of Byteboard, a technical interviewing platform that is backed by Google's incubator Area 120. Previously, she was a software engineer on Google and was selected to Forbes 30Under30 in 2019. In this episode;1-) Story of Byteboard2-) How to get...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Koray Bahar. Koray is co-founder and CEO of Figopara, which is a b2b solution for SMBs to arrange due dates of electronic invoices by many options. Previously, he was founder & CEO of Foriba, a compliance service provider for electronic invoicing, which was acquired by Sovos. Lastly,...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Eamonn Carey. He’s the managing director at Techstars London, a partner at The Fund, and an early-stage investor, advisor, and board member for companies across the US, Europe, and Asia. He has invested in over 50 companies around the world and he also runs a regular deal flow email f...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Shane Mac. Shane is a general partner & co-founder at the Logos Fund that invests in startups defining remote work globally. Previously, Shane was CEO & Co-founder of Assist, the automated assistant platform for messaging and voice, which was acquired by Conversocial in 2019. And he's...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Duygu Oktem Clark. Duygu is the founding managing partner at DO Venture Partners that invests in early-stage tech startups, and coaches corporate innovation through partnerships with startups. She is also on the jury in the European Innovation Council funds to select, support, and inv...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Tim Young. Tim is a Founding General Partner at Eniac Ventures with two exits as an entrepreneur and over 20 years of experience advising and investing in 100+ early-stage startups. Prior to founding Eniac in 2009, Tim founded Bridge, an enterprise software company focusing on corpora...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is John Mannes. John is an investor at Basis Set Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on supporting startups using machine learning to address big problems across industries. Prior to Basis Set Ventures, John was a TechCrunch writer covering machine intelligence startups...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Matthew Hartman. Matt is a partner at Betaworks Ventures, based in New York City. Matt started his career building the technology platform for Trammell Crow Company (acquired by CBRE) before joining Hot Potato (acquired by Facebook). He co-founded ReferBoost, a profitable b2b company...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Erbil Karaman. Erbil is the chief product officer at Earnin. Before Earnin, he co-founded 500Startups Istanbul fund, and right now, he's the venture advisor in there. He was head of product at Lyft and led and started many product teams at Facebook, including Internet.org. As a founde...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Gagan Biyani. Gagan was co-founder and President at Udemy, one of the biggest online education companies, and was also co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company. Combined, both companies have raised over $250 million in venture capital and employed over 1,500 employees. In...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Leo Polovets, co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm with having portfolio companies such as Robinhood, Andela, Flexport, and Stedi. Before Susa, Leo was the second engineering hire at Linkedin, where he helped build the first versions of...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Pejman Nozad. Pejman is a founding managing partner at Pear VC, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups, based in Palo Alto. Pejman has over 15 years of experience investing in early-stage high tech startups. He built a $40B+ portfolio, investing in over 300 startu...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Jennifer S. LeBlanc. She is the best-selling author of Launching for Revenue and Changing Tides She is the founder of the Changing Tides Movement, which was developed out of the pressing need for a collaborative community focused on the unique experiences of women founders, entreprene...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Steve Barsh. Steve is a Managing Partner at DreamIt Ventures. He has over 30 years of experience starting, leading, launching, and building multi-national companies as well as early-stage venture work. He has helped launch over 100 companies that have generated over $1B in value. As a...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Sean Byrnes. Sean is CEO & co-founder of Outlier. Previously, he founded Flurry which was the leader in mobile analytics and advertising space and it was sold to Yahoo! in 2014. Sean advises some early-stage technology companies and invests in many others. In this episode;1-) The bigg...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Josh Constine. Josh is a Principal investor and head of content at venture capital fund SignalFire. He invests in early-stage startups across verticals with a focus on social apps, visual communication, remote work, entertainment & media, and tech's transformation of new sectors. Prev...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Elizabeth Yin. Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed-stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth...

Founder's FAQ: answers to all the possible questions of a founder. Hosted by Ilker Koksal. This episode's guest is Phin Barnes. Phin is partner at First Round Capital, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco and New York. Previously he was creative director at AND1 and founder of responDesign. He’s also a sneakerhead. In this episode;1-) Leveraging the board.2-) Assessing the founder’s core...