Fund/Build/Scale

Rachel Springate is the founding general partner of Muse Capital, an early-stage venture fund focused on overlooked sectors like women’s health, wellness, parenting, gaming, and sustainability. In this episode, she shares her strategy for finding value where other investors aren’t looking, explains how Muse assesses early traction in non-traditional markets, and breaks down the persistent funding...

Fredrik Thomassen, co-founder and CEO of Superside, joins the show to unpack how startups can scale creative work without slowing down or burning out their teams. Superside is a subscription-based design company that helps fast-growing teams get high-quality creative at scale. In this conversation, Fredrik shares how he built a globally distributed team, why async collaboration beats real-time mee...

What makes a founder dangerous? Not credentials. Not their pedigree. And it's not who they know. For investor and former operator Promise Phelon, a dangerous founder is someone with lived experience, relentless conviction, and the ability to build something the world doesn't expect. Promise is the founder and managing partner of Growth Warrior Capital, an early-stage venture firm that invests in f...

What kind of founder spends five years building a product before going to market? One who's trying to solve a very hard problem. Vince Gaydarzhiev is the founder of Alcatraz, a deep tech startup that uses facial authentication. The platform isn’t used to lock people out of single offices or consumer gadgets; its customers are buying global enterprise security, where compliance is strict, trust is...

What turns a free trial user into a paying customer? For Ola Sars, founder and CEO of Soundtrack, the answer is all about behavior. In this episode, we break down how his team uses product-led growth (PLG) and product-qualified leads (PQLs) to drive conversions.  You'll hear how playing 100 tracks became a key signal for purchase intent, the tactics Soundtrack deploys to help self-serve customers...

Mike Conover started his career as a machine learning engineer. Today, he’s the co-founder and CEO of Brightwave, an AI startup helping financial professionals make faster decisions with massive, unstructured data. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Mike shares how he made the leap from technical contributor to strategic leader—and the hard lessons he learned along the way. From translating tech...

Igor Taber has sat on both sides of the table: first as a VC at Intel Capital, then as an operator at high-growth AI startup DataRobot. Now, as co-founder of Cortical Ventures, he’s backing the next generation of AI-first startups. In this episode, Igor shares how his operating experience reshaped his investment lens, what most VCs still miss about early-stage execution, and how founders can break...

Runway CEO and co-founder Siqi Chen shares how his team used a waitlist not just to build hype, but to engineer smarter growth. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Siqi breaks down how Runway strategically kept customers in a holding pattern to gather feedback, qualify demand, and refine product-market fit. We also talk about: How to build trust with early users through transparency Using scarcit...

Ayelet Noff has spent more than two decades helping startups land meaningful press — but she’s also seen how the game has changed. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, the founder of SlicedBrand and new PR tech startup Dazzle shares what still works, what doesn’t, and how founders can earn meaningful attention in today’s fractured media landscape. We get into: – What makes a pitch actually land wi...

Sahitya Senapathy, founder and CEO of Endeavor AI, joins Fund/Build/Scale to talk about launching a solo-founded startup at the intersection of AI and heavy industry. From building FEMA apps at age 11 to raising $7M before finishing college, Sahitya shares the hard lessons behind the headline. We dig into: – Selling AI solutions to manufacturers with no network and no co-founder – What enterprise...

Sophie Bakalar, partner at Collaborative Fund, joins Fund/Build/Scale for a candid conversation about early-stage investing in climate tech, consumer AI, and deep tech hardware. She shares how she evaluates “green” founders with limited experience, what kind of traction she looks for in pre-revenue companies, and why a passion for solving a real-world problem outweighs having a stacked resume. We...

Recorded in July 2024, Aimi founder Edward Balassanian joins Fund/Build/Scale to share how his AI-powered platform creates generative, copyright-safe music for enterprise clients. He explains how customer discovery with DJs shaped Aimi’s tech, why compliance is core to their strategy, and why the company downsized after hitting product-market fit — all while inventing a market where AI music solve...

