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

Erika Anderson is the co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Storytell AI, a platform that transforms unstructured conversations into strategic insights. A published essayist in The New York Times and Vanity Fair, Erika brings a deeply human and creative lens to the world of AI. With a background in storytelling, facilitation, and product development, she offers fresh insight into using generati...

Samara Hernandez is the founding partner of Chingona Ventures, a trailblazing venture capital firm dedicated to backing overlooked and underestimated founders. With experience at Goldman Sachs, Math Venture Partners, and a mission deeply rooted in her heritage, Samara brings a fresh and authentic perspective to VC. She's helped grow Chingona Ventures into a $60M firm by rethinking who gets funded—...

Eric Silverman is the Managing Partner at Eastham Capital and a veteran investor with decades of experience across real estate, banking, and early-stage ventures. With six successful funds under his belt—and a seventh underway—Eric brings unmatched insight into distressed multifamily investments and a sharp eye for identifying high-performing operating partners across the country. His disciplined,...

Rajeev Rai is the co-founder and CEO of QASource, one of the world’s leading software QA and engineering services firms. With decades of experience across Apple, Adobe, and his own ventures, Rajeev has made quality assurance a strategic asset for hundreds of companies, from scrappy startups to global tech giants. In this episode, he offers deep insights into why QA is often misunderstood, how to s...

Dave Perretz is a former Army officer turned founder of Signal Fund Services, where he helps emerging GPs scale with confidence. With experience at JP Morgan, Iron Spring Ventures, and startup 2U Laundry, Dave combines deep operational expertise with a strategist’s mindset to reimagine how fund infrastructure should work. In this episode, he shares how his military background shaped his leadership...

Ben Black is the co-founder and managing director of Akkadian Ventures, a pioneering secondary investor with a career spanning over two decades in venture capital. With a track record of building innovative investment strategies and founding the Raise Global Summit, he offers unparalleled insights into secondaries, fund management, and the evolution of the venture ecosystem. In this episode, he sh...

Abdo John Hajj is the Managing Partner at Type One Ventures, a multi-dimensional investor and former founder who's deployed over a billion dollars into some of the most transformative companies in tech, AI, and space—names like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Neuralink. With a bold mission to accelerate humanity’s path to a Type One Civilization, Abdo combines a cinematic storytelling background with deep...

Malcolm De Leo is the Co-founder and Chief Business Officer at GraphIQ, an innovation-first platform redefining how enterprises discover and connect with business intelligence. With a PhD in chemistry and a 20+ year career spanning Clorox, Orbital Insight, and Quantified, Malcolm has built a reputation for evangelizing innovation, data-driven transformation, and cultural change inside legacy organ...

Chris O'Neill is a seasoned tech executive with over 25 years of leadership experience at companies like Google, Glean, and Xero. As the current CEO of GrowthLoop and a board member at GAF, Chris brings deep expertise in AI, cloud, and go-to-market strategy. With a track record of navigating both wartime turnarounds and scaling peacetime operations, he offers a rare blend of operational rigor...

Oliver Libby is the co-founding Managing Partner of H/L Ventures and City Rock Venture Partners. With nearly two decades of experience backing high-impact, mission-driven startups, he has pioneered a unique venture studio model rooted in daily active engagement. He's also the co-founder and Chair of the Resolution Project, which has helped launch over 1,000 social ventures around the world. In thi...

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and the originator of the term “newsjacking.” With a career that spans decades and a front-row seat to the evolution of real-time, fan-first marketing, David offers insights into how founders and brands can break through the noise without losing their authenticity. In this episode, he shares how...

Mala Ramakrishnan is the founder and managing partner of Progressive Ventures. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, she brings over two decades of experience as a technologist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. With multiple startup exits and a background as head of privacy at WhatsApp, Mala offers rare insight into B2B AI SaaS, privacy, and inclusive investing. In this episode, she shares h...

What if the secret to building enduring billion-dollar businesses isn't chasing growth at all costs—but betting on slower, more sustainable scale, even if it means skipping the traditional exit? Jim Curry thinks most of Silicon Valley has it backwards—and he’s proving it, one founder-led company at a time. Jim Curry is the co-founder of Build Group, a $330M permanent capital firm that invests in l...

