Knuckle Up with Nakul

James Cadwallader and his co-founder Dylan Babbs were working six days a week in an office before they had a company, or even an idea. James would drag Dylan into their coworking space on Saturdays, ban laptops, and fill a whiteboard with post-it notes; for a stretch, the leading idea was lithium mining. He calls it hardcore from day minus one. Twenty-one months after launch, Profound is a $1 bill...

Most founders get more stressed as the company gets bigger. Immad Akhund has spent years engineering the opposite. “I’ve tried to make it so that the pressure kind of goes down as success goes up, which I think is relatively rare,” he says. “If you’re more successful, why are you more stressed about it?” This may be surprising coming from someone running one of the most loved fintechs of this gene...

Cameron McCord spent 484 days underwater. As a submarine officer in the US Navy, he learned to run a reactor in a space where the crew sees you 24/7, even brushing your teeth, and where there is no "later" to sort out a disagreement. He still calls the Navy the single biggest influence on how he leads. After the submarine came Capitol Hill as a Navy congressional liaison, then early Anduril, then...

Akshay Kothari has spent most of his time at Notion trying to put himself out of a job. His move, repeated for years, is to run at whatever the company's biggest unsolved problem is, build the system around it, hire someone great to own it, and then remove himself. In 2023 the approach left him, a co-founder of a multibillion-dollar company, with zero direct reports and a calendar wide open to thi...

Ashwin Sreenivas spent his childhood in India waking up at 5am and studying until 8:30 at night. History, geography, physics, chemistry, math. Every day, from 4th grade through 12th grade, through the Olympiads and the National Talent Search Exam. He says now, three years into building one of the more successful post-ChatGPT companies in the world, that all of that is precisely why what he does to...

Michael Grinich is a design-obsessed engineer who once spent days in a recording studio with an electronic musician crafting the perfect email notification sound. He now runs WorkOS, the $50M (accelerating) ARR enterprise infrastructure business powering nearly every major AI company you can think of, OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Sierra, Cursor. Michael has scaled the seven-year-old company to 100 peop...

Bipul Sinha grew up in dire circumstances in India, made his way to IIT, and immigrated to the US in search of the American dream. By 40 he had become a successful VC at Lightspeed; he then founded Rubrik, today a $10 billion public company and one of the last decade's fastest-growing enterprise software businesses. Most founders look to mentors for guidance. Bipul's first principle is "nobody kno...

Qasar Younis grew up on a farm in Pakistan, moved to Detroit as a kid, and worked at General Motors before landing at Google and becoming COO of Y Combinator. He then founded Applied Intuition, today a $15 billion company building AI for the physical world. In an industry where most people look up to tech founders, Qasar looks up to Sam Walton and Warren Buffett. Qasar is an N of 1 founder, and in...

Frank Slootman is the only CEO in history to take three enterprise companies public: Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. At their peak, the companies he led were worth over $200 billion combined. His playbook for building high-performance organizations, captured in his book “Amp It Up”, has become required reading for CEOs. In this conversation, Frank opens up about the fear of failure that sh...