Post Money

Every month, new startups launch with access to the same models, the same tools, and increasingly similar technology. In today’s episode of Post Money Podcast Brad Svrluga explains why founder quality, hiring, and relentless execution have become the defining advantages in a market where innovation cycles now move at unprecedented speed. For founders, the challenge is no longer simply building a g...

AI is shrinking teams, accelerating product development, and changing what investors look for in founders. The biggest competitive advantage is no longer having the largest team, it’s learning faster than everyone else. Nihal Mehta from Eniac Ventures shares why the future belongs to founders who ship relentlessly, stay close to customers, and keep burn low until the market pulls them forward. Ins...

Some of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories started with government funding, not venture capital. The U.S. government has helped build some of the world's most valuable technology companies, from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle to Pixar and Palantir, and the next generation may be no different. Alexander Harstrick has watched this shift happen from the inside: first in military intelligence and Pe...

In a matter of days, the U.S. government blocked access to Anthropic’s advanced Mythos and Fable models, while SpaceX surpassed a $2 trillion valuation and announced its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, one of the fastest-growing AI software companies in the world. These events may appear unrelated, but together they point to a fundamental shift in the AI landscape. Advanced AI is no longer just...

Venture capital spent the last twenty years chasing software. Now some of Silicon Valley’s most experienced investors believe the next generation of trillion-dollar companies will be built in the physical world. In this episode of the Post Money Podcast, Bain Capital Ventures Partner Ajay Agarwal explains why AI is moving beyond chatbots and software into factories, warehouses, construction sites,...

When someone told me, “You have to invite Lu Zhang on the show because she’s fearless,” I was intrigued. That single word ended up shaping much of this conversation. Lu started investing in AI long before AI became the hottest topic in venture capital. She launched Fusion Fund when most people thought she was too young to be a venture capitalist, built the firm from less than $20 million to more t...

Founders are constantly told to “think bigger,” raise more capital, and chase billion-dollar outcomes. But behind the headlines about AI unicorns and explosive growth lies a much harsher reality: most startups never IPO, most founders end up heavily diluted, and even successful venture-backed companies can take a decade or more to reach an outcome. In this episode of the Post Money Podcast, Nilanj...

Inside top venture firms, investors are now funding frontier AI research labs before products exist, before revenue exists, and sometimes before there is even a clear path to monetization. The bet is no longer just on software companies, it’s on entirely new forms of intelligence. In this episode of the Post Money Podcast, Raviraj Jain from Lightspeed Venture Partners explains why some of Silicon...

Autonomous ships, AI-powered naval systems, and unmanned fleets are quickly becoming one of the most important technology shifts inside the US defense ecosystem, driven by a reality that is reshaping how the US thinks about maritime power and industrial capacity. China now builds half of all the ships in the entire world. Their Navy is roughly the same size as the US Navy. The US cannot out-build...

David Frankel wrote some of the earliest checks into companies like Uber, Coupang, PillPack, Whoop, Shield AI and Suno, yet his firm, Founder Collective, still refuses to lead Series A rounds or aggressively double down on portfolio companies. In this conversation, he explains why too much funding can quietly destroy startups, why founder-investor alignment matters more than ownership percentage,...

Anthropic just drew a line in the sand. Their latest frontier model MYTHOS is so capable at autonomously discovering and exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities that they’ve refused to release it to the public. Instead, it’s being quietly handed to a handful of giants like Microsoft and JP Morgan Chase and top government officials, including the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chair have already b...

Most founders are still building for a human buyer, while they already should be marketing to machines. In this conversation, Anshu Agarwal, General Partner at Converge, explains why your real buyer could be an AI agent that researches, shortlists, and recommends products before a person ever sees your brand. That shift changes how customers discover, evaluate, and choose products, and it forces f...

