Ignite: Conversations on Startups, Venture Capital, Tech, Future, and Society

What if the biggest reason small businesses fail isn’t bad ideas or weak founders, but the fact that money shows up late, or not at all? In this episode, we sit down with Nicolás Villa, CEO of Platam, a Colombian fintech quietly rewiring how small and mid-sized businesses access capital across Latin America. Before Platam, Nicolás built and sold an innovation consultancy working with some of the r...

What happens when an investor gets tired of guessing, and decides to rebuild the guessing machine itself? Ali Dastjerdi didn’t stumble into AI for investing, he escaped into it. After years inside Insight Partners, swimming in deal flow, pattern matching companies, and watching great decisions hinge on incomplete information, he walked away to fix the system from the inside out. Ali is the co-foun...

What if the most important skill in venture capital isn’t pattern recognition, but patience? In a world obsessed with overnight breakouts, Adam Besvinick has quietly built a different kind of edge, one forged by cold emails, long apprenticeships, and a stubborn belief that real companies take time. He’s the founder and managing partner of Looking Glass Capital, a pre-seed firm known for being the...

Most founders lose sleep over customers, competition, or cash. Alexander Wulff lost sleep over spreadsheets. That anxiety turned into a decade-long obsession, and eventually, into an AI CFO. Alexander Wulff is the CEO and co-founder of ScaleUp Finance, and the builder behind NUM, an AI-powered CFO designed for startups and SMEs. Before fintech, he spent more than a decade building and exiting a de...

What if the next great connector in Silicon Valley isn’t a human at all, but an AI with opinions, taste, and the courage to say no? In this episode, we sit down with Andrew D’Souza, founder and CEO of Boardy, and the serial entrepreneur behind Clearco, to explore what happens when you combine behavioral psychology, network effects, and modern AI, then let it loose on one of the hardest problems in...

Most people don’t break into venture by following the map. They do it by ignoring it, burning it, then drawing a new one from scratch. Sarah Romanko is an investor at Geek Ventures, where she backs immigrant founders building deeply technical companies in AI and robotics. Before that, she stitched together fellowships, startup roles, speaking gigs, and a real estate job, all while building a netwo...

What if the best venture investors aren’t pattern matchers at all, but former operators who’ve spent decades stitching companies together, one partnership at a time? Karen Page’s career reads less like a résumé and more like a relay race, sales floors to startups, startups to Big Tech, Big Tech to venture, with the baton always being go-to-market clarity. From helping scale Box in its formative ye...

Imagine spending decades inside the most buttoned-up corners of finance… then quietly deciding the real edge lives somewhere less liquid, less obvious, and way more misunderstood. John McArthur is the Senior Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Krillogy, where he helps steward billions across public and private markets. Before that, he cut his teeth at firms like Morgan Stanley, and before that...

Imagine spending 15 years underwriting venture funds, only to realize the biggest risk isn’t the startups, it’s how little anyone actually measures the people backing them. Eric Woo is the co-founder and CEO of Revere, a platform bringing data, transparency, and product thinking to how allocators evaluate and manage emerging venture funds. Before founding Revere, Eric sat on nearly every side of t...

Two founders walk into Techstars. One grew up across six countries. The other learned venture math the hard way. Together, they’re quietly rewiring how startups actually get built. In this episode of the Ignite Podcast, Brian sits down with Kerty Levy and Keith Camhi, the minds behind Techstars’ vertical networks, the layer most people miss, and the one founders feel the most. Who they are Kerty L...

What if the real job of PR isn’t getting attention, but protecting it? In this episode of Ignite, Brian sits down with Matt Stewart, a longtime communications leader who has spent 15+ years helping frontier tech companies, from climate to AI to biotech, tell stories people actually care about. Matt’s path runs from editing a college gossip tabloid to the Peace Corps to advising founders, VCs, and...

At sixteen, Jeff Barr was supposed to be opening boxes at a small computer store in Seattle. Instead, customers kept getting sent to “the long-haired kid in the corner,” because he was the only one who actually understood what the machines could do. That instinct, deep curiosity paired with a need to explain things clearly, would quietly shape the future of cloud computing. In this episode of the...