Osama Elkady is the co-founder and CEO of Incorta, the only open data delivery platform enabling real-time analysis across all systems of record without complex ETL. With nearly two decades at Oracle—where he led innovations in BI, mobile strategy, and enterprise reporting—Osama holds several patents in data architecture and has helped numerous Fortune 100 companies become real-time enterprises. I...

Minha Hwang is a principal applied scientist with a rare blend of technical depth and cross-disciplinary experience—holding dual PhDs in materials science and marketing science. He’s spent his career at the intersection of machine learning, experimentation, and causal inference, helping scale some of the most sophisticated AI evaluation systems in the world. Prior to his current work, Minha helped...

Steve Kann is a Partner at Ocean Street Partners, a prolific investor, capital markets strategist, and Amazon #1 bestselling author of Microcap Magic. With over 30 years of experience in investment banking, public markets, and entrepreneurship, Steve has advised or raised over $1 billion in deals. He’s known for uncovering massive value in overlooked public companies and helping growth-stage start...

What do Looney Tunes, hedge funds, and a $10M smartwatch Kickstarter have in common? For Benjamin Bryant, they’re all part of the unlikely path that led him to become one of the most prolific early-stage investors in YC history. A former VFX engineer turned Pebble exec turned venture fund builder, Benjamin now runs the AngelList Demo Day Funds—backing hundreds of YC startups with a quantitative ed...

What happens when a Bay Street dealmaker trades spreadsheets for seed rounds—and turns Canada’s next wave of startups into a global force? Alex Norman, co-founder of N49P and Canadian partner of TechTO, went from investment banking and private equity to becoming one of the country’s most connected early-stage investors and ecosystem builders. Through N49P, he’s backing founders who are flipping th...

What if one of the sharpest minds in finance wasn’t shaped by textbooks—but by watching Lehman Brothers collapse from the inside? Chris Zaccarelli, CIO of Northlight Asset Management and co-founder of Beacon Capital Advisory Group, went from coding derivatives at Goldman Sachs to redefining how everyday investors navigate risk, recession, and returns. A Cornell-trained computer scientist and CFA,...

What if one of the boldest early-stage investors in frontier tech got her start chasing down a job over yoga pants and no website? Kristina Simmons, founder and managing partner of Overwater Ventures, began her career launching Lululemon’s e-commerce before rising through the ranks at Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures. Now she’s channeling that rare mix of brand, ops, and VC experience into...

What if the most viral bedding brand in America was born not from a lifelong passion—but from a movie scene that made its founder furious? Colin McIntosh, founder and CEO of Sheets & Giggles, turned a rage-fueled reaction to War Dogs into a fast-growing, pun-powered DTC bedding company built on eucalyptus, humor, and heart. A Techstars alum, former pitch coach, and comedy nerd, Colin shares ho...

What if the person shaping the future of AI at one of the world’s biggest companies started by modeling the brains of bumblebees? Daniel Hulme, Chief AI Officer at WPP and founder of Satalia (acquired by WPP), is a rare hybrid: academic, founder, and futurist. Now he’s building Consium—the first commercial research organization focused on machine consciousness—while leading AI transformation acros...

If your startup’s logo disappeared tomorrow, would anyone still remember your brand? Today’s guest, Michelle B. Griffin, knows exactly why the answer matters. As a Forbes-featured visibility strategist, author of The LinkedIn Branding Book, and founder of Brand Leaders, Michelle has built a career helping B2B founders stop hiding behind logos and start standing out as authority brands. After start...

What if your first investor didn’t just invest in startups—but had personally helped launch thousands? Jenny Fielding, former Managing Director at Techstars and now Co-Founder of Everywhere Ventures, has been behind some of the biggest startup successes you’ve heard of—and is now reimagining how early-stage investing works in a borderless world. From scaling companies as a two-time founder to acce...

What if your biggest startup insight came not from a spreadsheet—but from knocking on 150 doors and listening? Louis Retief is the co-founder and former CEO of Hubly, a vertical SaaS platform that reimagined how financial advisors manage compliance, capacity, and client service. What began as a peer-to-peer lending idea pivoted—through sheer grit and real-world curiosity—into a back-office automat...