Fund/Build/Scale

Startups are built on grit, vision, and — surprisingly — a lot of peer advice. In this episode, I sat down with Mallory Contois, Head of Community at Mercury and leader of Mercury Raise, their founder success platform. Drawing from their latest survey, Mallory shares eye-opening insights about how early-stage entrepreneurs navigate challenges like fundraising, hiring, and customer acquisition. Why...

In October 2024, New York-based Swell VC announced its second fund with $11.5 million in commitments.  Co-founded by general partners Jay Patil and Rusty Ralston in 2011, the firm now manages two seed-stage funds and a special purpose vehicle with $19 million in assets. Compared to larger firms, they’re small potatoes — but that’s intentional. Swell VC is all about being hands-on: helping founders...

If a team hasn’t built a minimum viable product, secured paying customers, or demonstrated strong unit economics, what exactly are seed-stage investors betting on? To get some answers, I sat down with Nnamdi Iregbulem, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, to discuss what drives seed valuations, the traits of successful founders, and his perspective on AI startups. “A lot of the pitches that I...

In the startups I worked at, we never had spare laptops.  When we hired someone, we’d order their laptop that day. That’s Startup Cashflow 101: don’t spend money until you have to. The same principle applies to your leadership team. Hiring a CMO before product-market fit? Too soon.  And a CEO can handle COO duties for a while. Most seed-stage companies don’t need a full-time CFO either.  A good co...

When I learned that MaC Venture Capital just raised $150 million for its third fund since 2020, I immediately reached out for an interview with Marlon Nichols, the firm’s co-founder and managing general partner. Marlon previously co-founded Cross Culture Ventures, which merged with M Ventures in 2019 to form MaC VC. In this interview, we talked about his path from enterprise software into venture...

In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, host Walter Thompson interviews Sahil Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Encrypt AI. Sahil shares his journey from academia to leading an international AI company, discussing the importance of storytelling, confidence, and addressing biases within AI models. He also delves into challenges faced by immigrant entrepreneurs and the balance between leadership and emplo...

Branding is a condensed form of storytelling. That’s my opinion, but it’s also shared by David Placek, founder and president of Lexicon Branding. Here are a few of the companies and products they’ve named since 1982: Subaru Outback, Subaru Forester BlackBerry Pentium PowerBook Nissan Rogue Lucid Azure Sonos Swiffer NVIDIA Shield Febreze In May 2024, I interviewed him at his headquarters in Sausali...

Deeptech founders are solving problems that most of us don’t think of as problems and tackling challenges that push the boundaries of what we think is possible. This interview with Justin Fiaschetti, CEO and co-founder of Inversion, is a good example. Inversion is building a platform that will enable space-based cargo delivery using autonomous re-entry vehicles with parachutes that will let them d...

If you want a healthy relationship, it’s essential to set clear expectations and boundaries from the start.  The same holds true for a founder and their board. Despite the power dynamics, CEOs can still create a transparent communication framework that respects everyone’s limited time. In part two of my interview with TigerEye co-founder and CEO Tracy Young, we discuss her approach to work-life ba...

In 2011, Tracy Young co-founded PlanGrid, which made software for construction teams. After scaling the company to 450 people and raising $69 million, it was acquired by Autodesk in 2018 for $875 million. That’s a win, but Tracy and her partners didn’t go for the exit because they’d reached the peak of the mountain. They cut the deal because PlanGrid was behind in the market, and they didn’t know...

Most of the world’s talent goes untapped. Unrecognized. With that in mind, I interviewed Laura González-Estéfani, founder of Miami-based VC firm TheVentureCity in May 2024. We talked about the potential of global talent and why more investors need to broaden their scope beyond major tech hubs. This episode provides valuable insights for founders who don’t have large networks or a business backgrou...

Today is my 55th birthday! I was planning to take the day off, but I started thinking about a few people my age who work in tech and have been recently laid off. Unlike workers in their 20s and 30s, they’re facing a very different set of pressures: family, college payments, aging parents, retirement, etc. Most of the ones I know are having a hard time landing interviews, let alone full-time jobs....