Dorothy Li is the co-founder and CEO of The Real Roots, a startup designing IRL, guided, matched experiences to help adult women build real friendships. With years in mission-driven startups—and a founder’s obsession with “what actually works in real life”—she’s tackling loneliness as a solvable systems problem, not a personal failing. With a clear read on why loneliness got louder after the pande...

Udi Ledergor is the Chief Evangelist and former CMO at Gong, where he helped define an entirely new category in B2B SaaS and turn a call-recording idea into a global revenue platform. He started in Tel Aviv’s performing arts scene, moved through product management and multiple head-of-marketing roles, and has spent 20+ years turning complex tech into stories people actually care about. With a back...

Ramana Nanda is a Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at Imperial College London and the academic lead of the Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship. He has spent his career at the intersection of science, venture capital, and institutional design, previously teaching at Harvard Business School and studying how ideas move from lab bench to balance sheet. With decades of work across the US, UK,...

Rob Hodgkinson is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of SignalRank, a data-driven venture platform identifying and investing in the world’s top 5% of Series B rounds through pro-rata financing. With a career spanning investment banking, growth equity, and operator roles at TVPlayer, Antenna Group, and more, he brings a rare blend of quant-driven rigor and on-the-ground startup experience. His ba...

Shaun Gold is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and investor known for blending sharp wit with real startup insight. After nearly two decades as Miami’s “Nightlife Ninja,” he reinvented himself as a storyteller for founders, the voice behind OpenVC’s content engine, and now a GP at Improv Ventures. With a background that spans books, screenwriting, and venture, he distills lessons from chaos—wh...

Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach, bestselling author of Continuous Discovery Habits, and founder of Product Talk Academy. After years helping teams at companies like Spotify and Capital One rethink how they make product decisions, she’s become one of the clearest voices on modern product discovery. With decades of hands-on experience across scrappy startups and global product orgs, Teres...

Jon Staenberg is the founder of Agate Hound Fund, a pioneering institutional fund-of-funds focused on search funds and entrepreneurship through acquisition. A 30-year venture investor, Stanford “trifecta” grad, and longtime small-business owner (from car washes to an Argentine winery), he lives at the intersection of Main Street and Silicon Valley. With decades of pattern recognition across hundre...

Max Sinclair is the founder and CEO of Azoma, an AI SaaS company helping global brands win in AI-powered search. A former Amazon product lead, he helped launch Amazon Business in the UK, led search and browse for Amazon Singapore, and headed EU Grocery before jumping into founder life. With deep experience across e-commerce search, item data quality, and now answer engine optimization (AEO), he of...

Leyla Kunimoto is the co-founder of Accredited Investor Insights, a platform demystifying private placements, venture funds, and commercial real estate for LPs and high-net-worth investors. She writes for a cross-section of the ecosystem—limited partners, fund managers, RIAs, and wealth advisors—focused on cutting through jargon to what actually drives outcomes. With thousands of conversations acr...

Jason Syversen is the founder & CEO of SportsVisio and a former DARPA program manager turned repeat entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He went from hacking Wi-Fi cameras for Special Forces demos to running nine-figure government R&D portfolios—then into startups and sports, with a mission to democratize analytics for everyday athletes. With deep roots in cyber/defense and a chip-o...

What if the tools reshaping our cities still think it’s 1998? Amar Hanspal thinks that’s a bug, not a feature—and he’s building the patch. Amar Hanspal is a veteran product leader and entrepreneur who helped steer Autodesk’s product org through a massive cloud shift before co-founding Bright Machines. Today he’s the co-founder of Motif, reimagining how architects and engineers design—collaborative...

Jeffrey Fidelman is the Founder & CEO of Fidelman & Company, an investment bank purpose-built for early-stage companies and emerging managers. A Harvard graduate who spent a decade at Morgan Stanley and HSBC before helping run a $120–125M venture fund, he’s since scaled a 40-person team that blends institutional process with hands-on fundraising execution. With a productized “fundraising a...

Max Greenwald is the co-founder and CEO of Warmly.ai, a platform building AI agents that warm your TAM and route hot leads to sales. A former Google PM who helped ship Google’s viral “Where’s Waldo” Maps April Fools (played by ~100M people), he’s navigated six pivots and the gauntlet from idea to real GTM repeatability. With on-the-ground experience from Techstars Boulder to scaling revenue and te...