For decades, capital and talent flowed toward software. Meanwhile, China quietly built a $20T economy by doing one thing exceptionally well: owning global manufacturing and its supply chains. Now, the pendulum is swinging back. In this episode, Lior Susan (Founder & CEO of Eclipse) makes a bold case: manufacturing isn’t just another sector, it’s the backbone of GDP, national security, and long-ter...

Why do investors miss billion-dollar companies, even when they’re in plain sight? Shopify is a great example of this. It wasn’t some obscure, hard-to-access startup. It was right there: powering thousands of websites, showing up as that small green logo across the internet. If you were paying attention, you could see it everywhere. And yet, for years, most people didn’t understand what it was beco...

AI is moving faster inside enterprise software than most companies can handle, especially in coding, where development speed is now outpacing security. In this episode, Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk, breaks down how AI is changing software development, DevSecOps, and enterprise security, and what it actually takes to keep up. We talk about how Snyk scaled from $2M to $350M ARR and what really drives th...

Cash runway determines whether a startup survives long enough to find product-market fit, navigate a market shock, or become a category-defining company. In this episode, Maia Heymann, Co-Founder and General Partner at Converge VC, explains why runway is not just a financial metric but a strategic asset, why dilution is often a smaller risk than founders think, and why early-stage venture debt can...

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the new interface for how we access information, shop online, and interact with the digital world. Entire industries built around the web as we know it, including media, search, e-commerce, and even logistics, are being quietly rewritten underneath us. In this episode, Ben Lerer, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau, explains why AI agents could become the...

When $300B gets wiped off SaaS market caps, it’s usually not just sentiment, it’s the market sensing a platform shift. AI agents are replacing per-seat SaaS software, vector databases are becoming the memory layer for large language models (LLMs), and knowledge infrastructure is emerging as the real foundation of enterprise AI. In this episode, Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Pinecone, explains why LLMs need...

When software leaves the screen and starts controlling the physical world, the venture playbook changes. For the last decade, venture capital has concentrated in asset-light SaaS businesses where growth is measured in dashboards and defensibility is defined by retention curves. Sunil Nagaraj has built his firm around a different premise: that the next wave of venture-scale outcomes will come from...

If you’re trying to predict the next unicorn by pattern-matching the last one, you’re probably already behind. In this episode, Anne Dwane of Village Global explains why predicting startup outliers has never been more difficult, how AI is quietly reshaping venture capital strategy, and why diversified 100-company seed portfolios may outperform concentrated conviction bets. Drawing on her journey f...

Seed-stage venture capital is often described as a people business, but very few firms are structurally built around that reality. In this episode, Brad Svrluga, co-founder of Primary, explains why his firm deliberately rebuilt the seed VC model to operate more like an execution platform than a traditional investment partnership. Instead of optimizing for GP economics, Primary reinvests management...

If you’re waiting for clean metrics before trusting product-market fit, you’re probably already behind. In this episode, Kent Bennett explains how early product-market fit actually shows up in the real world, why customer behavior matters more than spreadsheets, and how some of the most successful venture-backed companies were recognized before the data looked obvious. Kent draws on nearly two dec...

The U.S. Department of Defense is one of the largest buyers of technology in the world and yet most founders and venture investors still don’t understand how defense spending actually fuels startup growth. In this episode, Alexander Harstrick explains how government capital quietly de-risks early-stage technology, why dual-use startups are gaining an advantage, and how shifts inside the Pentagon s...

Most venture capital stories start with wins, but this one starts with bankruptcy. In this PostMoney Podcast episode, Nihal Mehta, co-founder and managing partner at ENIAC Ventures , recounts how failing publicly in his early 20s, including filing for Chapter 7, shaped his view of founders, risk, and what actually matters in the zero-to-one stage. From meeting his partners as engineering students...

Building to $100M+ in revenue changes how you think about growth, capital, and control. In this episode, Rob Biederman breaks down the hard lessons from scaling Catalant and why those experiences led him to build Asymmetric as an early-stage investment firm that deliberately operates outside the traditional venture capital model. Rob shares the real story behind turning a business school project i...