In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Nectir co-founder and CEO Kavitta Ghai shares how she turned her frustration as a college student into a fast-growing, VC-backed edtech startup. Kavitta discusses the leap from student to founder, how she built an AI-powered tool for classrooms without a technical background, and the tactics that helped her and her co-founder land paying customers early. She al...

Would you leave a stable, high-paying job at Google to build something that competes with NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD? That’s exactly what Tim Davis, co-founder and president of Modular, did. Since then, his company has raised $130M to reimagine AI compute infrastructure — but are AI startups really desperate for a new compute layer? And what’s it like to build a startup when your biggest competitors a...

Building a startup in Europe presents a unique set of challenges, like fragmented markets, cultural differences in risk-taking, and a VC ecosystem that’s still maturing compared to Silicon Valley. But things are changing fast. For this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I sat down with Lucile Cornet, partner at Eight Roads, a global VC firm that invests across Europe. We dive into: 🚀 How European found...

Journey founder and CEO Stephen Sokoler appeared on Fund/Build/Scale in June 2024 to talk about how his startup pivoted from B2C meditation services to a B2B mental health platform, along with what that shift revealed about selling to enterprise clients. He breaks down the challenges of high customer acquisition costs, the trade-offs of venture capital, and the key lessons founders should know bef...

When you accepted the offer, maybe you imagined being in the group photo when your boss rang the bell at NASDAQ. But five years later, your company just raised its Series C, and an IPO isn’t on the horizon. Meanwhile, you need liquidity — whether it’s for a down payment on a house, starting a family, or another major life event. The stock options you’ve earned are fully vested, but they’re just si...

Do you want to know the difference between marketing and PR? Marketing is when you say something nice about yourself; PR is when other people say nice things about you. Jenna Guarneri is the founder of JMG Public Relations and author of the bestseller "You Need PR." In this episode, she shares DIY PR tactics that help founders establish themselves as experts, attract customers, and raise their pro...

Building a startup in Africa isn’t the same as doing it in Silicon Valley. Some challenges overlap, but many don’t, like currency volatility, limited early-stage funding, and investors who expect you to scale faster than the market allows. So how do you grow beyond your home market? How do you raise funds when VC is scarce? And what do African founders need to do to make their startups more ventur...

Eric Ly is the CEO of KarmaCheck, where he’s tackling a problem he first noticed years ago as a co-founder of LinkedIn: People don’t always tell the truth about themselves. To address this, KarmaCheck — launched in 2019 — automates key aspects of the background check process. By reducing complexity, employers can speed up hiring, while job applicants experience less friction along the way. “This i...

Most early-stage founders I talk to are focused on getting their first customers, hiring their first employees, or maybe, if they’re lucky, closing their first round of funding. But what happens after that? For Rohit Choudhary, the answer was building a whole new category. Rohit is the CEO and co-founder of Acceldata, a data observability platform that helps companies manage the complexity of mode...

Startups face unexpected risks every day — cyberattacks, lawsuits, market shifts —but many entrepreneurs don’t think about risk management until it’s too late. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Vouch co-founder/CEO Sam Hodges explains why risk management should be top of mind for early-stage founders. We discuss: Why risk management matters for early-stage startups   How Vouch validated, built,...

Amr Awadallah is the CEO and co-founder of Vectara. Previously, he co-founded Cloudera, which went public in 2017 and was acquired for $5.3 billion, and also served as VP of Developer Relations at Google Cloud. His first startup, Aptivia, was acquired by Yahoo, where he later became VP of Product Intelligence Engineering. I talked to him about his experience as an immigrant in Silicon Valley, the...

In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, I talked with YL Ventures Partner Andy Ellis (a former CISO) about his approach to storytelling, tactics for founder-led sales and marketing, and why he thinks the cybersecurity hiring challenge isn’t a talent shortage, but a market misunderstanding. We also discussed refining product-market fit, customer discovery methods and pitfalls like believing in one's o...

Two of the three co-founders of Operant AI — CTO Dr. Priyanka Tembey and CMO Ashley Roof — joined me to talk about building the first runtime application protection platform and navigating the challenges of cloud-native security. The company announced a $10M Series A in September 2024 — In October, we discussed taking the leap into entrepreneurship, the lessons they learned through customer discov...