Based in New York, Elana Berkowitz and Courtney Leimkuhler are co-founders and partners at Springbank , where they focus on sectors that support working women and their families, largely in three key areas: the future of work, the care economy, and household consumer services.  Their thesis is driven by growing demand from employers, insurers, and the government, recognizing the economic impact of...

I interviewed Chikodi Chima, founder of Moonshot, a PR firm focused on early-stage startups. The discussion revolves around the art of storytelling, thought leadership, and how PR can exponentially boost brand presence and connect with media, along with prospective customers, employees and investors. Chikodi shares insights from his journey as a former tech journalist to a PR professional, emphasi...

In 2014, Naveen Rao left his researcher job at Qualcomm to co-found machine intelligence platform Nervana. About two and a half years later, Nervana sold to Intel for more than $400 million. After a few years at Intel, Naveen became CEO and co-founder of open source startup MosaicML, which helped companies build and train large AI models more efficiently and affordably. Approximately two and a hal...

In July 2024, I visited the Ferry Building in San Francisco to sit down with CapitalG partners Jill (Greenberg) Chase and James Luo. As Alphabet’s growth-stage VC fund, CapitalG specializes in backing startups that have found product-market fit and are ready to scale with investments ranging from $50M to $200M. We talked about the key signals that indicate a company is ready for growth-stage inves...

In this episode, Fund/Build/Scale host Walter Thompson interviews Benjamin Humphrey, CEO and co-founder of Dovetail, a customer insights hub based in Sydney, Australia. They discuss the challenges of hiring for a bootstrapped company, early customer acquisition strategies, and the impact of local networking when starting up far from major tech hubs like Silicon Valley. Benjamin shares his journey...

Jenna Birch is the founder of SISU, a PR firm that serves early-stage startups and VCs. She’s also a partner at Kaya Ventures. We talked about how to recognize when it’s time to engage PR services, the importance of a founder’s personal branding and the path that led her from journalism into venture-backed tech. She also shared her methodologies for assessing clients, setting realistic expectation...

Before Sri Chandrasekar became managing partner at Point72 Ventures, he was a Senior Vice President at In-Q-Tel, the non-profit VC firm that invests in startups on behalf of the CIA and other national intelligence agencies. That work cultivated his interest in AI and ML a decade ago, which led hedge fund Point72 to recruit him to join its then-new venture arm in 2017. Fast-forward to 2024, Sri tak...

Nicholas Thorne is a partner at prehype, a venture development firm that helps large companies create startups by acting as an incubator. He's also the founder of Audos, an AI co-pilot designed to assist entrepreneurs in conducting customer interviews, creating slide decks, and potentially investing in their ideas. According to Nicholas, Audos can even write code and identify freelancers, function...

I met Fortune Senior Finance Reporter Allie Garfinkle in February 2024 at an event for comms professionals.  She had just taken over the Term Sheet daily deals newsletter covering startups, venture capital, M&A, trends and pretty much anything tech-related. When news broke right after our panel that Reddit was filing to go public, she didn’t have a desk or a chair, so she grabbed her laptop, s...

Before Igor Jablokov was CEO and founder of Pryon, he worked with Apple on a prototype of Siri. He also founded a speech recognition company that Amazon acquired to develop its Alexa AI and Echo devices. He joined me on the podcast to talk about the evolution and challenges of building AI technologies and companies, different phases of startup growth, and how AI is transforming enterprise software...

If you're building a first-to-market solution using emerging technology that could meaningfully contribute to society and generate a 50x return, TDK Ventures President Nicolas Sauvage wants to hear from you. I invited him on the podcast to learn about TDK Ventures’ approach to corporate VC, which uses backcasting to identify ideal future technologies and then invest in entrepreneurs who are workin...

In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, host Walter Thompson engages in a comprehensive discussion with Hantz Févry, co-founder and CEO of Stoovo, an AI-based geospatial data company. Hantz shares invaluable insights into separating one's identity from their job, the importance of rapid execution in startups, and the journey from working at Google to launching his own company. This episode targets te...

Enterprise companies like Salesforce, Oracle and Cisco use sales-led growth to drive revenue and build relationships with potential customers. Early-stage startups can't afford to rely on traditional sales and marketing, which is where product-led growth (PLG) comes in. Instead of creating slick sales collateral and hiring aggressive go-getters, PLG presents the product itself as the primary drive...